From the Leadership Academy standpoint, it's really much more than the individual leaders. That's why so much of our work is grounded in teams, and how you build teams, and how you build relationships – but not for the sake of having a lot of new friends, for the sake of getting the work done on behalf of the students. It's always purpose-driven.
Is the Leadership Academy model exportable?
Others have come to learn from us, [but] I don't think we're going to do "satellite" programs. We give people our materials, but we say, "don't try this at home." It was really developed for New York City, but we can help people figure out how to grow their own leadership development and human capital strategy programs. I imagine that work will continue.
The design principles are exportable – starting with what principals need to know and how you map backwards from that. The way we go about the pedagogy makes us unique. That's where people find they have a lot to learn from us.
We encourage people to always look for disconfirming evidence. We're very good at looking for confirming evidence of what we already believe. But you get in the habit of looking for disconfirming evidence and you end up making much better decisions, because you expand your peripheral vision and look at things from behind the eyes of several different people, from multiple perspectives. This is really the intellectual bedrock of the program.
A lot of the work is sort of upside down from traditional schooling. In traditional schooling, you get rewarded for what you already know. If you go to college a very good writer, you'll start with very high grades; most college courses measure your ability to write. We aren't as interested in what people come in knowing -- we're interested in exposing what they don't now and aren't [yet] able to do. And then we construct all of our learning opportunities so they actually learn by doing, through simulations or on-the-job training.
We reward people for growth. We say, if you already know everything you need to be a principal, go be one.
