Would you like to be the kind of educational leader who feels a deep connection between who you are as a person and who you are as a leader? Our newest leadership course 5248: Developing Your Leadership Story is designed to help current and aspiring educational leaders develop a strong leadership identity. Through the activities in the course, you’ll explore your personal experiences, leadership style, core values, and mindset. This exploration will help you understand yourself better and develop a leadership identity that can guide and ground you as you work with others. By the end of the course, you will have developed a Professional Leadership Plan (PLP) that you can share and implement in your school environment.

Here are 5 steps to finding your leadership identity that you’ll take in the course:

1.  Summarize your journey to becoming a leader. Begin by exploring your early work, school, and your personal history as you consider how these experiences are woven into your leadership story. Whether you’ve had aspirations to become a leader for some time or have come into the role organically, it’s important to reflect on your pathway. 

2.  A deep dive into various leadership styles. Review the 3 main leadership types- Guiding, Directing and Enabling, then take your own leadership assessment to determine your style and how it affects the way you lead.

3.  An examination of core values. Knowing your leadership style is a critical part of your leadership story, but it’s your core values that undergird who you are, what you care about, how you make decisions, and how you lead. Re-examining your core values enables you to re-engage with your foundational beliefs and feel secure even when facing challenging situations and difficult decisions. 

4.  Manage and develop your mindset. Unlike your core values, which are typically fixed, your mindset can change throughout the day, or even within an hour! Leaders face so many responsibilities that sometimes they may feel unable to use their voices to advocate for change. A strong set of core values can help when situations seem out of our control.

5.  Draft, revise and share your leadership story! Your Professional Leadership Plan (PLP) is your leadership story—it represents who you are, where you have been, and how you want to lead in the future. It can ground and guide you as you lead those around you, and it can offer direction during challenging times.

Whether you’re a principal, district mentor or decision maker, teacher leader in your building, or interested in pursuing a future administrative role, this course is for you! Hop on over to the 5248: Developing Your Leadership Story detail page to read more about this course and download a preview syllabus. We are excited to offer this and several other leadership courses for credit (3 semester credits) and our new Flex Credit option which enables you to convert credits to hours or units.

Non-Credit / Flex Credit courses are identical to our continuing education graduate credit courses with 2 distinct differences: cost and documentation. They are specifically for those that want robust learning but only need professional development hours for license renewal or recertification.