Coming Full Circle: Ed.L.D. Marshal Ansel Sanders

In many ways, Ansel Sanders’ work has come full circle since he arrived on Appian Way three years ago as part of the Ed.L.D. Program.

Before coming to HGSE from Greenville, S.C., Sanders helped develop and launch an innovative school – the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering, the first elementary school in South Carolina with a school-wide engineering curriculum. The overwhelming attention  — people camped out to enroll — in the school only furthered Sanders’ curiosity over how to scale schools and build systems that meet the needs of a whole child and leverage community assets to do so. That question had followed him through his education career, which began as a middle school English Language Arts teacher in Baltimore under Teach For America to his time as an assistant principal in a Greenville middle school.

“I wanted to take time to step back as a practitioner and reflect with other practitioners wrestling innovative ideas and system-level dilemmas,” Sanders says about his decision to enroll in the Ed.L.D. Program. “I didn’t want just any graduate school experience but something that could really focus on my in-the-field experience coupled with leadership development. When I found Ed.L.D. I felt this was for me.”

Despite his enthusiasm about the program, Sanders admits he didn’t initially think it would affect him as greatly as it did. “I felt like I had it all figured out coming into this program,” he says. “Over the course of three years, that was turned on its head for good reason.”

Like many Ed.L.D. students, Sanders found his assumptions about education challenged intellectually and personally. Within the first year he questioned the purpose of school, education, and things that enable and inhibit success.

“The most impactful part of program is the adult development strand, which ultimately led to a deeper understanding of my beliefs and the root causes for why I believe what I do,” Sanders says. “We walked into a room and Lecturer Marshall Ganz asked why and what stories led us to want to be leaders. By his persistently asking the ‘why’ question, we were better able to understand the reasons we care and the fire in the belly that makes us do this work. I’d never been challenged so personally in that way.”

By his third-year residency in Memphis at the Tennessee Achievement School District — the state’s turnaround district aimed at bringing the bottom performing 5 percent of schools into the top performing 25 percent within five years — he found his initial interests that brought him to Ed.L.D. had aligned with what he learned at HGSE. As part of his job, Sanders focused on school partnerships that supported students academically and non-academically.

“It brought me back to when I was coming into the program. Schools can be positioned as a community hub, a source of multi-organization collaboration to bring holistic support for kids,” he says. “I believe in the idea of galvanizing a variety of stakeholders to get people aligned with around a collective, village raising the child vision for education. I love trying to move throughout different groups of stakeholders, schools, business, nonprofits, government, and seeing how we can align toward great outcomes for children.”

Now, with diploma in hand, Sanders is heading back to Greenville, where he accepted a position as associate director of Public Education Partners, a local education foundation that partners with city schools to find solutions to problems. In this role, Sanders will help districts realize their vision and strategize through building local, state, and region-wide partnerships to make it a reality.

Completing the Ed.L.D. and returning to Greenville is surreal, he says, noting the program’s intensity over a relatively short time is both worthwhile and challenging. He credits his family for getting him through but also his fellow cohort-mates, whom he’ll lead on Commencement Day as a marshal.

“It’s been about learning together, supporting one another, being vulnerable, challenging one another and lifting each other up,” Sanders says. “I am so honored and humbled and will do my best to represent us as a cohort, but each and every one of us have played this role over the course of our Ed.L.D. experience.  This is my opportunity, but one of the wonderful things about Cohort 3 is how we consider the cohort itself – one another – as an invaluable means for broad and deep growth and impact."