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Professional Development
Discover how intentional self-development can help you become a transformative leader.
Leaders often underestimate the power they have to make change. By paying attention to our personal growth, we can deepen our impact as leaders.
In Developing Myself, you’ll learn the importance of intentional self-development and use a variety of tools to support personal growth. You’ll learn to use practices such as deep listening, the ladder of inference, and testing big assumptions to improve professional relationships, diagnose challenges, and achieve personal leadership goals. You’ll also acquire tools to help you diagnose and respond to the complex challenges of systems-level education leadership.
Developing Myself takes place over 12 weeks. It moves through a cycle of learning, application, performance, and demonstration. You’ll engage in a range of activities and activities both online and in your personal and professional contexts.
The experience is designed to be both rigorous and flexible. The activities are asynchronous, meaning you can choose when within a given week, you do them. Each week will require five to seven hours of work, with more guided, paced work during the “learning” weeks (weeks 2, 3, 4, and 8) and more job-associated practice and application during weeks 5-7 and 9-12.
Developing Myself is one of five online modules of the Certificate in Advanced Education Leadership (CAEL) program. Designed for current and aspiring school system leaders, CAEL is based on the Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. If you’re interested in pursuing the full certificate, please visit the CAEL program page.
CAEL Modules:
Deborah Helsing's work assists individuals, teams, and organizations to make personal and collective change.
Lisa Lahey was most recently the associate director of the Change Leadership Group, a national project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop greater internal capacity for leading organizational improvement in U.S. public school districts.
Current and aspiring leaders in preK-12 school systems, including:
Taking Driving Change as a Graduate Credit Participant
Participants can complete CAEL modules for HGSE graduate credit. The tuition is $2,995 per person/module. Please note that the application, as well as acceptance specifications, differ from the non-credit CAEL requirements. If you are not admitted to the program for HGSE graduate credit, you can always apply and enroll as a non-credit CAEL participant.
Participants who have been admitted to complete CAEL modules for HGSE graduate credit should plan to complete their final projects during weeks 9-12. Participants should estimate an additional five hours of study during that period.
Taking Driving Change as a Team
Taking this course as a school-, district-, or organization-level team is a powerful way to enact a collective impact on learning in your system. You can tackle a more significant problem of practice, identify unified goals and objectives together, and collectively apply what you learn as you learn, all while building skills you can apply to future problems.
Your team will work on a single, shared problem of practice across the 12 weeks, submitting a single midterm and final project that represents your collective effort. Along the way, you’ll also submit individual assignments focused on more personal learning.
This program welcomes applications from both individuals and teams. First-time applicants need to create a Professional Education account to apply.
Individuals: Click the "Apply" button at the top of this page to log into your Professional Education account and access the application page. Proceed with the individual form until submission.
Teams:
Step 1: Designate one participant or an administrative staff member as the Coordinator.
Step 2: Upon the submission of the team application, all team members will receive an email notification with a link to their personal application form. Team members should complete their forms promptly. Once all team members submit their forms, the application is considered complete and ready for review by the Admissions Committee.
Invoices: Invoices will only be available upon your acceptance.
Participants admitted to complete CAEL modules for graduate credit will complete a specialized version of the final activities Participants can complete CAEL modules for HGSE graduate credit. The tuition is $2,995 per person/module. Please note that the application, as well as acceptance specifications, differ from the non-credit CAEL requirements. If you are not admitted to the program for HGSE graduate credit, you can always apply and enroll as a non-credit CAEL participant.
Click here to apply for Developing Myself: A CAEL Module for Graduate Credit.
Tuition assistance is available for this program on a need and application basis. Tuition assistance is granted based on participant and institutional needs. Requests for tuition assistance do not affect an applicant's prospects for admission. You may access the tuition assistance application after you have submitted your program application. Tuition assistance applications should be submitted at least one month prior to the final application deadline.
Professional education alumnus pushes the boundaries of Italian academia