Reconnect with your core purpose and values as an educator, and examine how they shape your classroom norms, signature routines, and leadership practice.
Develop a shared, coherent “language of practice” by closely investigating routines, strategies, student work, and classroom evidence — and use it to deepen learning with students, families, and colleagues.
Build powerful mentoring and coaching relationships by connecting personal history to practice, cultivating trust, and using cycles of inquiry to address personal, social, and instructional challenges.
Strengthen your skills for supporting student, novice, and early-career teachers through clear roles, co-teaching structures, and responsive mentoring and coaching across the span of a teaching career.
Expand your instructional coaching toolkit by centering teacher agency, understanding student- vs. teacher-centered coaching goals, and strategically matching coaching strategies to varied contexts.
Explore and apply research-based, collaborative models of professional learning to design, facilitate, and continuously improve effective teacher teams and school-based professional learning structures.
Mentor teachers, instructional coaches, and leaders of instructional teams and departments play critical roles in teacher development and student growth. And when we offer access to leadership roles and support the people in them, we enrich and retain our strongest teachers.
The Instructional Leadership Certificate (ILC) was created to help teacher leaders build their leadership capacities and learn to provide the developmental support their colleagues need to become better classroom teachers. Through ILC, you will build skills to lead adult learners, engage with relevant problems of practice that address common challenges of instructional leadership, and apply knowledge, skills, and insights to practice leadership in your own professional context.
Participating in the Instructional Leadership Certificate (ILC) coursework is an opportunity for teachers to distinguish themselves as teacher leaders who are knowledgeable and supportive resources in their professional communities. Becoming a member of the ILC cohort allows you to gain and contribute expertise through a series of courses designed to meld HGSE faculty expertise, the latest research, and the knowledge and insights of fellow practitioners. The certificate welcomes interest and registrations from all practitioners in the field.
Courses
Articulating the Intangibles of Teaching: Aligning Your Purpose and Practice for Instructional Leadership
Explore the intangibles of teaching and learn to align your mission, vision, and values in a comprehensive, personal teaching practice.
Teachers Mentoring Teachers: Practices for Powerful Professional Communities
Identify and develop the mentoring and teaching practices that can support and sustain teachers as individuals and practitioners.
Instructional Coaching Through Change: Supporting Teachers in Action
Learn how to effectively leverage instructional coaching relationships to help teachers fulfill their visions for instructional improvement, student engagement, and professional growth.
Leading Teacher Teams: Promoting Growth Through Effective Collaboration
Uncover strategies for balancing your team’s role in advancing student learning, fostering the professional growth of individuals on your team, and establishing the structures and dynamics required for successful team collaboration.
Earning Your Certificate
The Instructional Leadership Certificate (ILC) consists of four 6-week online courses designed to build capacity in those who serve or aspire to serve in instructional leadership roles, such as mentors, coaches, department chairs, grade-level leaders, and facilitators of professional development. All courses address three certificate throughlines: Advanced Instructional Excellence, Leading and Motivating Educators, and Aligning Purpose and Practice.
The courses are asynchronous via our Canvas learning platform and are divided into six one-week modules, which consist of three to four hours of work per week that include a practice challenge for participants to apply learning in their context. There are opportunities for individual reflection and application as well as peer feedback throughout the course, and participants will be awarded 20 PD clock hours upon completion of each course.
To earn the Instructional Leadership Certificate, participants must complete all four ILC courses. Articulating the Intangibles of Teaching is the recommended foundational course, though courses may be completed in any order across a flexible schedule.
Who Should Attend
