Leading outside the lines.

 
 

The Lead For Delaware Program

(for aspiring school leaders)

Lead For Delaware

is a two-year, soft skills-focused, alternative-route school leader development and certification program. Engaging participants in more than 1500 hours of both professional learning and clinical practice, the program develops and certifies leaders who wish to see all kids receive a high-quality education, with no regard to their zip code.

 
 
Cohort 3 participants dive into their own understanding of race and gender as social constructs.

Cohort 3 participants dive into their own understanding of race and gender as social constructs.

rigorous reflection

At Lead For Delaware, we expose leaders to themselves. We don’t hold back on engaging in difficult conversations about race, gender, identity or other structural barriers to transformation; in fact, exploration of these concepts is foundational to our program. Leaders who know themselves and seek to understand others have the power to transform communities.

Monick and Amy of Cohort 4 debate the role of ethics in hiring.

Monick and Amy of Cohort 4 debate the role of ethics in hiring.

strategic discourse

Leaders in Training, (or LiTs), regularly engage in problems of practice specific to their everyday work. They explore the common tensions they face in values, beliefs and assumptions. Our program is noisy with disagreement, debate and creative problem-solving.

Lead For Delaware trains teachers in rural India.

Lead For Delaware trains teachers in rural India.

thoughtful exposure

At times, we put relevant context and familiar experiences aside to engage in opportunities designed to grow us as individuals. Making meaning for our own context occurs only after a period of thoughtful processing and intentional reflection; Lead For Delaware pushes LiTs’ mental and physical fortitude to the limit.

The Equity Practitioner Program

(For leaders of equity work)

Spread equity.

4th Dimension’s Equity Practitioner Program, (EPP), seeks to equip educators at every level of organization with the knowledge, skills, abilities and resources to successfully lead equity efforts at the school and community levels. Over a 6-month period a thoughtfully designed dialogic model anchored by carefully curated texts and high-leverage elements of adult learning practices, are synthesized to offer a robust set of powerfully relevant and self-reflective experiences.

GUIDING BELIEFS

  1. Structural barriers are created at seats of power and lie at the root of systemic inequity in schools.

  2. There is inertia in the dangerous social and psychological constructs that govern our daily lives; equity is achieved when we challenge institutions responsible for creating the constructs. 

  3. America’s founding story is unique; as such our systemic inequities CAN NOT be simplistically compared to the systemic inequities of other nations.

  4. Schools must be redesigned to intentionally and equitably educate ALL kids.

Whole School Support

(For schools charting a new path forward)

Because schools are laser focused on preparing students for the post-secondary world, there is often little to no internal capacity to tend to the systems and structures that keep the school positioned to best serve its students. 4th-Dimension Leaders provides a school-wide, comprehensive, 3-year solution for schools that find themselves less able to tend to the overwhelming number of supports needed to successfully engage in the work of educating all kids equitably.

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