On February 7, Keniq Coney, our chief schools officer, and Jubria Lewis EdD, director of school improvement, presented to over 1,000 educators at the School Leaders of Color Conference in Las Vegas. The School Leaders of Color Conference is an annual event hosted by The Collective, which is Teach for America’s national association for alumni of color.
Titled Resilient Leadership: Moving Beyond Surviving to Thriving, the conference was designed to support Teach for America alumni who serve as school leaders. This year’s attendees learned how to create and implement effective school systems to empower their staff and achieve results.
Ms. Coney and Mr. Lewis’s workshop, How to Catch ’Em, Keep ’Em, and Grow ’Em: The Secret to Systems Development, highlighted the frustration many school leaders experience when obtaining ineffective and inconsistent results with their current school systems. As subject-matter experts on school systems development, they believe that the key to building transformational systems and processes is personnel development. In their session, they discussed how to identify weaknesses in current systems. They also shared best practices and resources on how to build effective systems through high-performing teams. Participants walked away with techniques and tools to reframe their current systems in order to better serve their school populations.
“The School Leaders of Color Conference is a safe-space platform for school leaders of color to address challenges that we often face working in education. It allows participants to retool, reenergize, and lean on the collective power of others who want to engage in disruptive leadership to challenge the status quo of the educational system,” said Mr. Lewis.