Leading from the Middle 

Overview

Leading from the Middle (LFM) is a leadership development program focused on developing and equipping middle leaders with skills and strategies to advance lasting reform efforts at their respective colleges aimed at closing achievement gaps for underrepresented students.

LFM uses a project and problem-based learning model, to engage college teams comprised of community college faculty, administrators, staff, and researchers in collaborative learning to explore and apply effective strategies to the development of a project centered on closing opportunity and outcomes gaps while at the same time honing their individual and collaborative leadership skills.

To facilitate learning, LFM’s academies are located in a retreat setting. Over the course of a year, participants attend three 2½-day convenings that enable campus teams to engage with and learn from one another. An assigned coach helps guide each team and provides targeted support during and outside the convenings.

For more information or questions, please send an email to Ireri Valenzuela or Debra Polak, LFM Co-directors.

 2020 Academy Themes

The 2020 LFM academies will focus on the following two themes. 

The foci of the yearlong (Re)designing the Student Experience and the Far North Academies is to facilitate a process where LFM participants working on advancing their colleges’ instructional and student support redesign efforts are able to ground these endeavors in the student experience. To that end, the six student success factors--directed, focused, nurtured, connected, engaged, and valued—identified by students as necessary to their success, in RP Group’s study Student Support (Re)defined, will be used as a framework to explore how middle leaders can use the student experience as a powerful driver to advocate for and advance institutional transformation.

During the program, participants hone their abilities to:

• Develop and build on their personal leadership identity

• Apply critical inquiry skills to decision-making and communication

• Engage resistance, build coalitions, and win buy-in to drive institutional-based reforms

• Apply planning and design approaches to promote coherent strategies among efforts to improve student success including Guided Pathways, equity, and student progress, retention, and completion initiatives

• Situate institutional reform efforts in the student experience

The focus of the Making Data Work for Student Success Academy will be on developing the capacity of LFM participants to use inquiry and evidence to support instructional and student support redesign efforts to move their colleges towards becoming more student-centered institutions. An emphasis will be placed on making data actionable.

During the program, participants hone their abilities to: 

• Develop and build on their personal leadership identity

• Apply critical inquiry skills to decision-making and communication

• Access publicly available data sources and navigate corresponding data platforms

• Work with disaggregated data and methods for determining disproportionate impact

• Engage resistance, build coalitions, and win buy-in to drive institutional-base

 2020 LFM Academy Calendar

LFM Statewide Academy I: (Re)designing the Student Experience (Kellogg West Conference Center, Pomona) 
February 20-22, 2020 | May 28-30, 2020 | October 15-17, 2020

LFM Statewide Academy II: (Re)designing the Student Experience (Kellogg West Conference Center, Pomona) 
February 27-29, 2020 | June 4-6, 2020 | October 29-31, 2020

LFM Statewide Academy: Making Data Work for Student Success (Kellogg West Conference Center, Pomona) 
March 19-21, 2020 | September 17-19, 2020 | November 12-14, 2020

LFM Guided Pathways Regional Coordinator’s Academy  
November 7-8, 2019 | February 27-28, 2020 | June 4-5, 2020 | October 29-30, 2020

Far North Academy (Location: Virtual/Site-based)
April 23-24, 2020 | September 24-25, 2020