by Jeremy LaCasse, Executive Director of The Gardner Carney Leadership Institute
The GARDNER CARNEY LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE (gcLi) believes that every child has the potential to be a leader and that leadership can and must be taught. Every teacher needs to cultivate leadership in all students. To accomplish this, we have developed a disciplined method and practice of teaching that we call The Pedagogy of Leadership®, combining brain science, social emotional learning, cultural competency, and experiential learning.
We believe that: (i) There is an urgent need to prepare young people to become capable citizens and agents of change in the world; (ii) teachers are in the ideal position to prepare students for this work; and (iii) teachers need tools, resources, and professional networks to do this work.
The gcLi was founded at the Fountain Valley School (FVS) in 2002 to honor the memory of Gardner Carney (FVS ‘92) who died in a kayaking accident in 1995 during his senior year at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The purpose was to provide the opportunity for teachers everywhere to gain the tools necessary to make the teaching of leadership more deliberate, systematic, and intentional.
Our mission makes clear that there is an inextricable connection between leadership and citizenship. The healthy, effective, and benevolent functioning of classrooms, sports teams, schools, local communities, and entire nations depends upon it. Leadership is an active struggle, an exercise of character and values, a willingness to be in dialogue with diverse viewpoints, an ability to take risks and to engage wholeheartedly and uncomfortably with groups. To do it well, one must be willing to be on a lifelong journey to become more self-aware and compassionate. In short, the path to leadership and thus to citizenship consists of all the skills and behaviors that the gcLi has taught since its inaugural Leadership Lab ‘05. Time has demonstrated both the effectiveness of this pedagogy and how critical it is to helping students develop into people capable of leading the process of creating durable solutions to the significant challenges facing communities today.
The Leadership Lab draws participants from around the country to educate teachers to teach leadership through The Pedagogy of Leadership®. Our participants teach in a wide range of schools—from kindergarten through 12th grade, single sex schools, religious schools, boarding schools and more. The Lab is an experiential weeklong workshop that models many strategies and practices teachers may use when teaching students to lead. Participants work in cohorts to solve novel problems that offer insight on group behavior, systems of feedback, and how we learn to lead and, by extension, teach leadership.
The gcLi Leadership Lab is a highly effective program, as our participants often note that it is one of the most significant professional development experiences of their career. We complete an annual post-Lab Likert Scale survey that comprehensively measures multiple aspects of the lab and the participant’s experience. The graduates reference the powerful impact of the Lab, aiding them as they develop student leaders. They return to their schools, ready to employ The Pedagogy of Leadership® within the context of their school community and through the many and varied interactions they have with students.
Leadership Lab ‘25, the 21st annual practicum of the gcLi, convened on June 16 in Colorado Springs. More than 1,000 teachers and administrators have graduated from our program and gone on to change the lives of thousands of students in powerful and important ways. Students of our graduates, in turn, go on to do tremendous work in their own right, shaping the world into a better version of itself.
The gcLi perpetually looks for new and effective means to best help educators develop as teachers of leadership. Our newest initiative, School Certification Program in the Pedagogy of Leadership®, provides an opportunity for the gcLi to work directly with faculty in their school environment. Through a four-day intensive experiential program delivered over the course of a school year, the School Certification Program in the Pedagogy of Leadership® engages with faculty in an experiential workshop focused on helping individual teachers and the whole of the faculty teach leadership across their school community.
Similarly, the gcLi Virtual Program is a series of three sessions delivered ge teachers in teaching leadership through a more accessible medium. This program caters to both those new to the gcLi Pedagogy of Leadership® and graduates of the gcLi Leadership Lab, acting as a refresher and providing further inspiration to do this important work.
The gcLi is also fortunate to have a strong relationship with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. The ‘24 –‘25 school year marked the 10th awarding of the gcLi- sponsored $10,000 Fellowship in The Pedagogy of Leadership® Grant at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (UPENN/ GSE). Each grant recipient is a graduate of the Leadership Lab. Penn GSE’s School Leadership program is unique with its emphasis on cohort learning, mentoring, and engagement of both private and public educators. Graduates will earn a Masters of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) through an 11-month executive style masters program.
We are also partnering with the Penn GSE to offer the Leadership for Authentic Learning program. This virtually delivered program covers six two-hour sessions and employs both the Penn PBL framework and the gcLi Pedagogy of Leadership®. This allows us to reach a broader audience and help more teachers educate more students to lead. We provide resources on teaching leadership through the gcLi bi-monthly Leadership Blog, written by global leaders and practitioners of The Pedagogy of Leadership®, and the gcLi Leadership Podcast. Many contributors are products of the Leadership Lab and are doing path-breaking work creating opportunities for students. Their work includes service-learning programs, mentorships, community partnerships, athletics, the arts, and unique experiences that help students develop the leadership capacity so essential to making them productive citizens and improving the state of our global community.
The gcLi helps teachers educate students to lead. While this work is challenging, never has The Pedagogy of Leadership® been more essential to developing people who will work together to solve problems facing communities and countries around the globe. Together, educators focused on teaching leadership can and will make the difference, and the gcLi is thrilled to aid teachers in this important work.
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