Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement

06/16/2026

Coherence isn't the same as consistency. And the difference matters enormously for school improvement.

We've worked with district leadership teams who've put significant energy into getting everyone "on the same page," aligned messaging, shared frameworks, and consistent language from the central office to the school level. And on the surface, that effort appears coherent.

But when you sit with teachers and principals in those same systems, you often hear something different. Initiatives that feel disconnected from each other. Priorities that seem to shift with the calendar. A sense of being asked to implement the district's plan rather than own a shared one.

Real coherence isn't about messaging or language consistency. It's about whether the people doing the work at every level of a system can draw a clear line between what they're doing in their classrooms or schools and the larger improvement story the district is trying to write. That line has to be legible; not because someone explained it at a convening, but because people were part of building it.

The systems we've seen that do this well invest heavily in the conversations between levels. Not just communicating downward, but creating genuine space for front-line educators to shape strategy, name what's not working, and be heard in ways that actually change the plan.

That kind of coherence takes longer to build. It also lasts.

06/15/2026

That's a wrap on BCLS Cohort 73!

What happens at Base Camp & Leadership Summit isn't easy to summarize. It's five days of school and district leaders doing the hard, necessary work of becoming better together. Stronger teams. Clearer purpose. The kind of trust that makes the day-to-day demands of leading schools more survivable.

95% of past BCLS participants leave saying they're more optimistic about their ability to create change. That's not a coincidence; it's what happens when leaders get the time and space they rarely receive to actually invest in one another.

To Cohort 73: carry what you built this week back to your schools and districts. The students you serve are counting on exactly this kind of leadership.

Interested in bringing your team to a future BCLS experience? Learn more on our website: https://glisi.org/base-camp-and-leadership-summit-2/

06/09/2026

BCLS Cohort 73 is officially underway at Jekyll Island!

Yesterday, school and district leaders gathered on Jekyll Island for Day 1 of GLISI's Base Camp & Leadership Summit, a five-day residential experience designed to do something most professional development doesn't: give intact teams time and space to be more curious than certain as they interrogate their data and their ideas about the problem that needs solving before jumping to solutions.

BCLS isn't a conference. It's a dedicated environment where leaders step away from the daily demands of their individual roles to deepen their connections as teams, which includes building trust, strengthening team culture, and beginning to develop the momentum required to address the real problems of practice that matter most for advancing system outcomes and student learning.

We're so glad to welcome Cohort 73 to BCLS and for this transformative week.

If your team hasn't experienced BCLS, there's still time to join us this fall! Save your team's spot now: https://glisi.org/base-camp-and-leadership-summit-2/

06/02/2026

RETAIN partners are seeing significant improvement in teacher retention through investment in leader capacity.

RETAIN, a bright spot of Learn4Life, school leadership teams create the working conditions that keep great teachers. In each RETAIN cohort since launch, we are seeing a year-over-year reduction in unwanted teacher departures of 50% or more.

What’s changing? Teachers are reporting a more robust sense of belonging. They are receiving consistent one-on-one time with their leaders. They said they felt genuinely cared about for the first time in a while. One RETAIN participant put it plainly: "Working conditions for teachers have changed; they now feel more comfortable speaking up about things that aren't working well. The team is more cohesive and solution-minded."

RETAIN wasn't built on quick fixes. No "jeans days." No surface-level wellness perks. It was built on the belief that leaders who learn to cultivate trust, reflect honestly on their own practice, and attend to the real conditions around them, change what it feels like to work in a school.

That kind of change takes time. And it's worth it.

Learn more about RETAIN from a recent alumn featured with Leslie, Jennie, and GAEL on UnscriptED. The episode is available here:

Teacher retention is often treated like a staffing puzzle, but we keep coming back to a tougher truth: educators stay or leave based on the daily experience of working in a school. That experience is shaped, minute by minute, by leadership. We sit down with Jennie Welch and Leslie Hazel Bussey from....

05/22/2026

What is your leadership team making possible for those you serve?

That guiding question helped frame a learning day for School Governance Council members from Fulton County this spring. Council members from across the county came together with principals to surface aspirations for the learning experiences students experience in school.

Council members who once saw their role as reviewers of budgets and plans and school leaders who saw them the same way reimagined how they could more effectively shape their agendas and connection points to create more knowledge exchange between principals leading schools and community members who have their finger on the pulse of young people’s needs, community assets, and community-connected learning opportunities.

What do these public leaders want to make possible?

1. Access to meaningful, memorable learning experiences for students that build their knowledge and skills.
2. Schools where students and adults alike are energized to be there and connected to one another.
3. Increasing community and workforce connected learning opportunities to equip students for life after high school.
4. Ensuring greater access to the resources and community assets required to make 1-3 possible.

We are proud to support Fulton County Schools in the work of hosting shared space for educators and community members to come together to learn and grow.

05/19/2026

588 leaders. One summer. One shared belief.

Last summer, 588 school leaders deepened their practice through Base Camp Leadership Summit and customized leadership retreats. They came as individuals representing different schools, districts, and communities. They left as teams, with shared language, renewed relationships, and a more honest sense of the work ahead.

We don't measure that impact in training hours or satisfaction scores alone. We measure it in the conversations that happened two months later when a principal handled a hard situation differently. In the team that finally named the thing they'd been avoiding. In the superintendent who realized their own leadership patterns were getting in the way.

Strong leaders transform lives. That starts with investing in the humans doing the leading.

05/15/2026

There’s a big reason why teams go to Base Camp Leadership Summit (BCLS) together.

There's a version of professional development that treats leaders as isolated individuals who need to go be sharpened and then return to be more effective in their roles. And there's a version that recognizes the real unit of system change is teams, and that what happens between people matters as much as an individual team member’s capacity.

BCLS brings intact leadership teams together for a multi-day residential experience. Not a conference. Not a workshop. A sustained immersive environment where teams can think, reconnect, and do the kind of work that the pace of the school year makes nearly impossible.

This summer's June cohort is sold out, but November and January still have space. If your team has been putting this off, or if it's been five or more years since you last came, the 73rd cohort is a good moment to come back.

Learn more and save your team’s spot here: https://glisi.org/base-camp-and-leadership-summit-2/

05/12/2026

One of the highlights of our spring is hosting leader exhibitions with our aspiring leaders across Georgia.

We recognized the completion of the 3rd cohort of aspiring leaders in , who shared the specific ways their leader practice improved over the course of their cohort experience.

A specific example of how their growth is already having an impact includes demonstrating that effective co-teaching in inclusive classrooms has a measurable influence on student success.

05/11/2026

Graduation is the milestone. Growth and learning are years in the making.

Behind every student crossing a graduation stage this month is thousands of hours of educator time and effort to nurture and grow young people, and hundreds of small decisions that shaped the learning environments for our soon-to-be graduates.

The trust a kindergarten teacher built on day one. The principal who made it safe to struggle. The counselor who noticed something was off before the student could name it. The budget fight no student ever saw, but benefited from anyway.

None of those moments feel like graduation. Most feel unremarkable in the moment — another conversation, another decision, another day. But they accumulate. They become the conditions that carry a student to the finish line and, more importantly, prepare them for what comes after.

To every adult who poured something of themselves into that invisible work, we want to thank you. Graduation celebrations are for our graduates. But the conditions to grow and learn along the way were shaped by you.

05/08/2026

Leaders who create psychological safety. Teams that learn together and then carry that learning into how they shape climate, culture, and performance. Asking the question "Are kids learning and how do we know?" instead of "Are kids scoring great?"

Leslie Hazle Bussey and Jennie Welch of GLISI and Dr. Brian Keefer of Fulton County Schools joined GAEL UnscriptED to dig deeper into how GLISI designs professional learning built for transformation, not compliance, and the net benefit of that design approach for leaders, students, and outcomes.

Part 2 of 3 was just released last week. Listen to the second part now:

The fastest way to stall school improvement is to treat leadership like a set of tips you can download. Real change asks something harder: adults have to be willing to learn, unlearn, and look in the mirror. We sit down with Leslie Hazel Bussey (CEO and Executive Director of GLISI), Jennie Welch (Ch...