Northwestern is helping develop leadership skills in high-performing Chicago Public Schools principals through a one-year training program provided by NU faculty.

Faculty from the School of Education and Social Policy and the Kellogg School of Management’s Center for Nonprofit Management designed the new program, which will operate for the next three years, said Liz Livingston Howard, director of nonprofit executive education at Kellogg.

The Chicago Public Schools Principals Fellowship program’s first 21 participants, all CPS principals, will attend six days of training led by NU faculty, receive one-on-one coaching and have their leadership skills assessed by their colleagues, said Livingston Howard, who was part of the program design team. The first training session was held last month.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for Northwestern to have two schools partnering to have significant impact on the leadership of an important institution like the CPS,” Livingston Howard said.

The initiative also aims to increase retention of top principals by requiring that participants commit to CPS leadership roles for the next three years, said SESP Prof. James Spillane, key designer of the program. He said the program hopes to promote a desire to improve the school district.

“These fellows will not only think about their own schools, which of course is critical, but that they also begin to think about school leadership and management more broadly within the school system,” Spillane said.

The Fellowship program is financed by the Chicago Public Education Fund, which has provided $500,000, as well as the Crown Family. Former University President Henry Bienen first introduced the idea to NU faculty about a year ago after it was discussed between CPS and the Chicago Board of Education, Spillane said.

“There is nothing more important for CPS than training and broadening the best principals,” Bienen said in an email to The Daily. “They are the key to how schools work.”

One of the central lessons of the program is the theory of distributed leadership, which places focus on not only the CEO or principal but others who are involved in leading and managing, Spillane said.

“The reality of leading and managing complex organizations like public schools is that it involves many hands, and as a result we need more complex conceptual frameworks for thinking about the actual work of leadership,” Spillane said.

CPS screened applicants through a rigorous process that involved multiple stages of interviews and did not involve NU faculty, Livingston Howard said.

She said the principals will receive feedback about their leadership abilities from colleagues in their schools and will analyze the assessments with faculty from Kellogg, SESP or coaches outside NU.

Lori Ann Campbell, principal of John Marshall Metropolitan High School in the West Side of Chicago, is a current program participant. She said she is awaiting results from her colleagues who provided information on how she handles stress, builds teams and designs strategic plans. Although Campbell said the 360-degree assessment is a bit unnerving, she said she sees value in looking at her own performance through that lens.

“Some of the best feedback you can get is from someone else’s view and perception of you as a leader,” Campbell said. “It’s going to be valuable information to push my practice.”

Campbell, who started as principal of Marshall High School in September, said she is grateful for the opportunity to study leadership district-wide because it enables her to pinpoint effective strategies at other schools and apply them to her own. The school is representative of a majority of the participant schools, which have predominantly low-income and minority student populations, according to a Chicago Public Education Fund news release.

At the first academic training session last month, participants discussed different ways of thinking about leadership, Spillane said. He said he hopes the program creates “world-class school leaders” and that it is extended past the planned three years.

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