Learning leaders are, above all, active learners in the communities they lead. They continuously pursue improvement, applying to their own work the learning mindsets and practices they expect others to adopt.

Learning leaders see every strategy, practice, and action as today’s best hypothesis, positioning their system to test and refine those theories as it works to meet the needs of every student and community it serves. 

Underlying this work are several core leadership principles. Learning leaders:

• Design to measure the full system, not only its component parts. Learning leaders understand that challenges, large and small, are the grist for improvement. They develop and facilitate robust, collaborative learning and formative measurement routines that act as early alerts, prompting and enabling actors to (1) spot and explicitly name problems and opportunities for improvement whenever and wherever they occur and (2) quickly swing into action to learn from and address them.
  
  
• Design systems that learn in community, not silos. From their central vantage point, leaders help others learn as a community, identifying high-leverage partnerships that cross traditional boundaries and connecting stakeholders so they can work in tandem to develop systemic solutions to shared challenges.  Learning leaders reject traditional ideas about where expertise lies, understanding that those closest to and most affected by problems bring unique insight to problem-solving. These leaders go further than merely seeking input about strategy and system design. They empower their community to identify and directly shepherd system improvement efforts. 
  
  
• Facilitate do not dictate. The ultimate goal of all organizational learning is to produce stronger, more consistent outcomes for all. But learning leaders understand that enforcing rules-based, routinized practices across divergent contexts will never spur sustainable progress toward equity. Instead, learning leaders create a strong shared impetus and boundaries for learning, and then help local actors develop tailored approaches to improvement in their own context.

By explicitly articulating their strategy for designing, guiding, and participating in learning and improvement, learning leaders flip the traditional leadership script, committing publicly to learning, positioning themselves to measure and continuously refine their own practice, and becoming accountable to their community.