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Salem State has a long history of preparing teachers and school leaders. Building upon that tradition, McKeown School of Education Professors Jacy Ippolito and Megin Charner-Laird relaunched the Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Educational Leadership (CAGS) in 2017. Developing expanded teacher leader and formal leader pathways and a culturally responsive curriculum, the new program directors seek to engage educators on their journey of transformation from teacher to school leader.

Deeply invested in working collaboratively and co-creating knowledge, Charner-Laird and Ippolito employ a cohort model enabling CAGS candidates to build a professional network to last a lifetime. Partnering with many local districts, CAGS is offered in a fully online format, as well as in-person versions delivered in district classrooms. Charner-Laird describes the CAGS as, “founded on antiracist leadership, transformational leadership, and a deep understanding of adult development and learning.” This programmatic stance has inspired educators in the region to embrace the program and to look towards it as a powerful source of leadership preparation as well as a means for districts to invest in future leaders. The CAGS attracts seasoned, professional educators who elect to hone their skills, preparing for their next leadership challenge at the school or district level.

Salem is among the districts that partner with the program, supporting candidates’ enrollment, along with other districts in the greater Boston area and, increasingly, statewide. The CAGS program’s geographic footprint has also expanded substantially over the last few years. The fully online program expanded the opportunity to a broader, more diverse pool of candidates, including educators raising their own children and rising leaders of color. The program’s reach now extends to the South Shore, Cape Cod, Western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and beyond.

As Ippolito describes, “the whole enterprise is a mechanism for school districts to grow their own leaders and invest in their own educators.” Charner-Laird characterizes the program as “contributing to the diversification of the leadership pipeline” due to efforts to reach a more diverse pool of candidates and curricular revisions, as well as an emphasis on hiring faculty of color to teach in the program. Noting the impact of shifting regional demographics, she adds that “students in schools need to see more leaders who look like them.”

Investing in ongoing support structures beyond the two-year program, the CAGS program directors also created the Center for Educational Leadership at Salem State (CEL@SSU). CEL@SSU’s purpose is to extend the CAGS programmatic learning in the field, growing leadership capacity among new and existing PreK-12 school leaders to create sustainable and equitable learning outcomes for all students. Ippolito and Charner-Laird developed the Center’s alumni professional learning communities to bring new school leaders together, to grow their collective wisdom, and to expand existing professional networks across districts.

In less than a decade, Charner-Laird and Ippolito have grown CAGS enrollment from slightly more than 20 students to over 150 candidates annually. Some graduates are now returning to teach or supervise candidates in the program. Ippolito affirms that the “ongoing mission of the CAGS and teacher leadership programs and the Center for Educational Leadership is truly about preparing the next generation of leaders, diversifying the leadership pipeline and the leadership workforce in the region.”

The revitalized CAGS is also a rich source for ongoing research with several colleagues and decades of scholarship undergirding their work. The program directors’ research collaborators include James Noonan of Salem State and Chris(tine) Leider of UMass Lowell. With co-author and colleague, Christina Dobbs from Boston University, Ippolito and Charner-Laird have published a series of books on disciplinary literacy. Their most recent publication is the 2nd edition of Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry and Instruction from Harvard Education Press, while their fourth book in the series, Critical Disciplinary Literacy, will be published in 2025 by Routledge Press.

Recognizing that norms of communicating across various disciplines have developed over time, their disciplinary literacy scholarship uncovers the roots of these traditions, encouraging teachers to interrogate their relevance for today’s classrooms. As Charner-Laird describes, “ we invite students into that critique and into reframing and recreating some of the ways that we can do science, read and write in mathematics . . . opening up and reinventing what it means . . . so that students of a variety of backgrounds and identities can own that disciplinary identity . . . And then imagining new futures in the disciplines through the lens of literacy.”

The program and Center directors share pragmatic, practical tools and resources for teachers, in addition to the theoretical models they advance. “We have this real commitment to co-construction and honoring teachers’ expertise: from having been teachers and coaches, and from working with teachers our whole careers. The expertise lives in teachers and in their synthesis and understanding of curricula, standards, and goals; and their deep understanding of who students are, and the context that they're teaching in,” says Ippolito.

The entrepreneurial space created by McKeown School leadership has empowered the synergy among Charner-Laird, Ippolito, and their colleagues to evolve from collaborating on relevant research in the field, to leadership of the CAGS and CEL@SSU, and back into the community. As Ippolito describes, “being able to go out into schools on a regular basis not only allows us to bring research into classrooms, but it also allows us to bring knowledge from schools back into our SSU courses and graduate programs. That iterative, reciprocal relationship of learning with and from both research and preK-12 educators fuels us.”  Charner-Laird explains, “Salem State has provided us with this really exciting opportunity to not be just researchers, not be just teachers, not be just practitioners in the field, but really to merge all of it.”

And our doors are open.