In April Outreach’s Education Technical Assistance Services (EDUTAS) recognized 55 Oklahoma school administrators for their participation in professional learning cohorts during the 2024-25 school year.

EDUTAS has partnered with the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) to strengthen the state’s school leadership pipeline for the last nine years beginning with Moving UP for assistant principals in SY16-17, followed by the Oklahoma Principal Leadership Academy for early career principals in SY21-22.

EDUTAS manages both leadership programs funded by the OSDE. “Since the beginning in 2016 we have been honored to support nearly 400 school leaders as they engaged in our professional learning cohorts focused primarily on building their knowledge and skills to create impactful school environments where all students can achieve. We’ve been laser-focused on collaborative leadership, collective efficacy, communication and school improvement,” Lisa Pryor, EDUTAS Director, said. “We’ve relied heavily on John Hattie’s Visible Learning research to support leaders as they create a coherent framework for their own instructional leadership practice.”

Principal Leadership Academy Cohort

Our national subject matter experts Dr. Jenni Donohoo and Dr. Colleen Curran continue to deliver impactful instruction that moves meaningful and timely research into practice in small doses for the Oklahoma leaders to test at their sites. Our Oklahoma-based leadership coaches Dr Linda Everett, Dr. Kathy Taber, Charlotte Gordon, Charlotte Jones, Dr. Amy Fichtner, Dr. Kelly McKoy, Patricia Simons, and Mark Shadid provide ongoing support and feedback to small teams and to individual leaders during and between learning sessions. Karen Mock and Andrea Lister-Miller were the OSDE program liaisons this year.

“We will mark our tenth year of Moving UP and fifth of PLA this coming school year,” Pryor said, “and we will pilot a virtual Teacher Leader program in Fall 2025. Adding teacher leaders to our education leadership portfolio will help our cohort graduates and others to really dig into the collaborative leadership and collective efficacy concepts with their classroom teachers; we believe that is a formula for student success.”

EDUTAS also supports intensive full-service school leader development in Arkansas through its partnership with the Arkansas Leadership Academy programs targeting teachers, building leaders, district leaders, school teams, and school executives.

For more information about Oklahoma or Arkansas programming please email lisa.pryor@ou.edu.

“Moving Up” Cohort