The Minnesota Principals’ Academy is a powerful and much-needed source of support for principals across our state as they play their critical and challenging roles in improving schools and raising student achievement.  The University of Minnesota’s Consortium for Post-Secondary Academic Success is coordinating the Academy.

The academy is funded by Minnesota Legislature appropriation, and was created in collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Education, Minnesota Elementary School Principals' Association, the Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, and the University of Minnesota.

A growing body of research underscores the critical role that principals play in creating great schools and helping students succeed.  Principals set the vision, guide instruction, build the budget, unite the team and lead the drive for results.  Their jobs are an extraordinary mix of small details and big ideas, of crisis management and long-range planning.  In this time of increasing national and international demands on schools and students, principals must be highly capable as instructional leaders. 

Despite the importance of the principalship and the demands that are placed on principals today, relatively few principals receive ongoing professional development that enhances their ability to lead schools to high performance.  The Principals' Academy fills that gap by bringing to Minnesota the research-based program of the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL), an initiative of the Washington, D.C.-based National Center on Education and the Economy.  The NISL executive development program was developed over six years with major support from national foundations and is being used to provide leadership development for school principals in Massachusetts, Florida and other states. 

Using the NISL program, the Minnesota Principals' Academy enables cohorts of practicing principals to put leadership best practices from education, business, the military and other fields to work on behalf of their students and schools.  Delivered in two and three-day segments over the course of one year, the curriculum combines face-to-face instruction in workshops, seminars and study groups with interactive Web-based learning.  Through the Minnesota Principals' Academy, this rich curriculum is being adapted to the unique needs of Minnesota’s urban, suburban and rural schools and students.

The NISL program uses a train-the-trainer delivery model that enables Minnesota to provide continuing leadership development for principals over the next several years.  During 2006-2007, forty-eight Minnesota principals and school leaders were trained by NISL professionals and experts from across the country. Starting in June 2007, members of the Leadership Team delivered the NISL curriculum to the first cohort of principals from across the state.