2026 ACSA Women in School Leadership Forum

Women leaders are often encouraged to be resilient, but resilience is not meant to be built in isolation.


Educational leadership can be demanding, complex, and deeply personal work. This session creates space for honest reflection about the relationships that help women sustain their leadership over time and offers practical strategies for building stronger support systems that benefit both the leader and the communities they serve.


Learning Outcomes

1. Assess their current leadership support network
2. Participants will identify the relationships that currently provide challenge, encouragement, accountability, and advocacy—and where meaningful gaps may exist.
3. Recognize barriers that can weaken connection among women leaders
4. Participants will explore common dynamics such as isolation, comparison, perfectionism, competition, and unspoken expectations that can make authentic support more difficult.
5. Develop practical strategies to intentionally strengthen leadership sisterhood
6. Participants will leave with ideas and tools for building more intentional circles of trust and support within their schools, districts, and professional communities.

Leave with:

1. A practical framework for strengthening trusted professional relationships
2. Reflection tools they can use immediately within their own leadership journey
3. Concrete ideas for fostering stronger support networks among women in education

In today’s complex and fast-paced educational environment, leaders are expected to drive results, build culture, and navigate challenges; yet many are unprepared for the realities of leading through resistance, conflict, and change. This session explores what it truly means to lead with courage: confronting hard truths, engaging in difficult conversations, and making decisions that prioritize students over comfort.


Grounded in real-world leadership experience, this interactive session will unpack the essential practices of courageous leaders, including addressing toxicity, fostering trust through transparency, and building systems of accountability. Participants will reflect on their own leadership, engage in practical scenarios, and leave with actionable strategies to lead change with clarity and confidence.


This session goes beyond theory, focusing on the leadership moves that are often not taught in preparation programs, but are critical for creating strong, student-centered school communities.


Participants will leave with:

1. A practical framework for courageous leadership that supports leading difficult conversations, making decisive actions, and building trust within teams
2. Concrete strategies to address resistance and toxicity while maintaining a positive, student-centered culture
3. A personal action plan to immediately apply courageous leadership practices in their school or district setting

Artificial intelligence is reshaping education, but the most powerful AI strategies are not tech-first, they are human-first. In this hands-on workshop, women school leaders will explore how to leverage AI tools to amplify their impact, reclaim time, and lead with greater intentionality. Through guided activities and real-world scenarios, participants will leave with practical AI skills they can use immediately, grounded in values, equity, and authentic leadership.

1. Identify 3 to 5 AI tools relevant to their leadership role (communication, planning, data, staff support)
2. Apply a human-centered framework for evaluating and integrating AI responsibly
3. Craft at least one AI-assisted workflow or resource to implement the following week

School systems cannot rely on chance to develop their next generation of leaders. Yet many districts promote strong educators into leadership roles without intentional preparation, coaching, or system alignment. This session provides a practical, scalable framework for building the capacity of aspiring leaders through distributed leadership, structured mentorship, and aligned professional learning.

Participants will explore how to design a leadership development pipeline that integrates instructional leadership, operational literacy, culture-building, and systems leadership. Drawing from real district implementation examples, the session will demonstrate how leadership capacity can be embedded into PLC structures, committee work, pathway initiatives, and emerging technology efforts rather than treated as an isolated program.

Attendees will leave with a replicable leadership pipeline model, sample structures for mentorship and coaching, and practical tools for identifying, developing, and sustaining aspiring leaders across roles.

What if the way leaders show up each day directly shapes whether students, staff, and families feel valued, heard, and empowered within a school community? This interactive session explores how internalized leadership habits, particularly those shaped by gendered expectations, can unintentionally influence school culture and limit belonging. Participants will engage with 10 high-impact leadership shifts designed to strengthen clarity, confidence, and presence while creating environments where all voices are genuinely elevated.


These shifts challenge common patterns many women leaders have been conditioned into, including waiting to feel ready before stepping into authority, seeking consensus before providing direction, over-explaining decisions, and prioritizing comfort over clarity. While well-intentioned, these habits can dilute leadership presence, create inconsistency, and unintentionally suppress student and staff voice. Through real-world scenarios and guided reflection, participants will identify where these patterns show up in their leadership and how they impact school culture.


Participants will leave with

1. a clear understanding of the 10 leadership shifts and how they influence belonging and voice.
2. They will gain practical strategies to make confident decisions, communicate with precision, and set clear expectations that foster inclusive environments where all stakeholders feel valued and empowered.

While organizational charts and systemic biases are frequently cited as the primary obstacles for women climbing the ranks in K-12 administration, an uncomfortable truth remains largely unaddressed: some of the most painful and persistent obstacles women encounter come from other women. Testimonials from across the educational landscape reveal that instead of experiencing mentorship, many emerging leaders encounter gatekeeping, subtle exclusion, and professional friction from female peers and superiors. Why does the climb to leadership so often turn women against one another rather than uniting them?

By diagnosing why women can be uniquely harsh or unsupportive to one another, we can intentionally design a new blueprint for executive behavior. Empowering the next generation requires us to heal the fractures in the current generation, teaching emerging leaders that true professional sophistication relies on collective elevation, not competitive isolation.

3 Key Takeaways

1. Identify the Root Causes of Peer Friction: Analyze the psychological and structural drivers such as the scarcity mindset and systemic isolation that cause women to view one another as threats rather than allies.
2. Deconstruct the "Alpha Support" Paradox: the gap between public performative support & behaviors that shut down emerging talent.
3. Embody "Walking the Talk" in Leadership: Accountable actions that turn public advocacy for women into real-world, everyday support.

Women in school leadership wear every hat: board liaison, instructional leader, HR, finance, crisis communicator, equity advocate, mentor, often inside the same hour. The standard AI pitch is one more tool. This session is the opposite. It shows how women leaders are bottling their expertise into an agent team that carries some of those hats with them, in their voice.

This walkthrough opens the working setup in action. Megan opens her actual vault and demos the agent team she runs alongside her SpEd leader role. Each agent is built to act in her voice and judgment, drawing on her past work and the daily reflection that feeds it.

The deeper move is reflective practice. A Second Brain plus an agent team makes thinking traceable across time, surfaces patterns the day-to-day blurs, and gives leaders space to reflect before they react. In a job that often forces reaction over reflection, that shift is the practice.

Three key audience takeaways:
1. The "bottle your expertise" frame: which decision patterns are agent-ready, which need living judgment
2. A starter architecture for a leader's Second Brain that an agent team can work from
3. The reflective-practice frame: how an agent team protects time for thinking