2026 ACSA Women in School Leadership Forum

Education leadership requires more than individual excellence; it demands collective strength and inclusive collaboration. This interactive session invites participants to rethink how leadership teams are built and sustained, emphasizing trust, shared vision, mentorship, and allyship.

The session begins with an exploration of common challenges women face in leadership roles, including underrepresentation, limited access to mentorship, and implicit bias. Participants will then reflect on their own leadership journeys and the networks that have shaped their growth.

A central focus will be the dual importance of women mentoring women and engaging male allies. While mentorship among women creates spaces of shared experience, validation, and empowerment, male allies often hold positions of influence that can open doors, amplify voices, and advocate for equitable opportunities. Participants will explore how to effectively partner with male colleagues as sponsors and champions, and how to foster allyship that is authentic and impactful.

The session will also distinguish between mentorship and sponsorship, emphasizing how both women and men can play critical roles in advancing leadership pathways. Through guided discussion and scenario-based learning, participants will learn about the presenter's personal journey to the Superintendency and how every relationship plays a critical role in personal and professional development and advancement.

Women in school leadership face a unique double burden of navigating systemic gender gaps while managing the high-stakes emotional labor of their communities. Resonant Resilience reframes wellness from a luxury to a strategic leadership imperative. This workshop moves beyond theoretical balance to provide practical, somatic tools for sustainable energy and mental clarity.

Participants will engage in a Resilience Audit to identify burnout triggers and explore work-life integration strategies tailored for high-responsibility roles. This session incorporates experiential nervous system regulation. Leaders will participate in a guided seated breathwork sequence designed to lower cortisol and a brief sound therapy immersion using a quartz crystal bowl. This sound experience facilitates deep cellular relaxation and mental reset, demonstrating how leaders can use sensory tools to maintain composure in high-pressure environments. By the end of the session, attendees will shift from the cycle of exhaustion to a state of empowered, wellness-centered leadership.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Somatic Reset: Breathwork and sound-centering technique to regulate the nervous system during high-stress days.
2. Integration Over Balance: Develop a tools that set sustainable boundaries while meeting varying demands.
3. Modeling Wellness: Acquire actionable habits to lead a wellness-centered culture that improves staff retention and collective resilience.

What happens when women stop staying in their assigned lanes and start leading everywhere?

This interactive and inspiring session challenges women leaders to move beyond traditional career paths, seek experiences across the entire organization, and step confidently into spaces where women have historically been underrepresented, including business services, human resources, CTE, operations, and secondary leadership. Through candid stories, practical strategies, humor, and research, four accomplished education leaders will explore how to overcome professional pigeonholing, bias, workplace politics, impostor syndrome, and the pressure to continually prove your worth.

Participants will leave ready to broaden their leadership portfolios, strengthen their networks, advocate for one another, and protect the wellness that makes sustained leadership possible. Bring your ambition, your wisdom, and your willingness to take the next bold step because you were not meant to lead in only one lane.

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

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

Who This Is For
Women in school leadership at every level – from Executive Assistants to Superintendents. If you have a boss, a peer, or a team… this session is for you.

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The Problem
Most leaders are consulting, advising, and directing their way through conversations they think are coaching. The result: closed thinking, missed insight, and influence left on the table.
And here’s the part nobody talks about: the most important conversations you need to get right aren’t always with your direct reports. They’re with your peers. Your board. Your boss.

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The Approach
This is a practicum, not a lecture. We start with a reset – because most people in education have a very specific mental model of what coaching is. (Instructional coaching and executive coaching are almost opposites.) Once we clear that up, we get to work.
You’ll watch live demos. You’ll practice in pairs. You’ll leave having experienced coaching firsthand – not just heard about it.

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Key Takeaways

• Distinguish coaching from consulting, mentoring, and directing – and use each one intentionally
• Practice high-leverage questions that open thinking instead of closing it
• Apply coaching as a power skill laterally and upward – where much of your real influence lives

In today’s complex and demanding school environment, women leaders are navigating increasing expectations while working to build strong instructional systems and ensure equitable outcomes for all students. This session reframes “grit” as more than perseverance, it becomes a strategic leadership approach grounded in purpose, intentional action, and system-wide impact.

From Grit to Greatness challenges leaders to move beyond doing it all themselves and instead build the capacity of those around them. Grounded in real-world leadership experience and research on inclusive and transformational leadership, this session focuses on how leaders can expand their influence, strengthen systems, and create sustainable change.

Participants will engage in guided reflection, collaborative discussion, and practical planning aligned to real leadership challenges. Activities are designed to support immediate application at the site and system level.

Key Audience Takeaways:

1. Apply at least two strategies to build staff capacity through aligned systems and shared leadership
2. Implement practical approaches to strengthen teacher confidence and improve instructional outcomes
3. Develop a clear framework for designing inclusive systems that support every student through strong Tier 1 practices