PAGE is the Science Museum of Minnesota’s flagship program for leaders in K-12 education. Dedicated to supporting diversity, promoting inclusion, increasing access, and achieving equity in educational systems, PAGE is designed to support leaders in bringing about meaningful and lasting institutional change towards greater equity and inclusion within schools and across districts. This transformative program has been developed and refined through multiple awards from the National Science Foundation and focuses on leadership, beliefs, systems, relationships, and complexity.
During PAGE, you will engage with fellow leaders and the facilitation team in critical questions and discussions about leading in complex systems and profound ways of bringing about new behaviors and actions in your context. You and your colleagues will develop skills in systems thinking; practice strategies for facilitating highly productive teamwork and collaboration; and examine the relationships between identity, systems of oppression, power, and status.
The PAGE community of educational leaders is powerful. It includes over 40 districts from five states in the Upper Midwest and collectively capitalizes on the wisdom of urban, rural, and suburban contexts. District leaders include superintendents, assistant superintendents, school board members, curriculum directors, Q-comp coordinators, principals, teacher leaders, and instructional coaches. The PAGE community also includes teams from several State Departments of Education.
PAGE is transformative. As one district leader put it, “My leadership has been shaped by PAGE PD. I lead my faculty meetings using facilitation strategies. I formulate questions to guide staff to identify disparities. My feedback to staff from either room stop-ins or formal observations are to support the lenses of PAGE. Being aware of systems helps me as I facilitate new initiatives in my school.” Another put it this way, “This experience has been life changing and career shaping. It calls me to be something better, someone better than I was before. It has opened my eyes to see things I would have missed.”