Leading Adult Learning

Support adult growth and development to navigate complex challenges and build thriving teams, and school and district communities.

In our highly complex, ever-shifting world, building human capacity remains one of the most powerful responsibilities—and transformative opportunities—of educational leaders. Grounded in more than thirty years of research and the understanding that adults make sense of their work and experiences in diverse ways, this new, fully revised and expanded edition of Leading Adult Learning helps you tailor your leadership to meet educators where they are—and differentiate support in meaningful ways. Leaders have comments that this developmental approach is one of the "greatest levers of change."

Features of this second edition include:

• Fully-updated takes on four, research-based "pillar practices" for growth—teaming, providing leadership roles, mentoring, and collegial inquiry—that can help educators build the cognitive, relational, and emotional capacity to teach and lead with genuine care
• Fresh, real-world stories and case studies that illustrate how educators are applying these pillar practices in today’s contexts, including hybrid and online environments
• Even more practical protocols and tools designed to support deep reflection, meaningful and courageous dialogue, and authentic collaboration in teams, schools, and systems that 
• Grounded in current research and best practices, and aligned with Learning Forward’s standards to support effective, high quality professional learning ensuring your strategies are responsive to today′s educational realities.

By intentionally caring for the development of your staff, you cultivate the resilient, collaborative cultures they need to thrive. Ultimately, when the adults in your educational ecosystem grow, your students are the ones who truly benefit.

Eleanor—Ellie—Drago-Severson is Professor of Education Leadership and Adult Learning and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. A developmental psychologist, Ellie teaches, conducts research, and consults with team, school, district, and systems leaders—as well as teacher leaders—in public, charter, and private schools and systems. She supports professional and personal growth; leadership development for principals, assistant principals, teachers, schools, districts, and organizations; and coaching and mentoring in K–12 schools, universities, medical institutions, educational associations, and other adult education contexts both domestically and internationally. She is also an internationally certified developmental coach who partners with leaders to build internal capacity, lead on behalf of social justice, and strengthen capacity across their systems. For more than three decades, Ellie’s teaching, research, and partnerships in the field have sought—synergistically—to explore and extend the possibilities of adult development and developmental leadership as levers for internal capacity building at the individual, team, organizational, and societal levels. Her work explores interconnected streams that focus on the connection between internal capacities and educational leaders’—broadly and inclusively defined—practice on behalf of growing bigger selves and helping others to do the same. She also takes a developmental approach to creating conditions that support our desires to thrive and support those in our care, as well as feedback for growth, the pressing challenges national and international educational leaders are facing and ways to help them manage these challenges, and leadership preparation and development. In addition, her work offers a new, learning-oriented model for leadership development; supports adult development in individuals and teams within and across systems; lifts leadership at the individual and systems levels; supports diverse adult English language learners and those who serve them; and grows teacher, principal, assistant principal and district-level leadership. Consonant with urgent conversations about transforming teams, schools, systems, and society into more learning-inclusive and equity-oriented contexts, her work foregrounds how we can support leaders’ internal capacity building in schools, districts, organizations, and leadership preparation programs—and how these capacities inform the gifts leaders are able to give to those in their care, each other, and the world as they lead for social justice and strive to make the world a better place for all. Ellie loves opportunities to accompany educators and other leaders in their vital work—and never takes it for granted. Instead, she considers it a gift. At Teachers College, Ellie is director of the PhD Program in Educational Leadership. She teaches aspiring and practicing principals in the Summer Principals Academy; aspiring superintendents in the Urban Education Leaders Program; and leaders from a range of for-profit, management, and consulting sectors in the Accelerated Education Guided Intensive Study (AEGIS) Program. She also coaches leaders in the Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Leaders and in her private coaching practice to help them grow—on the inside—and to grow their practice. In addition, she serves as faculty director and co-facilitator of the Leadership Institute for School Change at Teachers College. Ellie is author of the best-selling books Helping Teachers Learn: Principal Leadership for Adult Growth and Development (Corwin, 2004) and Leading Adult Learning: Supporting Adult Development in Our Schools (Corwin/The National Staff Development Council, 2009), as well as Becoming Adult Learners: Principles and Practice for Effective Development (Teachers College Press, 2004) and Helping Educators Grow: Strategies and Practices for Leadership Development (Harvard Education Press, 2012). She is also coauthor of Learning for Leadership: Developmental Strategies for Building Capacity in Our Schools (Corwin, 2013), Reach the Highest Standard in Professional Learning: Learning Designs (Learning Forward & Corwin, 2014), Tell Me So I Can Hear You: A Developmental Approach to Feedback for Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2016), Leading Change Together: Developing Educator Capacity Within Schools and Systems (ASCD, 2018) and Growing for Justice: A Developmental Continuum of Leadership Capacities and Practices (Corwin/Sage & Learning Forward, 2023). Ellie’s teaching, scholarship, and developmental approach to leadership foreground the power of growth, relationships, and interconnections—since these are essential to learning, development, individual perspective broadening, authentic collaboration, and capacity building at the individual, team, school, district, and systems levels. Her teaching, mentoring, and life’s work are inspired by her husband and soulmate, her parents and family, her relationships, her teachers, her own experiences as a middle and high school teacher, her experiences as a program director and teacher of adults, her work with leaders in the field, her coaching work, and—last but not least—her work with practicing and aspiring leaders in graduate programs and in the field. Taken together, these experiences form an interdisciplinary palette that is complemented by adult developmental theories and other life-changing frameworks. Ellie’s work has earned awards from the Spencer Foundation, the Klingenstein Foundation, and Harvard University, where she served on faculty for eight years and was awarded the Morningstar Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Dean’s Award for Excellent in Teaching. Most recently, Ellie received three outstanding teaching awards from Columbia University. She earned degrees from Long Island University (BA) and Harvard University (EdM, EdD, and a postdoctoral fellowship). Ellie grew up in the Bronx and is deeply grateful for the ways that it—and the community that raised her—have shaped her life.