Kristina Hesbol, Director, Kristina.hesbol@du.edu;
Kent Seidel, University of Colorado Denver, Associate Director, kent.seidel@ucdenver.edu
Center purpose/vision
Through the Center for Innovative Rural Collaborative and Leadership Education (CIRCLE), rural educational leaders have access to and support for the same exemplary models of leadership that improve teaching and learning in urban and suburban schools – uniquely adapted to meet the context-specific needs (Williams & Grooms, 2016) of rural and remote school and district educational leaders. CIRCLE collaborates with both rural practitioners and researchers, whose shared interest in improving rural leadership makes them significant partners.
Research projects
Leading for Liberation: LGBTQ+-Affirming School Leadership Practices in Rural Schools
This is a collaboration with 2023 UCEA Fellow from UW Madison, two graduate assistants from Virginia Tech, two graduate assistants from the University of Denver, and me
We’re using a quan->qual mixed methods design to study key strategies employed by rural school leaders that lead to positive outcomes for youth who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically.
Networking Rural Research-Practice Partnerships: An Exploratory International Study
A foundational focus of CIRCLE practice-research partnerships is leading the disruption of inequity in rural schools (Tieken, 2014; Mackey, Faircloth, & Cummins, 2020; Alfaro, O’Reilly-Diaz, & Lopez, 2014; Izquierdo, DeMatthews, Baldera, & Gregory, 2019; Khalifa, Khalil, Marsh, & Halloran, 2019). In a collaboration with the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change, we’re focused on co-constructing a suite of place-based assessment instruments that inform a school’s instructional and operational decision-making.
Rural Educators across Borders (REAB) Leadership Project
10 rural American principals meet monthly with 10 head teachers from Wales and Northern Ireland in a developing networked improvement community. Each has a REAB teacher who is partnered with a teacher in a REAB school – this group is working on ecological sustainability.
Dr. Allen Pratt, Executive Director, National Rural Education Association
Dr. Hollie Mackey, Lead, North Dakota Promoting Sustainable Partnerships in Education and Research (PROSPER)
Dr. Muhammad Khalifa, Professor, The Ohio State University
Dr. Joy Esquierdo, Associate Professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
We’re always looking for opportunities to support the development of innovative rural educational leaders. CIRCLE is a practice-research partnership in which rural educators and their research partners can learn from each other.