Clover Park School District Superintendent Ron Banner is partnering with AWSP to bring the eight-part Empowering Excellence Series to his Administrative Leadership Team this year. Ron describes their district’s experience in the article that follows. View our Empowering Excellence brochure to learn more about the series.
While attending the AWSP/WASA Summer Conference in June 2024, I found myself drawn to one of the final breakout sessions on the very last day. What caught my attention was its focus on principal and leadership professional development, and more specifically, the concept of “Becoming while Doing.”
As a superintendent, I see firsthand the increasing complexity of a building administrator’s role. In Clover Park, our principals are balancing the demands of instructional leadership, staff support, navigating extreme student behaviors, engaging with families and communities, and confronting the politicization of public education, all of which have been compounded by the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I hold a simple belief about the chain of support in our district: the district supports building administrators, who support educators, who in turn support students. Yet I recognized a growing gap. It was becoming harder to clearly articulate how the district was intentionally supporting our administrators in a way that met their evolving needs.
That realization came into sharp focus during a recent principal candidate interview. A finalist asked, “What do you do to support the professional growth of your administrators?” I knew our answer, association dues, principal academies, and an annual professional development stipend, didn’t capture the deeper, more sustained support I envisioned.
Then came that breakout session. As I listened to the elements of AWSP’s Empowering Excellence series and the School Leader Paradigm, I felt like I had found it—the missing piece. This framework addressed the full spectrum of leadership: culture, systems, and learning. It blended personal growth (becoming) with the practical demands of the role (doing) in a way that simply made sense.
I brought the idea back to my Superintendent Council and our principals’ association leadership. The response was unanimous, this was the throughline we needed for our 2025–26 Administrative Leadership Team (ALT) professional development.
We launched the first session during our August ALT retreat, and the feedback was immediate and positive. Leaders valued the way the Paradigm grounded our discussions in both self-reflection and actionable leadership practices. We now have a shared framework for monthly ALT meetings that will carry us through the school year and likely into a “Round 2” in 2026–27, with goals to differentiate for veteran leaders and on-board new administrators.
Now, when candidates ask how we support our leaders, our answer will be richer and more complete. Yes, we continue to provide stipends, association dues, and principal academies to learn district systems. But we also proudly share that at the core of our high expectations lies high support: a solid leadership framework, rooted in Becoming while Doing, delivered through the AWSP Empowering Excellence series.
For us in Clover Park, this is more than professional development, it’s an investment in the people who carry the responsibility of shaping culture, refining systems, and fostering learning. And it’s a commitment to ensure that as they lead, they are also growing into the leaders their schools and our students, need them to be.
