Diverse Charter Schools Coalition

Leading from Within—Exploring the Self
Domain of the Compass Leadership
Framework

What are the Communities of Practice offerings for the 25-26 school year? Read below to meet one facilitator team. For more updates, visit our CoP page.

join a community of practice in 25-26

Sara Carlson Striegel – Valor Collegiate Academies
Travis Commons – Valor Collegiate Academies

Meet your 25-26 CoP Facilitators

Sara Carlson Striegel
Sara Carlson Striegel has spent nearly two decades in education, serving in various roles including becoming the founding principal of an elementary school in Northwest Denver. In 2021, Sara joined the Impact team as a director of leadership development. In her role, Sara coaches and supports education leaders across various settings, including charter school networks and traditional districts nationwide. She now leads the Compass in Leadership Program, which blends leadership best practices with emotional and physical well-being, as well as identity development through a relationship-based approach. Sara also co-leads the Circle Facilitator Course designed to train and credential individual facilitators in Valor’s Compass Circle model. Being both bilingual and biracial, Sara brings a deep appreciation for navigating diverse cultural systems while fostering authentic identity development and sustainable wellbeing practices.

Travis Commons, PhD
Dr. Travis Commons has worked as an educator and researcher across a variety of settings, ranging from residential and clinical treatment to traditional and charter public schools. In 2014, Travis relocated from his long-time home of Chicago to Nashville to be the founding principal at Valor’s first school site — Flagship Academy — which has been the top performing open-enrollment middle school in the district every year since its opening. In 8 short years, Valor has become an innovation hub for pioneering a comprehensive human development (CHD) approach to schooling, centered around The Compass – an integration of habits of academic success, social-emotional learning, and identity development in a relationship-based approach to growth. Dr. Commons now leads the network’s National Impact Team, in which he and his team offer a range of transformative offerings and certification programs that mitigate barriers and create pathways to connection and belonging in schools.

Meet your 25-26 CoP Facilitators

Effective leadership begins within. The Self Domain of our Compass Leadership Framework invites leaders to engage deeply with their inner world—uncovering, examining, and expanding the beliefs, stories, and habits that shape how they lead.

This Community of Practice (CoP) is designed to create a reflective space where leaders can build greater self-awareness and alignment, and develop the internal capacities that support transformational leadership in complex and human centered environments.

In this CoP, participants will:

  • Deepen self-awareness by exploring six key leadership capacities that support grounded, purposeful, and equity-aligned leadership;
  • Engage in reflective practices, storytelling, dialogue, and embodied exercises that support internal alignment and growth;
  • Connect personal leadership experiences to larger systems and patterns, examining how identity, bias, and power show up in daily decisions and relationships;
  • Experiment with practices and mindsets in their professional contexts, documenting insights, tensions, and moments of transformation.

Session Focus Areas:
Each session will center one capacity of the Self Domain:

  1. Finds Leadership Center – Cultivating presence, balance, and regulation in moments that matter.
  2. Has a Flexible Identity – Naming and navigating the stories we carry about ourselves as leaders.
  3. Leads with Purpose – Leading in alignment with our core values, while honoring diverse perspectives.
  4. Expands Worldview and Capacity – Moving toward the edges of what we know and welcoming discomfort as growth.
  5. Has a Strong Sense of Inner Knowing – Listening inward and building trust in our internal guidance system.
  6. Embraces Discomfort to Confront Bias – Holding space for discomfort as a tool for confronting bias and power dynamics.

What participants will walk away with:

  • A reflective portfolio of personal leadership insights, intentions, and documented growth;
  • Strategies and tools to center self-awareness, equity, and purpose in daily leadership practice;
  • A deeper connection to a leadership community grounded in authenticity, vulnerability, and mutual growth.

This CoP is for anyone who manages others and is ready to go inward in order to lead outward—with clarity, courage, and compassion.

Leading from Within—Exploring the Self Domain of the Compass Leadership Framework will be meeting at the following dates and times for 25-26 School Year (all ET). Unless noted all meetings are held virtually on Zoom.

  • October 1, 2 – 3:30pm ET
  • October 7, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • October 21, 12 – 1:30pmET
  • November 3, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • November 18, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • December 2, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • December 15, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • January 12, 12 – 1:30pm ET
  • February 3, IN PERSON – Washington DC,  Time TBD
join a community of practice in 25-26
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