Services That Transform Leaders, Schools, and Families
Wise Leadership Consulting offers coaching, consulting, professional development, and advocacy services grounded in culturally responsive practice, adaptive leadership, and a deep belief that every child, every school, and every leader deserves the conditions to thrive.
All services are available virtually nationwide and in person in the Chicago metropolitan area. Every engagement begins with a free consultation to understand your context, goals, and challenges.
1. Executive Leadership Coaching
For sitting principals, assistant principals, and district leaders
School leadership is among the most consequential and isolating roles in education. Through individualized coaching, Dr. Burnett-Wise helps leaders develop the clarity, courage, and strategic capacity to lead transformative change in their buildings and districts.
Drawing on Heifetz’s adaptive leadership framework, coaching engagements help leaders distinguish between technical problems and adaptive challenges, build collective efficacy among staff, strengthen instructional coherence across classrooms, develop culturally responsive approaches to discipline, family engagement, and school culture, and create Leadership Development Plans that drive measurable growth.
Dr. Burnett-Wise currently facilitates a team of coaching professionals and personally coaches Chicago Public Schools principals through the prestigious Malott Fellowship in partnership with the Chicago Public Education Fund and UIC’s Center for Urban Education Leadership. Dr. Burnett – Wise and her team work across focus areas including instructional leadership, community partnerships, chronic absenteeism, distributive leadership, and data-driven practice.
Formats: Ongoing 1:1 coaching engagements (monthly, weekly or biweekly), cohort-based Professional Learning Communities, or intensive leadership retreats.
2. Principal Preparation and Pipeline Design
For universities, school districts, and state agencies
The principal pipeline crisis is real: too many preparation programs emphasize compliance over capacity, theory over clinical practice, and management over transformational leadership. Dr. Burnett-Wise brings direct experience designing and directing a university-based principal preparation program (Roosevelt University’s M.A. in Instructional Leadership with Principal Endorsement) to help organizations build pipelines that produce leaders ready to lead on day one.
Consulting services include program design and curriculum development for principal preparation, clinical internship structure and site supervisor training, alignment with state endorsement and accreditation requirements, recruitment strategy for diverse principal candidates, and mentorship and support structures for early-career principals.
Formats: Program audits and redesign consulting, multi-day design institutes, or ongoing advisory partnerships.
3. Culturally Responsive Professional Development
For schools, districts, and educational organizations
Professional development that transforms practice requires more than a one-day workshop. Dr. Burnett-Wise designs and facilitates sustained learning experiences that help educators move from awareness to action. Grounded in the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings and Paulo Freire, these sessions challenge deficit thinking, build cultural competence, and equip teachers and leaders with concrete strategies for creating classrooms and schools where all students thrive.
Topics include culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy in practice, using assessment data (including MAP/NWEA) for equity-centered differentiation, building school cultures that affirm identity and expect excellence, teacher observation and feedback through a culturally responsive lens, project-based and experiential learning design, and child development frameworks (Piaget, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development) applied to diverse learners.
Formats: Single workshops, multi-session series, full-day institutes, or embedded coaching cycles for school teams.
4. Parent Advocacy and School Navigation
For parents, families, and community organizations
Choosing a school is never a neutral decision, especially for families of color navigating systems that were not designed with their children in mind. As both a scholar of educational leadership and the parent of a gifted child, Dr. Burnett-Wise understands the landscape from the inside. She helps families cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and advocate powerfully for their children’s learning.
Parent workshops and consultations cover how to evaluate schools beyond test scores and marketing (including culture, pedagogy, and leadership quality), understanding gifted identification and how to advocate for appropriate challenge, navigating selective enrollment, magnet programs, and private school options, supporting literacy development at home with research-based strategies, understanding your child’s assessment data (MAP scores, report cards, IEP/504 processes), and knowing your rights and building productive relationships with teachers and administrators.
Formats: Community workshops for parent groups, individual family consultations (virtual nationwide), partnerships with churches, libraries, and community organizations to host parent education events.
5. School Founding Consultation
For communities, educators, and organizations
When the schools available do not reflect the values, culture, or aspirations of a community, sometimes the answer is to build something new. Dr. Burnett-Wise founded Uhuru Shule Cooperative, an independent African-centered school for gifted Black children, housed at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She knows firsthand what it takes to move from vision to reality, and she brings that experience to communities and educators ready to create schools that truly serve their children.
Consultation includes developing a founding vision, mission, and educational philosophy, curriculum design grounded in culturally responsive and project-based approaches, governance structure and cooperative models, partnerships with universities, community organizations, and funders, navigating regulatory requirements and operational logistics, and building a team and a culture from the ground up.
Formats: Ongoing advisory relationships, intensive planning retreats, or project-based consulting engagements.
Why Wise Leadership Consulting
There are many consultants in education. What makes this work different is the integration of scholarship and practice. Dr. Burnett-Wise does not offer theory from a distance. She leads a school. She prepares principals. She coaches sitting leaders through real challenges in real time. She parents a gifted child and navigates the same systems she studies. That combination of rigor and lived experience means the guidance you receive is grounded, practical, and deeply informed by what actually works.
Ready to get started?
The Uhuru Journal: Rooted & Rising 