Courses & Cohort Programs

For students interested in growing their collaborative leadership skills at a deeper level, the Wurtele Center offers courses and cohort programs that bring together a small community of learners to develop into collaborative student leaders. These programs engage students in exploring their individual strengths, growth areas, and evolving sense of purpose (ME); help them build their capacity to work with others in a team and community (WE); and assist them as they seek to make positive change (IMPACT).

LEAD Scholars & LEAD Corps

The Leaders for Equity-Centered and Action-Based Design (LEAD) Scholars is a one-semester, cohort-based program comprising two, 7-week courses (IDP 134 and IDP 135). This program focuses on building leadership capacity through both examining leadership through a social justice lens and learning skills of facilitation and design for social change. The Wurtele Center for Leadership and the Office for Equity and Inclusion have designed this program with the mission of equipping students with the skills to apply equity-centered design to address some of our greatest social inequities through the art of facilitation. A small cohort of students will explore who they are as leaders, how their social identities impact their leadership and how to develop deep and meaningful relationships with one another. They will learn and apply the processes of design and facilitation to serve as references and consultants to the greater campus community.

After completing the scholars program, students have the opportunity to apply to be a member of the LEAD Corps. Selected corps members will engage with the community as peer facilitators, consultants and trainers. They’ll learn and practice deeper facilitative leadership strategies, such as deep listening, radical collaboration, emergent strategy and liberatory design. The corps also serve as capacity builders for their peers as they offer opportunities to work in collaboration with other students to help them design and implement their own ideas. To work with the corps, please fill out the intake form and someone from the corps will be in touch.

Be on the lookout for more information on how to apply to the LEAD Scholar program in January 2026. For questions please contact Annie DelBusto Cohen or Toby Davis.

“Joining the LEAD program allowed me to see the ways in which you can do social justice work in such different capacities. It was useful to me to see my peers doing work in their ways and modeling what social justice work can look like and how it can fit into your life personally.”
"Through the Corps, I’ve been able to talk to fellow Smithies about topics I never would have had the courage or tools to broach before. The Scholars program gave me language and knowledge to name systems of oppression and how they can manifest at institutions like Smith.”

IDP 133: Critical Perspectives on Collaborative Leadership

Spring Semester 2026

Traditional conceptions of leadership set up leading and working as a team as diametrically opposed; “leaders” are often understood as those who achieve greatness through their own powers of persuasion or individual achievement, while “teams” are often framed as leaderless efforts that move forward by virtue of dispersed contributions to a project or initiative. This course challenges students to interrogate this perceived dichotomy by viewing theories and histories of leadership and collaboration through a critical lens and exploring alternative ways of imagining change-making as a collaborative leadership act. Through reading, writing, reflection and practice, the class will offer students new perspectives on how they might bring others into collaboration by intentionally creating a productive team culture and modeling processes that encourage others to step in and out of the lead. This course is especially useful as a foundation for those students whose future academic (or life!) work is likely to engage them in significant group work.

“Thank you SO much for this course. It truly has given me the confidence I needed to take the next steps after Smith. The practicality of all of the various skills I gained here—this probably was the MOST important course I took in my time here.”

IDP 123: Introduction to Collaborative Innovation

Spring Semester 2026

This 2-credit, S/U course introduces students to key frameworks and theoretical concepts within the domains of collaborative leadership, human centered design and entrepreneurial innovation, and critically considers these practices and their impact in the world. Students engage with guest speakers who are working within diverse fields and roles to examine and explore these concepts within a real-world context. Students engage in hands-on exercises and assignments that introduce ways of working within these domains and reflect on relationships between these domains and their own disciplinary work.

“This is a great class! No matter your personal/academic background, you are welcome in this class and will get something out of it! It will enrich how you understand yourself and the world and you will learn about many ideas and tools that you can use both in and out of the classroom in the future. Definitely take this class!”