We are thrilled to announce that Jessica Wilson and Liz Kornheiser will be stepping into new roles as Co-Executive Directors of Folio Collaborative. At Folio, we believe that strong relationships are at the heart of a great school, and this principle extends directly to our new co-leadership model that is a living reflection of Folio's core mission and values.
This model combines the best of both worlds, bringing together skillsets that cover all of our organizational needs—from product and operations to strategy and sales. Co-Executive Directors Jess and Liz are uniquely compatible in their leadership styles and areas of expertise, ensuring that Folio continues to help our members build sustainable professional growth strategies and support them in developing, attracting, and retaining the best educators and school leaders.
While embarking on a national search for a new Executive Director early this year, Jess and Liz collaborated deeply with the Folio team and the Board of Directors to identify the leadership needs for Folio in the future. With the guidance of the Board and support from the team, Jess and Liz thought deeply about their aligned skillsets and commitment to Folio’s mission and are excited to step into these new roles.
Folio’s mission resonates deeply with me. Having grown up as a faculty kid at a boarding school, our lives revolved around school in a way that has always felt very natural to me. And what makes a school, at every one I have had the pleasure of living at or attending, is the people. What drew me initially to Folio, after having spent time in sports media and then educational consulting, was the focus on supporting teachers. As a parent, I remember the transformative advice someone shared that if we aren’t taking care of ourselves as caregivers, we can’t bring our best selves to our children. And the same goes for teachers, if they aren’t given the opportunity to get feedback, reflect on their practice, and collaborate with others, they cannot be the best teachers they can be for their students. At Folio, we want to elevate professional learning at schools to being a personalized, contextualized, and collaborative process of growth that builds momentum each year and creates a positive culture rooted in clarity, process, and support.
I’m especially excited by the opportunity Folio provides schools to engage teachers in the implementation of their institutional goals and strategic plans. While working as an educational consultant, I partnered with schools to develop their strategic plans and found many struggled to transition from design to execution, especially in a comprehensive way that translated to teacher work. Folio creates clarity by directly aligning teacher goals to strategic goals, highlighting longitudinal data, and examining trends across teaching and learning environments. We believe that investing in teachers is critical and I’m excited to be a part of a team that puts teachers at the center of all of our conversations and strategy.
What excites me most about Folio is that our work is fundamentally about supporting teachers to reach their potential through the cultivation of positive relationships and feedback models. We are driven by an understanding that real professional growth happens when educators have the time and space to think deeply about their work and reflect with trusted colleagues. The myFolio platform is designed to facilitate these authentic, ongoing conversations by making the paperwork easier to free up time and space for the deeply human work of professional growth.
We are all school people and have been the classroom teacher trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t in a module. That work can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Working closely with our members allows us to listen, reflect, and build features that support building the community and culture within schools to give all teachers a support structure with the goal of achieving personal success.
My work with our customer success and development team really drives home the tangible impact intentional design of a tool can have on the relationships and culture within a school community. By focusing on growth, conversation, and high-quality coaching, Folio directly helps schools develop, attract, and retain the best educators and school leaders. Our platform is an investment for the long haul, building a personalized ecosystem for growth that makes professional development feel integral to an educator's impact on the school's mission.
Knowing that we are helping schools secure their most valuable resource—their talent—and empowering those talented educators to maximize their professional impact and fulfillment in the classroom is what motivates me every single day.