I thought Holdsworth was a box to check. It changed who I am.

Midland ISD’s Kimber Anderson expected The Holdsworth Center’s Aspiring Principal Program to be a box she had to check – nothing she hadn’t heard before. Instead, it transformed her as a leader.

When my district first started talking about The Holdsworth Center’s Aspiring Principal Program, I saw it as a box to check.

I was an assistant principal who had decided I wanted to run a campus someday, and going through the program seemed like the right next step. I figured I’d go in, hear everything I’d already heard, check the box and be good to go.

I didn’t expect to walk out a completely different leader. But that’s what happened.

Everybody in education talks about having a toolbox of skills. You go to a training, you pick up a few new tools, add them to the toolbox.

My Holdsworth experience did not feel like adding to my toolkit. It felt like changing myself. These were not skills that got lost in the bottom of my messy kit, never to be seen again. They became part of who I am as a leader.

That kind of change doesn’t happen in a workshop. It took a full year, and how that year is designed is a big part of why.

I was in the first cohort of 27 aspiring principals from the Permian Basin region across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. We came together for six learning sessions, worked one-on-one with a coach and spent four two-day rotations visiting campuses across Texas to watch experienced principals do the job.

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The Holdsworth Center’s Aspiring Principal Program is a yearlong program that prepares aspiring principals to step into the principalship — through learning sessions, one-on-one coaching, campus rotations across Texas and principal-level work on their own campus.

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The rotations made a big impact. When you walk into another school as an aspiring principal, you start collecting little bits of good practice you can carry home and use on Monday: That bell schedule. That intervention block. That hallway system.

The program made me change that lens. What matters is not what the principal is doing on the campus. It’s their thought process. It’s the decisions they make, why they make them and how they carry them out.

Once I knew to look for that, I could ask better questions. I got to hear what hadn’t worked and why. And I started noticing the same themes surfacing across diverse schools led by different leaders. Those commonalities showed me what it takes to be good at this job.

That’s the piece I don’t think aspiring principals get anywhere else.

As an assistant principal, you may feel like you’re getting principal experience but you’re not. They are two very different jobs. The mindset, skills, decision-making, how you spend your time and what you prioritize are drastically different once you’re sitting in the principal’s seat.

The program wasn’t just theory either. Each of us took on a stretch project in partnership with our principal that gave us an opportunity to do real, principal-level work and get feedback from our leader and coach.

My coach was amazing. She helped me identify an area where I wanted to grow, set goals against it and then practice the skills in real time.

The clearest thing that changed in me? Learning to grow and empower others.

I used to be the chief problem solver. I took on every messy knot because I believed untangling it was my responsibility. Handing it off felt like passing the buck.

Now I see it as an opportunity to grow someone else. It doesn’t feel like passing off my work anymore. It feels like I’m helping someone with potential to learn and progress.

One year ago, I could not do that. Today, I am proud of the progress I’ve made and how I have seen others around me grow.

It also helped me land my first job as a principal at Lee Freshman High School.

A few nights before my interview, I pulled out my Holdsworth notes. I went back through the rotations, the principals I’d talked to and the questions I’d asked, and I wrote down what I thought might be relevant. That was my main resource walking into that interview.

While no one can be 100% ready before they’re in the job, Holdsworth gave me a solid foundation. I got to observe and ask questions of people sitting in that seat right then, dealing with that day’s problems and that day’s decisions. I saw the reality of it. And when something comes up this year, I have notes to check and people to call.

If you had asked me 10 years ago whether I wanted to lead a school, I would have said no. But my path kept moving in that direction, and with every experience and every door that opened, the confidence and the skills caught up.

If you want growth you have to look forward, and Holdsworth helps you see beyond the horizon. It is not what you’ve always gotten. It’s a new way of thinking.

Kimber Anderson is the principal of Lee Freshman High School in Midland ISD and a 2026 graduate of The Holdsworth Center’s Aspiring Principal Program.