The LINC Project investigates how intentional network design can support curriculum leadership, professional collaboration, and system-wide educational change in the context of curriculum reform. Building on insights from the NPLS Project, which emphasizes the important role of social networks in professional learning communities, LINC expands this focus by investigating how educators and school leaders work together within and across schools to interpret, implement, and sustain reform efforts. 

Educational reforms often introduce shifts that require educators to navigate changes in ways that align with their specific contexts. LINC explores how strategically designed professional networks function as infrastructures for knowledge-sharing, leadership capacity building, and structured collaboration. Through network-informed interventions, this project examines how intentional efforts to structure professional communities and relationships can strengthen leadership, distributed expertise, collective sense-making, and organization capacity. It uncovers how educators develop and leverage professional relationships to co-construct knowledge, mobilize expertise, and engage in reform efforts that foster sustained and meaningful change. 

LINC isn’t just about understanding networks—it also examines how network-informed interventions help educators, leaders, and policymakers structure professional relationships in ways that support long-term educational change. As part of NetLead Lab’s broader mission, LINC demonstrates how network-based leadership practices create context responsive, adaptive, knowledge-rich learning ecosystems that evolve with policy shifts and support educators, leaders, and organizations in navigating and sustaining meaningful change.