PPEL offers courses and experiences that build capacity for everyday practice—so that work becomes a place of learning, growth, and contribution. Across Yale classrooms, client partnerships, and programs, we return to the same core moves: stay close to experience, reflect together, and learn through feedback about impact.
Everyday Leadership
The grounding framework of The Practice—integrating values and impact in everyday moments of conversation, collaboration, and conflict.
Interpersonal & Group Dynamics
A course rooted in small-group interaction and lived experience, strengthening the capacity to build more open and effective working relationships. One of the most popular electives at Yale SOM for over 20 years.
Coach Training (Coming 2027)
A forthcoming Executive Education offering at Yale School of Management. Faculty Director: Heidi Brooks.
Holding Space
A learning laboratory for working with what's happening in groups.
We train space holders to work with real moments—when tension rises, someone goes quiet, or conversations begin to polarize. Rather than pushing past those moments, we slow down and treat them as curriculum—engaging experience, reflecting together, and learning through feedback about impact.
Holding Space grew out of PPEL's facilitator development work and remains the dedicated gathering for our facilitator community.
Next Intensive: June 14-16, 2027 • New Haven, CT
Shaping Culture
Culture is built in micro-moments—so that's where we work.
Shaping culture supports teams and organizations that want culture change to be lived, not declared. We focus on everyday conditions that enable values, actions, and ways of being to align.
Learning Through Experience (Podcast)
Leadership isn’t just what you know—it’s how you show up. Learning Through Experience is a Yale School of Management podcast hosted by Dr. Heidi Brooks. Each episode explores how leaders learn through the moments that matter: meetings, relationships, decisions, and dilemmas. Drawing on guests’ wisdom and questions from listeners, the show turns insight into practice and transforms life into a learning laboratory.