The Learning While Leading (LWL) professional development program motivates and further prepares administratively certified educators to become principals or assistant principals and offers continuous support to new principals during induction. The LWL program addresses a clear need for transitional support to motivate, fully prepare, and support educators that transition into the principalship, thereby addressing a gap in principal pipeline support in Illinois. With an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the Illinois Regional Offices of Education Lead Hubs (Illinois ROE Lead Hubs) has designed and launched the LWL program in 2023. The goals of LWL are to prepare future effective principals or assistant principals to lead change by engaging teachers and other school personnel in a continuous school improvement process using Learning Cycles and teacher teams. On a larger scale, LWL program staff, and their Lead Hub partners will use findings from this research to build a statewide system to develop a pipeline of "Leadership for Continuous Improvement" for Illinois schools. WestEd serves as the LWL independent evaluator, and we are studying LWL implementation and efficacy to determine whether the model positively influences principal hiring, retention, and school-level leadership success. The program evaluation study includes the following: Fidelity of implementation, a primarily descriptive analysis of program implementation and the degree to which the logic model is implemented throughout the project; Impact analysis, which employs comparative quasi-experimental methods to examine school-level impact of hiring an LWL participant. This report provides data and descriptive information on the early implementation of LWL through December 15, 2023. The report has four sections: 1. Overview of the LWL logic model 2. Program evaluation questions and methods 3. LWL participant and school demographics 4. LWL program implementation data The report is intended to provide formative data to LWL administrators and stakeholders during early implementation, as a means of benchmarking progress and sparking dialogue about program improvement and efficacy.