The Governor's Institutes of Vermont are summer programs for Vermont high school students with strong personal motivation and interest in Art, International Affairs, and Science and Technology. In summer of 1990, a new program, based on the concept that teachers teach better when they are learners as well as leaders and called the "Lead Learners" program, placed teachers, as students, in each of the three institutes so that they could learn to be more effective agents of change and could also bring to their home schools some of the strategies learned at the institutes. Proceedings of a Lead Learner conference on performance-based course design and assessment are summarized in this report. Articles by contributing participants include information on school restructuring, classroom strategies, Soviet-American student interaction, and the creative process. The articles also provide examples of three innovative schools and two successful projects. A scoring guide for oral presentations is included. (LMI)