Fall Meeting 2019 – Register Now!
We are really excited to launch registration for the 2019 Fall Meeting! Please join us in Boston, MA, November 7-9, 2019.
We are really excited to launch registration for the 2019 Fall Meeting! Please join us in Boston, MA, November 7-9, 2019.
SRI Fall Meeting 2019 is an educational conference like no other; a conference where educators create a community of learners who share their professional practice and learn from its close, public examination. Come to Fall Meeting to practice the skills, habits, and dispositions of professional collaboration and reflective discourse using SRI protocols and resources.
In Boston we’ll renew our fierce commitment to educational equity and excellence, and together, we’ll rekindle our passion for teaching and learning. Through our collective wisdom, we’ll find the courage and comfort needed to bring our best selves back to our schools and our students. Together with colleagues, we’ll access, engage, and be challenged through sustained conversation about what matters most – improving teaching and learning experiences, through a lens of equity, to make schools better places for every learner.
Highlights of Fall Meeting 2019
- Reflective learning groups — the centerpiece of SRI Fall Meeting is what distinguishes Fall Meeting from other educational conferences. In these groups, we’ll use SRI protocols to hold us as we engage in complex, challenging, and sometimes, difficult conversations about teaching, learning and leading;
- Through Learning Experiences, in-depth explorations designed and facilitated by SRI colleagues, we’ll hone skills, learn new strategies, and interrogate what it means to lead for educational equity and excellence;
- Pre-conferences will be offered the day before Fall Meeting, and are open to all participants. Please consider registering for a pre-conference this year! Sessions include facilitating through a lens of equity; and an introduction to SRI tools, practices, and resources for participants new to the work of SRI or Fall Meeting.
SRI Leadership Academy
Creating transformational learning communities with a fierce commitment to educational equity and excellence requires hard work and strong leadership. Over the past five years, SRI has been working diligently to identify the best practices for helping educators dive into conversations about educational equity and excellence to help them change and improve their instructional practice to serve all students. We began to notice a trend – the places with the greatest success had one key element in common – strong leadership helping guide the work around equity and excellence.
This data informed the development of the SRI Leadership Academy. This brand new opportunity invites school, district, and nonprofit leaders to engage in a year-long cohort experience to support them to design and implement concrete, achievable goals to transform their schools and organizations.
Classroom teachers can have substantial impact on the learning of students, and the choices they make in their instructional practice are critical to student success. However, without strong leadership at the school and district level, change is inconsistent and develops only in pockets. With strong leadership, the culture of the school and organization changes, and focusing on issues of equity becomes the responsibility of the entire community.
Applications for the inaugural cohort of SRI Leadership Academy Fellows are open now, and close May 31st. I am writing to personally invite you to consider joining this unique learning experience that will help you design and implement the changes needed to ensure that all students are successful. You will meet both in-person and virtually with your fellow cohort members in a customized reflective learning community. We will learn together, utilizing an improvement science framework combined with the SRI Educational Equity and Excellence Learning framework. Not only will you grow your leadership, but you will design and implement new practices that move your school or organization into specific action to disrupt student inequities.
Click here to learn more and apply for the inaugural cohort. Remember, applications close May 31st and space is limited.
Have questions or want to learn more? Email Deidre Williams (deirdre@schoolreforminitiative.org).
If not you, then who? If not now, then when? Our students need us to grow our capacity to support and implement change and I hope you will join us in this commitment.
Fall Meeting Pre-Conferences
Fall Meeting Pre-Conferences are all held on Wednesday, November 6, 2018 in Cambridge, MA. This year, you can choose from full day sessions or half day sessions. Our offerings this year:
Defining Equity: Disrupting Inequity
This session will be grounded in Paul Gorski’s Equity Literacy Framework. Using Restorative Practices Circles and a variety of other dialogue structures, we will work on identifying, responding to, and redressing the inequities that we encounter in our work. Our focus will be on both individually driven and systemic inequities.
We will use a restorative approach that includes constructivist listening, text-based dialogue, affinity-mapping, and mindfulness strategies.
Building Language Equity through Reading and Play
Quién eres?
Using Spanish, a first language for some, an unknown language for others, Spanish-speaking high school students and teacher facilitators will lead participants in community building, play, and literacy activities that develop a group culture so that we can embark on this learning experiences together. Facilitators will use the SRI protocol “What? So What? Now What?” to reflect on the shared Spanish-speaking experience and establish operating norms for our work together.
Comprehensive Exploration of School Culture, Climate, and Equity
Despite reform efforts aimed at reducing achievement disparities among marginalized students of color and poor students, gaps persist. There is a growing awareness that more systemic and implicit factors such as school culture and climate impact student and school success to a great degree and should be essential components of any school reform or improvement efforts. In this session, participants will explore and assess their school’s culture, climate, and equity through five interrelated and interconnected dimensions – cultural leadership, physical environment, psychosocial environment, academic environment and equity and cultural competency.
Creating a Foundation of Trust for Fierce Conversations
Under what condition might educators be willing to take the risks required for fierce conversations that advance equity? A foundation of trust is needed.
In this session we’ll unpack why the essential conversations about whether each child is getting what they need cannot happen without trust; we’ll utilize the research literature on how trust is built to analyze and amp up SRI Protocols; and we’ll hear how school-based teacher leader teams have worked to embed the practice of SRI protocols and their components within school routines in order to keep the fierce conversations going with authenticity and impact.
SRI Pre-Service Convening
SRI Pre-Service Network’s Aim: To better support pre-service teacher candidates in pre-service education using SRI Tools & practices. To prepare teacher candidates in the context of principles of SRI critical friendship.
The agenda will include an opportunity for networking and sharing of best practices; time for feedback on individual dilemmas or problems of practice; as well as an opportunity to partner with other pre-service educators to take up common issues and dilemmas using the Network Improvement Community model.
Transforming School Communities Through Text Making and Text Rendering
The session will introduce several tools that are crucial for building and sustaining an action-focused school-wide learning community. One is low-inference transcription of teaching and learning – a method of recording that makes teaching and learning visible without attaching judgment. Another is a set of protocols designed to read and interpret these transcripts as well as other texts that closely portray teaching and schooling. And third is a framework for using both tools within a schoolwide system and culture of collegial inter-visitation and conversation.
Full Pre-Conference Descriptions
Fall Meeting Keynote and Learning Experiences
2019 Fall Meeting Keynote Speaker – Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and Internet Yeller. She is the author of the New York Times Best-Seller So You Want to Talk about Race. Named one of the The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017, one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, and winner of the of the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award by the American Humanist Society, Oluo’s work focuses primarily on issues of race and identity, feminism, social and mental health, social justice, the arts, and personal essay. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, Elle Magazine, TIME, The Stranger, and the Guardian, among other outlets.
We will announce an opportunity to meet with her on a webinar this summer. You can find more about her and selected writings on her website: http://www.ijeomaoluo.com/
2019 Fall Meeting Learning Experiences
Do you have a great idea for a Learning Experience at Fall Meeting? Are you using SRI tools and practices in exciting ways that you’d like to share with others? Then we invite you to offer up a Learning Experience on Friday afternoon, November 8, 2019 at the Fall Meeting in Cambridge.
Each year, we utilize a portion of our conference for Learning Experiences. These sessions, either 90 minutes or 3 hours (This year 3-hour sessions are split across lunch), allow affiliates to learn new skills, dive deep, and explore different concepts, all within the framework of the SRI Mission, Guiding Principles, and Achieving Educational Equity and Excellence Learning Strands. We are accepting proposals for Fall Meeting Learning Experiences now until May 23. If you are interested in proposing an experience, please utilize the Learning Experience proposal form.
Questions? Email or call Deirdre (deirdre@schoolreforminitiative.org or 303.586.1169)
Do you have news to share? Interesting things happening in your area? Please let us know so we can share with our community! Email Chris Jones, chris@schoolreforminitiative.org.
Thank you,
Deirdre Williams, Kari Thierer, and Chris Jones
On behalf of School Reform Initiative
