SRI Leadership Academy -Two Weeks Left to Join the Inaugural Cohort
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. Please 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 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. Please join us in Boston, MA, November 7-9, 2019.
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;
- 2019 Fall Meeting Keynote Speaker 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. 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. - 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 Professional Learning Services
SRI Leadership Academy
This cohort-based model invites school, district and nonprofit leaders to engage in a year-long academy to support them to design concrete achievable goals for school and organizational improvement, with a specific emphasis on educational equity through adult learning. Combining the research-based SRI intentional learning community design with improvement science and facilitative leadership practices, this year-long experience provides an opportunity for leaders to learn and grow, design new initiatives with feedback opportunities from colleagues, and work to improve their organizations through an action research project.
Enrollment in the leadership academy includes registration for the annual SRI Fall Meeting, as well as eight virtual sessions and a final in-person retreat in June.
Click here to apply to join the 2019-2020 cohort
SRI Equity First Institutes
The Equity First Institutes help participants build capacity to access, engage and sustain complex and challenging conversations about equity, identity and implicit bias that lead to action. Participants engage in a rigorous set of learning experiences that begin in a safe space for us to take up the nuances of exploring our own identity. The Institutes then move us to a brave space where we explore how our identity is apparent when we interact with others, and finally shift us to bold spaces where we take up the work of dismantling the systems of oppression in our current work contexts and designing new systems that address persistent inequities.
SRI Reflective Learning Communities Institutes
SRI invites and supports teachers as well as school and district level leaders, individually and/or in teams, to learn about and practice the skills, habits, and dispositions of SRI’s Collaborative and Reflective Practices.
Click here to register for Leading SRI Reflective Learning Communities Institute July 29-31, 2019 in San Antonio
SRI Technical Assistance & Coaching Services
SRI offers specialized coaching and mentoring to individuals and teams to improve effectiveness, build capacity for change, manage multiple initiatives and demands of constituents, design and implement strategic plans, lead curriculum revision, and develop solutions to adaptive challenges.
We start where you are and support your efforts to sustain equitable, positive, and safe learning environments for students and adults. We offer technical assistance that creates a shift in culture and improves teaching and learning, by working with you to design customized support for your community. Our work helps to:
- Build the capacity of educators, families/caregivers, community members, and students to develop skills and knowledge to
- Effectively facilitate vital group conversations and learning in order to
- Identify barriers to student success and
- Interrupt systemic conditions that contribute to and maintain a culture of disproportionality
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
