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.
Achieving equity in schools requires strong and informed leadership to spur necessary changes within systems, organizations, and practice. It also requires engaging in deep and often difficult conversations about inequities that currently exist within these systems, organizations, and practice. In the absence of intentional conversations about equity as well as the ways in which leaders are aware of their power, privilege, and underlying assumptions the improvement process in their schools and organizations may be incremental and technical, but it will not be transformational, adaptive, and sustainable. Schools, districts, and organizations need leaders who possess the motivation, commitment, energy, knowledge, and skills to do the complex work of facilitating transformational and adaptive change. SRI’s Leadership Academy develops leaders’ capacity for complex learning to increase their organization’s capacity for change, improvement, and reinvention.
SRI’s Leadership Learning Model focuses on three core dimensions: Equity Leadership, E-Continuous Improvement by Design, and Cultures Conducive for Change. This model combines the research-based SRI reflective learning community design with improvement science and facilitative leadership practices. The year-long experience provides an opportunity for leaders to learn and grow and design new initiatives with feedback from colleagues as they work collaboratively in reflective learning groups to improve their organizations through a continuous improvement research project.
Applications for the 2020 SRI Leadership Academy are open now.
Leading Powerful Adult Learning Online – New Dates Added!
June 17,19, 24, 26, 2020
Time: 2-5PM Eastern
This virtual learning series is designed for leaders, coaches, or those who are often called upon to facilitate meetings or deliver professional development and need support in designing, implementing and supporting adult learning particularly in virtual learning spaces. Using research-based tools and strategies, participants learn how to build community virtually, and nurture ongoing conversations designed to improve leading, teaching and learning. The virtual workshop provides in-depth study of protocols; introduces adult learning theory; builds explicit connections between adult learning and student success; supports participants to ask for and receive feedback critical to their success; and enables participants to design action plans that facilitate the improvement of teaching and learning through the lens of educational equity and excellence. By the conclusion of the 4-part workshop, participants will:
- Gain an understanding of adult learning theory;
- Understand the connection between adult learning and school transformation;
- Understand core considerations when leading in virtual spaces with SRI reflective tools and processes;
- Explore themselves as leaders; and
- Begin to develop and/or deepen the facilitative skills needed to lead educators’ learning
More Information and Registration
Facilitating Virtual Learning Communities Webinar
Dates: July 7, 9, 14, 16, 2020
Time: 7-8:30PM Eastern
Our most popular virtual institute is back! Participants in these sessions will engage in a variety of SRI protocols and practices to explore how SRI critical friendship can foster and sustain professional learning communities in a virtual space. Ample time will be reserved to debrief the virtual experience, examine implications for our work, and develop next steps in using virtual professional learning communities to engage more teachers and students in SRI’s Mission and Guiding Principles. Participants will need a web-enabled device (desktop or laptop with camera preferred) to use during these sessions.
More Information and Registration
Summer Virtual Meeting
August 5-7, 2020
Keeping it Fierce: Affirming our Commitment to Equity and Excellence
August 5, 2020 – Opening and Keynote 10-11:30am EST
August 6-7, 2020 – Virtual Reflective Learning Groups 8am-1pm (with breaks)
We invite you to join us virtually August 5-7 for an educational conference like no other — SRI Summer Virtual Meeting 2020 — a conference where educators create a community of learners who share their professional practice and learn from its close, public examination. Join the virtual Summer Meeting to practice the skills, habits, and dispositions of professional collaboration and reflective discourse using SRI protocols and resources.
Highlights of Summer Virtual Meeting 2020
- Reflective learning groups — the centerpiece of SRI Summer Virtual Meeting is what distinguishes our 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 leading, teaching, and learning; and
- A Keynote Speaker, who will charge us in our work to push for equity in our schools and our practices.
Reflective learning groups will be East (CST and EST) or West (PST and MST) with their schedules running 8am-1pm Pacific (West groups) or 8am-1pm Central (East groups) August 6-7. Breaks are included!
More Information and Registration
Summer Meeting Facilitators Needed
At the center of our virtual conference are reflective learning groups, the experience that sets SRI Summer Meeting apart from other virtual educational experiences.
Please consider applying to co-facilitate a reflective learning group. And, if you know someone who would be a terrific Virtual Summer Meeting facilitator and you’d love to co-facilitate with them, please reach out and ask them to apply!
Summer Meeting registration fee will include additional professional development for co-facilitators. Co-facilitator duties will require you to be fully present online from 8am-1pm Thursday, Aug. 6 and Friday Aug. 7.
Please request more information or direct questions and concerns to Deirdre Williams deirdre@schoolreforminitiative.org.
Apply now through the SRI Site
Virtual Connections
School Reform Initiative is still facilitating “Virtual Connections” for our community on Wednesdays. We love connections as a protocol because all we have to do is prepare ourselves to lean in to each other, there’s nothing to prepare and no other expectations. The rules are simple – speak if you want to speak, don’t speak if you don’t want to speak, and speak only once until everyone has had an opportunity to speak. We’re hoping that if everyone connects for 20 minutes sharing whatever is on their mind that we’ll be able to provide a virtual community because we are not alone in our efforts to balance supporting our students, creating virtual learning for potentially the first time, homeschooling our own children, feeling isolated or anxious, and so many other realities. Remember, there is power in community. We are stronger together and while we may not be able to be in social gatherings for a while. Join SRI for “Virtual Connections” Wednesdays at 10am Central.
#10forSRI
Our goal for 2020 is to help educators remember why they became educators, and to do whatever we can to not only help them to ‘feel’ supported, but to actually ‘be’ supported, and work together to create the schools our students deserve. I hope you will join me and continue to support SRI!
SRI is fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence, and we cannot do this work without your support!
Thank you for your commitment to students, families and communities!
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 and Chris Jones
On behalf of School Reform Initiative
