Greetings 2018 Fall Meeting Participants!

If you are attending the Fall Meeting in San Antonio, please read the information below, and start thinking about the piece of work you will bring to your collaborative learning group.

Collaborative Learning Groups at Fall Meeting:  What Should I Bring?

Collaborative learning groups reside at the heart of SRI Fall Meeting, and our learning in these groups is what sets SRI Fall Meeting apart from other educational conferences.  We’ll spend most of our time in San Antonio (10+ hours) in these small groups, co-facilitated by SRI affiliates. Every Fall Meeting registrant will be assigned to a collaborative learning group, which will include participants from across the country and from all areas of education.  

In collaborative learning groups, we’ll co-create brave and safe spaces to:

  • use SRI tools and resources (i.e., protocols) that support adult learning, collaboration, and reflective discourse through the lens of equity;

So that we can:

  • learn more about our own practice and invite feedback by taking a close, public look at the work we and our students produce;

In order to:

  • build our capacity to access, engage, and sustain complex and challenging conversations about equity, identity, and implicit bias that lead to action.

We’re asking you to consider bringing an “artifact” from your practice that you may present in your collaborative learning group.  This artifact should represent an issue of equity or inequity.   

If you’re thinking about bringing an artifact from your practice to Fall Meeting, it should be real and important to you – something you wonder about, not something you’ve already figured out.  The artifact, issue, or question you bring should not be a showpiece effort.  We will learn more about our own practice from something that represents a significant challenge or on-going issue in your practice.  In thinking about what to bring to Fall Meeting, we suggest asking yourself these, or similar, questions:

  1. How does this artifact, issue, or question represent an issue of equity (or inequity), in terms of race, class, and/or culture?
  2. What beliefs, assumptions, and biases might I be holding about my practice, or students and their learning?
  3. In what ways does my practice support every student?  Where might I be getting in the way of student success? What — or who — am I missing?

Examples may include:

  • a question about your practice
  • an assignment or assessment you created and want to refine to provide access for every student
  • a piece of student-produced work that confuses you (or from a student that eludes you);
  • a dilemma in your practice that centers on equity and you’re trying to manage it;
  • an issue that’s not yet fully formed, but you have a hunch it’s going to be significant;
  • student data that you don’t quite understand or you wonder what to do next;
  • a letter to parents or colleagues you’d like others to see before sending;
  • a strategic plan you’ve designed and you wonder how it supports all students;
  • a section of curriculum or lesson plan that you’d like to revise to be relevant to your students’ experiences.

If the artifact you want to share is a document, please bring 10 copies with you.  While SRI will have a Cyber Cafe where you can access the internet and print small jobs in a pinch, copy services won’t available at the conference hotel.

As we continue to plan for collaborative learning groups, please know that your presence and artifact will make important contributions to our learning in San Antonio.  Please feel free to reach out to Beth Graham (beth@schoolreforminitiative.org), SRI’s professional development specialist, who welcomes your questions and concerns.