Strand One: Examining Beliefs and Practices
SRI believes that ensuring that each child is successful requires racial identity work-exploring the role that race has played in shaping our own and our students’ lives. Sessions in this strand focus on issues related to student agency, identity, bias, power, and privilege within schools and classrooms. Participants will be challenged to confront assumptions and deficit thinking around teaching racially diverse students. Sessions will also build an awareness or equity consciousness among participants as an initial step to understanding how adult identity impacts practice, which ultimately impacts student outcomes.
Strand Two: Developing Cultural Competence
As our schools become more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse it is imperative that educators have the knowledge and skills to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than their own. Teaching and leading with cultural competence requires that educators develop along a learning continuum in three dimensions. They must have a level of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to adapt practices to meet the needs of culturally diverse students. Educators must understand culture and how it shapes individual behavior. They must also have the capacity to use cultural knowledge and self-awareness to effectively communicate with their students. Sessions will provide participants with tools to increase their capacity to communicate in culturally diverse schools and classrooms in either of these dimensions.
Strand Three: Nurturing Relationships
Nurturing relationships with racially diverse students is an essential element in improving the academic success of students and the cultural competence of teachers. Presentations will encourage participants to reflect on the practices they may currently implement in their schools that alienates some students. Sessions will also give participants concrete tools for nurturing relationships with students that may include skills for developing: a resiliency mindset, empathy, or social and emotional intelligence.
Strand Four: Collaborating in Reflective Learning Communities
It is SRI’s position that better action happens in schools characterized by collaborative, reflective practice. Collaborative, reflective practice happens when educators regularly give and receive thoughtful feedback and focus persistently on teaching and learning. These practices build educators’ capacity to embrace difference, identify and question commonly shared ideas, take up different points of view, speak their own truths, and manage the anxiety of not knowing. Sessions in this strand focus on the use of evidence-based strategies for creating and promoting reflective learning experiences for leaders and teachers to foster success for all students.
Strand Five: Sharing Accountability for Learning
Shared accountability for learning happens in schools when educators have the courage and skill to resist the easy answer and superficial solution, engage in racial identity work, and embrace the challenge of digging deeply into the uncomfortable, persistent, inequitable conditions and relationships that exist in too many schools. Sessions will focus on tools and processes for changing discourse and mindsets in schools to put the accountability on the adults to learn new ways of practice to meet the needs of students who are not being served well.