Winter Meeting - Educational Equity, Facilitative Leadership and Critical Friends Groups

The School Reform Initiative Winter Meeting 2010

Please join us in January 2010 as we come together to do essential, sustained, focused work - with the goal of transforming our thinking and our practice so the schools we are affiliated with reflect our goal of educational equity. We will move from conversation to action, with the people whose wisdom, perspective and skill we need most. We will use the tools and processes of critical friendship to deepen our skills, press for insights, and find courage in community.

Our time together will be divided in the following ways:

January 13
Pre-conference sessions: Introduction to Critical Friendship, Moving CFGs On Line, School Change: A Seminar for Administrators.

January 14-16

Keynote Address by Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she has launched the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the School Redesign Network and has served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. In addition, Dr. Darling-Hammond recently served as the leader of President Barack Obama’s education policy transition team, and she has a new book due out in January 2010, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. She is also the founder of the Stanford New Schools (East Palo Alto K-8 Academy and East Palo Alto High School), where Christelle Estrada, an SRI national facilitator, is the Chief Academic Officer.

Small CFG-like Groups: In small groups of five or six people, we will examine student and educator work, give feedback on dilemmas and issues, ask challenging questions, and gather multiple perspectives. These small groups will allow each participant to share work, get feedback, facilitate, coach, and share responsibility for the group and its learning. Each participant will be asked to bring work for feedback.

Text-based Groups: Participants will select a text from a collection of resources gathered from the field. Groups will be formed based on the text preference of participants, and the protocol/process used will be determined by facilitators of each text group.

Open Space Technology (OST): OST on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning will provide a different kind of opportunity to develop collective knowledge and to think deeply about a specific challenge, new idea, essential question, or local work. Some sessions will be set up prior to the meeting via the SRI Ning (join at http://sriinc.ning.com/)
World Café: We will close the meeting with a World Café designed to move us from learning and reflection, to action on behalf of educational equity for our students.

Social Time: Are you looking forward to seeing people you haven’t seen in a long time, and to meet new people from across the country? On Thursday night, there will be informal opportunities to meet and talk with people from our region, as well as from across the country – and on Friday night, a reception and dancing!

The 2010 Winter Meeting will be your opportunity to connect with Linda Darling-Hammond and many other educators from across the country. Please join Linda and all your colleagues in Cambridge, MA, January 14-16, 2010.

More information on the Winter Meeting program, pre-conferences, and registration can be found at www.schoolreforminitiative.org/wintermeeting

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