June 2024

Our collective power expands when we support each other to foster the unlimited potential of each and every student.

Join Me at the Fall Meeting! – Eve Rifkin

The Fall Meeting originated with our colleagues at SRI as an annual gathering of learning with the entire community. We are pleased to bring this event back to give educators the opportunity to share and learn from colleagues all over the world.

Our Fall Meeting has always been a place for me to connect with educators from around the country who are grappling with some of the challenges that I am facing. It is a place of camaraderie and growth. It is where I feel simultaneously at home and on a new adventure. It is also where I have experienced the most elevated sense of myself as a true professional.

I am most looking forward to engaging in intellectually rigorous conversations about teaching, learning and leadership, and connecting with colleagues from a wide range of educational settings. 

Fall Meeting has always given me a renewed sense of why the work I do matters. I always leave with new ideas to try out right away and with new friends to carry into the future.

I am so looking forward to seeing you there for the first time or 20th time. 

Join our international gathering that is not just another sit-and-get conference. We learn from each other by giving and receiving feedback and sharing important dilemmas. We each bring and share our own expertise and passion to create more equitable outcomes for each and every student.

Listen to Learn, Mentor, and Disrupt Quick Fixes! 

We are excited to share learning and resources from our innovative USDOE SEED grant-funded program, Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP), currently underway in Massachusetts.

CLEE is supporting early career principals to enact MA DESE’s Anti-racist Leadership Competencies while concurrently supporting experienced leaders to serve as mentors in our 12 partner districts.

Mentorship is a dynamic experience. We often listen to colleagues seeking problems to solve. We are leaders. We want to fix things and move on to the next dilemma. However, mentoring a colleague allows us to listen with a different intention – to probe for meaning and implications and learn alongside our mentees. The real learning happens when we slow down, listen, and push to understand the root of the dilemma presented by the mentee. The mentee discovers the answers are within themselves and we as mentors deepen our impact.

This learning was particularly evident during a recent Network Meeting group debrief in our USDOE SEED grant-funded program, Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP), currently underway in Massachusetts. This network meeting includes both mentors and mentees who shared their insights through their respective roles. In the debrief,  I heard participants articulate that mentor meetings offer a unique space for mentors to listen differently.

When mentors are at their best they recognize that dilemmas are not challenges to solve for their mentee but rather opportunities to nurture and build the mentee’s capacity to generate their own solutions and ideas. As mentors, our role is to provide perspective, inquiry, and support – not answers. You can learn as much as the colleague you are mentoring through listening. Listening is a disruptive experience in a system that prioritizes quick fixes over meaningful learning. 

CLEE Welcomes Two new Board Members From the SRI Community!

Eve Rifkin

Eve’s professional interests include faculty development, professional learning communities, and curricular design. Eve is a Senior Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development where she currently serves as the Director of the Leadership and Learning in Organization’s EdD program. Prior to her work at Vanderbilt, Eve co-founded and co-directed a public charter high school in Tucson, AZ, where she lives with her wife and daughter. Eve has her BA from University of Maryland; MEd from Northern AZ University; and EdD From Vanderbilt University.

Teri Schrader

Teri Schrader is Head of School at Watkinson School in Hartford, CT. Prior to her appointment in July, 2014, she served as Head of Upper School at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For fourteen years,she was Head of School at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School and the Theodore R. Sizer Teachers Center in Devens, Massachusetts, as part of the team of educators who designed and implemented the school’s program. Ms. Schrader is a Founding Board member and past Board President of the School Reform Initiative, a non-profit organization fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence. As Consultant to Schools, Ms. Schrader works with schools to develop and facilitate meaningful and sustainable plans for building effective leadership teams and supporting adult cultures of collaboration on behalf of student learning and institutional change.

CLEE Facilitative Leadership Institute (Virtual)

Grow Your Skills as an Equity Leader

All of us have the ability to lead adult collaboration to advance equity, regardless of our position in our organization or school. The Facilitative Leadership Institute builds your capacity to be a leader for equity. Facilitative Leadership provides leaders and educators a place to share best practice, engage using collaborative tools that strengthen leadership skills, and challenge thinking to discover ways that ultimately increase equity in our school communities.

You may recognize this as professional development for Reflective Learning Communities, Teacher Leader Training, Critical Friendship, Foundations in Facilitative Leadership, PLC Coach/Facilitator Training. 

Dates: 8/7, 8/8, 9/27, 10/25, 11/15, 2024; 1/24, 2/28, 3/14, 2025

All Sessions are 12-3pm EST

Worried About Funding Cuts? Get FREE Professional Learning in Your District!

Join with CLEE to Win a USDOE Educational Innovation and Research Grant

Are you looking to increase high and equitable ELA and math learning outcomes, school leader retention, social emotional learning, and/or attendance in your schools? 

We are seeking schools and districts in the Northeast US to partner with on a USDOE grant that would bring professional learning at no cost to your school(s) to reach these important outcomes. The support will include Individualized Coaching, High Engagement Learning Sessions, Anytime Learning and Resources, and Data Monitoring for Impact. 

Benefits: 

• Increase learning, student engagement and attendance

• Achieve school wide goals

• Activate stakeholder engagement 

• Retain leaders and teachers

• Increase district and school coherence 

Attract, Hire, and Keep the Best Team!

Do you need to hire? In an ideal world, an amazing candidate shows up at the perfect time with the best qualifications, an equity mindset, and with a background that can connect with each and every student in your district. In reality, hiring takes time and thoughtful systems and practices to create and continuously attract and retain effective adults to support students. 

CLEE can help you improve your system for hiring, retention and professional culture by using research-based strategies that will identify diverse, skilled candidates. If you don’t have district hiring goals, we can help to create them! CLEE can support creating and enacting your hiring goals and reducing bias in selection through Continuous Improvement. You will be supported at each step to gather data, identify needs, implement changes and evaluate impact to build and enact your hiring plans. Hiring is an opportunity to create a sustainable system that allows students to meet their potential through skilled and talented adults.

Summer Staff Retreats can Set You Up for a Successful Year

A summer administrative retreat can serve as an important bridge between school years to celebrate success, learn from challenges, and set direction for the future. CLEE can partner with you to plan and facilitate a team retreat that will charge your team up, bring them together with an aligned purpose, and all while having fun together!

CLEE’s skilled facilitators will work with you to design an agenda that meets your needs. Whether it be to learn from texts, analyze data, obtain feedback from the team on new policies or plans, or work together to solve pressing needs, CLEE has the tools and skills to create a successful retreat. We will ensure the retreat is designed to allow colleagues to know and trust each other. When you know the beliefs and values you each bring to your work, you can be vulnerable and collaborate for the same goals focused on students.

Each month, CLEE offers a question or two to help you reflect on what you are experiencing. Thinking about the importance of questioning and what your answers mean is one more step in your growth as a leader for equity.

Join CLEE on social media to follow the monthly questions and share your answers.

What have you gained from your colleagues in your professional practice? What have you passed on to colleagues?

Resource Books!

The Resource Book is a selection of protocols curated into a spiral-bound book and organized into sections, ideal for both new and experienced practitioners who want easy access to our most popular tools.