Dear SEMIS Coalition members,
Welcome to the start of another new school year! We’ve been hearing so much from our teachers and community partners over the past few weeks about your plans for the upcoming year and we are so excited for all of the place-based learning that’s on the horizon for students and educators alike. As we begin our launch into this next year of learning and deepening community connections, I’d like to take some time to share the many ways the SEMIS Coalition works collaboratively across our network to support education transformation – and how you can be a part!
One of the primary ways the SEMIS Coalition supports teachers and community partners to launch, build, and take action on their place-based learning experiences is through our Annual Learning Series. This series, which officially kicked off at our Summer Institute in July, is a set of six professional learning events that provide space for skill sharing, resource exploration, curriculum planning, and collaboration between classrooms, schools, districts, and communities. This month, our learning series will continue with our Dinner & Design event on September 26th, where educators, administrators, and community partners will connect to share ideas and collaboratively plan their upcoming place-based learning experiences. On October 11th, the SEMIS Coalition will hold a Fall Professional Development Day in Detroit, where we will take a deeper dive into some of the tools, resources, and partnerships that can strengthen place-based learning, align experiences with standards, and connect to community issues and opportunities for action. The SEMIS Coalition will hold a Winter Professional Development Day on January 30th and then will close out its Annual Learning Series with the Community Forum on May 19th and a teacher celebration in early June. Teachers and administrators that are able to commit to being an active member and participating in the entire Annual Learning Series also have access to additional support resources, including ongoing coaching support from the SEMIS Coalition coaching team and the opportunity to apply for a Partnership Grant to support their work. If you’re interested in learning more about membership in this year’s Annual Learning Series, please reach out to Lisa Voelker at lvoelker@emich.edu.
Being a member of the Annual Learning Series is not the only way to participate in the SEMIS Coalition, though. If you are an educator and are curious about our professional learning events, but not ready to commit to a full year, you are welcome to join a day of our learning series as an exploratory member. If you are a community organization that would like to get more involved in place-based learning projects in your community, you are also welcome to join some of our professional learning events, or reach out to us to explore where there may be strong connections between your work and a classroom’s place-based project. And if you are a part of the SEMIS Coalition network in any way, you are always welcome to join our Coalition-wide events like our Indigenous Ways of Knowing series this fall and the Community Forum in May!
As a strengths-based Coalition, we also always welcome new ideas for resources, events, community connections, funding sources, or anything else that can grow the impact of our work. We will continue to share ways for our network to share with and learn from each other in these newsletters, but we look forward to hearing from and connecting with you in this next year as well. We hope you’ll reach out to us anytime!
In partnership,
Anna Balzer
Director, SEMIS Coalition | abalzer1@emich.edu
