Our Realm of Influence

So many thanks to all of you for your trust, honesty, faith and time as we traveled down this CFG journey this year.  If you couldn't join us today, we did some reflecting on what kept us coming to the CFG this year.  What surprised us?  What did we value?

Here are some notes on what was meaningful to us about the CFG:

-getting a glimpse into each others' classrooms and practice
-being inspired by colleagues' perspectives on the work they're doing
-walking away feeling energized and fulfilled instead of drained or frustrated
-hearing your own teaching frustrations mirrored in someone else's story, then hearing ideas and suggestions in their context that could be applied to your own
-a sense of honor and relationship

What would you add to this list?  I'd love to hear from you about what you valued, what you craved more of, what you would like to see explored or questioned. I'll continue to compile this feedback as we look forward to next year.

We also tried out The Orchard Cove Protocol to look forward to next year.  What work seems imperative to Lower School?  What next steps do you think are important for us to embark on together as a learning community? What support will we need?  What support can we provide each other?

In the spirit of that last question, what support we can provide one another, a model called the Realms of Concern and Influence came up.  I offer it to you here as a tool for your own reflection, a journal prompt, or an activity with your team.  Listing our concerns comes easily. What happens when we really look at what is within our immediate influence?  What small changes can we make to our own time, collaborations and practice that can widen our realm of influence and ease our realms of concern?

Thank you again, friends, for your willingness to share this year together.  I can't wait to see what the next school year holds in store for us.

Inspired

Hello, friends!
I feel certain each of you found, as I did, something to inspire you in our meetings with Ashley Cadwell this week.  I sat near Paula a few times in the 3:30 meetings and each time she mentioned to me the pleasure of sitting around a table together to talk about what really matters.  I agree and feel grateful for all of you, who have made a commitment to sitting down for those conversations that matter on a regular basis.

I wanted to share an article that has inspired me lately about teacher research.  I'd encountered it before but it was reintroduced to me at a workshop at Opal School last week. This excerpt resonated with me when I reread the article after our work regarding the new building:
This is why true innovations are so difficult to accept and appreciate.  They "shake up" our frames of reference because they force us to look at the world with new eyes.  They open us up to what is different and unexpected.  We tend to accept the status quo, that which we know and have already tried out...even when it does not satisfy us, even when it makes us feel stressed, confused or hopeless.
I love the way the rest of this article frames our hope and inspiration in the children themselves and their innate desire to search for and research meaning.

Opal teacher Kerry Salazar shared some of her own guiding teacher research questions in a presentation on 12/6 that I thought might inspire some of you.  I'd like to offer them as questions that could guide some reflective writing over winter break:
What do I believe about children?
What assumptions do I carry?
How do these beliefs or assumptions show up in my daily teaching?
Does my practice/classroom reflect my beliefs?
What are my questions?

May the break be restorative to all of you, full of inspiration, reflection and renewal.

PS  I also have in my notes from the Suzy Cessor workshop a reminder to give you the link to the Five Whys Protocol she referenced when she introduced the Design Thinking process.  It's a simple, useful protocol, good for shorter time frames like team meetings. Here it is!

Looking Forward and Looking Back

Our next meeting is coming up on Thursday, October 18th from 3:30-5:30 (a half hour earlier than our last meeting) in the MHCR.  I'm so looking forward to spending more time with all of you!

Please contact me this weekend or Monday if you'd like to present a teaching  dilemma, planning inquiry, or student work you have questions about.  I'm happy to meet with you this week to answer your questions about this experience and to select a protocol that would help you elicit the kind of feedback you seek.  Bringing work to the group through a protocol can really help bring clarity to an issue and often uses the wisdom of the group to delve deeper than you can do in isolation.  It is also a gift to the group, this glimpse into your classroom life and your professional questions.  We always feel grateful to presenters, as we learn about our own teaching through the lens of another's inquiry. 

Before we meet together again, I wanted to refresh our memories of our last meeting.  We began by reading and discussing Marge Piercy's The Seven of Pentacles.  

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

We revisited our hopes for our collaborative community from our August meeting.  On this day, hopes that resonated particularly strongly were:

• Listening to each other
• Recognizing new possibilities
• Inspiration from learning about each others' work 
• Connections to each others' classrooms and work

In two small groups, we discussed the Circles of Trust Touchstones through these questions:

What do you need to 'tend properly' your professional garden?

Have you been part of a community that helped you 'weave real connections?'

What made it work?

What tools and agreements will help us see the burrows and lairs beneath the thicket and bramble wilderness of our work? 

Our consensus was in support of using the Circles of Trust Touchstones to guide our work together.

• Extend and receive welcome
• Be present as fully as possible
• What is offered in the circle is by invitation, not demand
• Speak your truth in ways that respect other people's truth
• No fixing, no saving, no advising, and no setting each other straight.
   (Most of our questions involved this line, with an agreement that part of being fully present is to keep your mind from always leaping to the next step or thinking of your response, but to truly listen.  We also discussed saying what you need.  We agree to ask each other, is this the kind of feedback you want?  We agree to try to tell each other what kind of feedback we'd find helpful.)
• Learn to respond to others with honest, open questions instead of counsel or corrections.
• When the going gets rough, turn to wonder.
• Attend to your own inner teacher.
• Trust and learn from the silence.
• Observe deep confidentiality.
• Know that it is possible to leave the circle with whatever it was that you needed when you arrived. 

We also discussed our commitment to the group and agreed to take responsibility for checking in if we miss a meeting and to do the best we can to attend CFG whenever possible.  We also know that 'life happens' and agreed to be flexible, honoring the difficult time choices we all must make.

We concluded by spending our last hour in the Walk and Talk Protocol and a final reflection.

Please bring materials for writing and reflection to the next meeting.  See you Thursday!

Kirstin

Questions as Gifts

At our August 29th gathering the question was asked what it means to ask questions that serve the listener as opposed to the person posing the question.  I'm excited to explore together what it means to offer questions as a gift to the presenter in CFG work. I gave the explanation that these kinds of questions are posed to help move the presenter forward in his or her work instead of to satisfy the curiosity of the questioner, but realized on further thought that this explanation lacked an essential component of this kind of questioning: the belief that wisdom and solutions lie within the teacher asking the questions as opposed to some external source.

For inspiration I revisited  Parker Palmer's Circle of Trust descriptions and came upon this passage I found helpful:

• Asking honest, open questions to “hear each other into speech”: Instead of advising each other, we learn to listen deeply and ask questions that help others hear their own inner wisdom more clearly. As we learn to ask questions that are not advice in disguise, that have no other purpose than to help someone listen to the inner teacher, all of us learn and grow.

As we embark on asking one another questions about our classroom environments, I invite us to play with these ideas about asking questions.  What challenges does this aim in questioning pose?  How does holding these ideas in hand change the kinds of questions we ask? Have you experienced someone in your life who asks you questions that help you find your inner wisdom?

If a colleague asks you such a question in the next few weeks that you find yourself working on and growing from long after it's been asked, please consider sharing its story with us at our next meeting.

A Poem for Summer

From time to time I'll post poetry or questions here.  Use them as journal prompts if you like, or just a chance to reflect for a few minutes on what they mean to you.


The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

-Wallace Stevens-

What does this season, a time for us all to go in our own directions, do for you as a person?  As a teacher? What views can you see from your exact rock? What can you recognize with time to gaze down at the sea? What will you keep with you even in times when your book is turned in the dust of your table?