Elementary Division Meetings

This week we held two elementary division meetings; one to begin thinking about some common themes of our work together this year, and the other to train faculty on a specific curriculum initiative.

On Tuesday we met from 9-11, beginning (after reviewing our ground rules) with an activity I based on one in Daniel Goleman's terrific book Working with Emotional Intelligence. The teachers were divided into two teams, and each given a ball to try to throw into a bucket, with increasing amounts of points being scored based on how far away a person was when s/he threw it in. After three rounds of playing this game, we had an excellent discussion about the idea of calculated and managed risk, with a wide range of perspectives voiced (from the new teacher who stood close to ensure getting one point each time, to a returning teacher who didn't feel there was much risk if he missed from far away, to the teacher who choose how much to risk based on the scores at the moment, and on and on). From here I directed the conversation towards thinking about how we manage risk in our teaching practices, and then on to the question of how students might feel risk (and thus respond) in a classroom setting. What surfaced was an understanding that we can't project our assumptions about the nature of a task or setting onto the children; we have to stay open, observant, and investigative of the signs they give us about how they are feeling.

From here, I turned the conversation to the topic of Gifts and Challenges, a long-running concept at TBS (which was brought to us by Judy Donovan at Sunrise Montessori in Sonoma), because of the 24 faculty in the division, only 4 were here the last time we did this training ten years ago. Gifts and Challenges is rooted in the sometime conflicting ideas of a) honoring and valuing each individual for his/her authentic self, and b) the developmental norm for children to compare themselves to their peers. In G+C, teachers and students investigate what comes easily to them, and what comes hard, in a range of domains, from academic to social to behavioral. By reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses, children begin to develop meta-cognition about their own learning, and find ways to both use and practice their strengths, and also work on their challenges to turn them into talents. This process also helps build community in the classroom. I showed a film about Gifts and Challenges made at TBS about 7 years ago, and then Shannon Collins walked the faculty through the series of lessons she implemented in the curriculum, including how it sits within the concept of "Me and We". This led to a generative discussion about what each classroom can do, or already does, to get at the concept of Gifts and Challenges, and the commitment to initiate a curriculum and conversation in all classroom during the first six weeks of school.

The meeting then moved through a series of discussions about the roles of various people in the division, including the arrangement of Stephen, Renee and Kate in the learning support office; Sima as the Math Curriculum Support and Community Engagement Coordinator; Kate as the Social/Emotional Learning Coordinator; and Kyla as Extended Day Director.

On Wednesday, the division re-convened for a one hour training on the Zones of Regulation curriculum, led by Kate Klaire. Kate began by introducing the conceptual framework for our social/emotional work that she and I developed this summer; then she explained the approach of the Zones of Regulation curriculum (implemented with tremendous success in the K/1 classrooms last year), which color-codes emotions as blue (sad, slow, tired, etc), green (happy, glad, present, etc), yellow (excited, confused, nervous, etc), and red (angry, out of control, desperate, etc), thereby using the visual-spatial modality to get the tricky realm of intra-personal intelligence. Kate then led the faculty in the first of two lessons that they could use (or adapt) to introduce the Zones concept in their classrooms.