How can we create meaningful relationships with all learners as a foundation for innovation and design?
As a lifelong learner, I have had some incredible opportunities to participate in amazing professional development around the topic of building relationships. I have pulled highlights from each of these recent experiences and put them into practice to start the school year this year.
We started with welcoming all of our faculty members back on the first day of local pre-service with a completely different approach and format. I brought in the work of Ali Hearn, who introduced me to a new way of thinking about Circles that really helps bring people together. The circle format naturally encourages all voices to be heard, active listening to take place, and time and space for thoughtful reflection and connection with colleagues. As a compassionate learning community, we want to be sure we are ‘doing with’ as opposed to ‘doing to’ or ‘doing for’ when it comes to decision-making and supporting one-another. We began the session in a large whole group circle, sitting in chairs, and introduced ourselves so we knew who was in the room. We then brought in some of Howard Moody’s Play Leadership activities to help everyone transition from summer mode to school mode and set the tone for a playful, interactive session together. We then had the adults create small circles with no more than 5 people and they had to be with people they don’t typically get a chance to interact with – the whole purpose of the day was to see our full PreK-8 community and get to know a small group of people intimately by the end of the day. We provided reflective questions, prompts for discussion, opportunities for group brainstorming of solutions to systemwide needs, and played a lot more games together throughout the day. We co-created posters to define The Power of Play, What Makes a Great Colleague, and what do we want the Culture of our School Community to look like, feel like, and sound like. It was such a powerful way for us to start the year together and build a strong foundation for building and maintaining relationships where there is a sense of trust, connection/belonging, and collaboration. Throughout the year we will continue to thread this work of building authentic relationships as we dig deeper into establishing our direction, alignment, and commitment within our learning community. The following graphic summarizes these focus areas and is a helpful reminder of what we need to keep coming back to time and time again. Everything we did together as adults, we can easily bring into the classroom as we start to build our classroom learning communities.
Relationships by Alison Celmer