(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Structural support for elementary school teachers | A prescription for failing, and feeling broke [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-16 Teacherken’s diary, Failing, and feeling broken, yesterday broke my heart. I see the dysfunction in the classroom as being structural and not personal. But, I know from experience everyone takes takes failing personally. It is only human to care so deeply about ones performance. So, when the stage and audience is not ready to receive the lessons being given it is devastating. The day before I was in a Empathy Circle and by random chance I spoke out on the very process or lesson that needs to be given to all the children of the world. Out of all that could be taught this should be the bedrock of education. Jump the fold for a short video of me making my prescription. A text version will be provided for those unable to view the video. This is an Open Thread / Coffee Hour and all topics of conversation are welcome. What is for dinner? How are you doing? What is on your mind. If you are new to Street Prophets please introduce yourself below in a comment. Today's Coffee Hour is brought to you by Empathy in Schools. The comments for this article are are after community links and its sub thread. Please limit community links to one per user because we want to encourage greater diversity of submissions of community links from different users. In the case of a needed fundraiser, either the member in need will write a separate diary or someone will do it on their behalf. That diary is then linked to in the community links comments. I’m going to start out by presenting a edited text version of the first 3 and a half minutes of the empathy circle I attended a day before teacherken’s posting. And following the video embed I’m going to explain the content a bit. (I edited the transcript a bit. I removed all the “uh” text and cleaned up the flow a bit to make it more readable.) Santa Barbara Retreat Center Visioning Empathy Cafe — October 14, 2023 0:24 Edwin Rutsch Speaking: I'm going to get us started. We are recording this call for educational promotional purposes. Let's see. Let me get my script here. OK. So I want to welcome everyone to our visioning Empathy Cafe. I'm Edwin Rutsch. I'm director of the new Empathy Center in Santa Barbara and you can see it behind me. This is a weekly empathy Cafe that we do. One, is to raise the level of empathy in society and that's in ourselves and in society. Two, is to learn about the empathy Center in Santa Barbara which we're just setting up right working at developing right now and to uh learn and practice the empathy Circle practice. Which I find is one of the best first step Gateway empathy building processes. And also by taking part in in this Empathy Cafe and and the Empathy Circles. If you take part in two of these you're able to enroll in our Empathy Circle facilitator classes. You can take our 4-week online training or our two-day training in person. So we're going to just start off with, you know, short introductions. If you like to share your name your location and why you're interested in being here. We'll just start with that. As I mentioned I'm Edwin Rutsch uh been working for 15 years on on raising the level of empathy in society doing all kinds of different project projects. And my brother purchased this property you know in Santa Barbara which is behind me. He asked me to manage it and we're setting up an empathy Center there so I'm just trying to connect with the community to kind of hear your ideas and to connect with people all over the world and in Santa Barbara so Bill you want to start. 2:21 Bill Filler speaking: My name is Bill filler I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area I'm a retired special education teacher and I've working with Edwin for about six years doing the online training and also going to demonstrations to try to get people on the left and the right to talk and more importantly listen to each other thanks. Edwin: And Jonathan. 2:40 Jonathan Gordon Speaking: Well hello everyone I live in the San Francisco Bay area and I've been studying to become a facilitator now for over a year and I've become convinced that the Empathy Circle process should be part of every child in the world's education. Edwin: Thanks … Tina thank you 3:16 Tina Jones Speaking: My name is Tina Jones I'm from Delaware I'm a trained mediator facilitator. I'm here to learn about empathy circles because we definitely need more empathy in our world. So I thought I'd start here. I've been following you on LinkedIn you have great posts. So I'm happy to be here thank you. YouTube Video: Santa Barbara Retreat Center Visioning Empathy Cafe I first met Edwin about 14 years ago when I was elected President of our local Democratic club. And just from the short encounter I had with him I applied his nascent idea of meeting in a circle and letting everyone speak to my club meetings. I did a series of Daily Kos diaries on my struggle with grassroots organizing at these links: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6. And two additional diaries I did on Empathy Circles before I started this series: links #1 & #2. These Daily Kos diaries will give the reader a good introduction to Empathy Circle practice. In Edwin’s introduction, above, he greets the guests and states the purpose of the gathering. This being an open cafe the suggested topic was the Santa Barbara center and what ever is on your mind. The Santa Barbara Empathy Center Educational Retreat It is the wisdom I learned from Bill Filler, who is introduced at 2:21 in the video, that I want to share with everyone and teacherken: People want to be heard and understood! Bill is the lead instructor for our online facilitator training classes. I have been his student for over a year. He also, with other volunteers, designing and conducting the in person training being given at the Empathy Center in Santa Barbara. People want to be heard and understood! Clearly, to me, the post modern world of disinformation, 24/7 online distraction, COVID stay at homes, and the social separations demanded by feral religions and fascism have created circumstances that have stunted the social emotional growth of our children. As a special education teacher, Bill Filler, shared stories from his work about troubled children that blossomed after he genuinely listened to them. So much so that it became a core component in his practice. Bill explained that it was through listening that he could identify how to help them over time. But he also emphasized that it was his and his staff’s initial genuine listening that jump started the learning and growth in his students. While reading teacherken’s diary and the comments over I wanted to yell out to everyone and especially Ken that it is the system and circumstances beyond Ken’s control that caused the dysfunction. And I wish the system would have let Ken discard the course goals and just worked on teaching social emotional lessons. And that is where Empathy Circle practice comes in. Imagine Ken’s class as bunch of kids that all want to be heard. And imagine that some of the kids have, out of self protection, retreated into themselves or the world of the internet distraction. Imagine that a few may be hungry or abused by their home circumstances. It is social emotional learning that addresses this issue. Followed by a compassionate addressing of the physical issues. Now imagine you are a teacher and assigned this class with a deadline to teach to a test. You walk in and have to start teaching. This is almost 100% you speaking. With most all the kids not understanding and wishing they were somewhere else. This is why so many teachers that commented on Ken’s diary reported they were leaving teaching or considering giving notice. A solution might be from the first day of elementary school the introduction of reflective listening. And the teacher teaches it by example. The teacher simply asks the child to speak. And then reflects what the child said and asks them if they feel like they were heard. The next step is teach taking turns speaking. This could be as simple as the instructor saying each day that they would start out day by asking one or two students what they learned yesterday or what ever is on their mind. The teacher would keep track of each kid and make sure over time each one gets a chance to speak. The teacher lets the child speak and then reflects back what the child said. And the teacher leaves the door open for the child to express themselves again until they feel heard and understood. And the teacher can use this time to train the other children to be respectful in the class room and pay attention to the person speaking. If a child disrupts make them speaker. Teaching reflective listening by example is the key and a structured approach such as I described could be given 10 minutes at the start of class. But if the teacher “gets it” they will use reflective listening all through the day. Bill Filler told one of the most satisfying things he has ever witnessed is students doing reflective listening among themselves. So, back to the video at 2:40. I introduce myself and say the following, “Well hello everyone I live in the San Francisco Bay area and I've been studying to become a Facilitator now for over a year and I've become convinced that the Empathy Circle process should be part of every child in the world's education.” If you visit the Empathy Circle Schedule you will see a number of Empathy Cafes listed. These are open to anyone to visit. In fact the last highlighted participant at 3:16 on the video, Tina Jones, was a first time visitor. Regards, Jonathan Gordon (linkage on Daily Kos) [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/16/2199694/-Structural-support-for-elementary-school-teachers-A-prescription-for-failing-and-feeling-broke?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/