From time to time IPC offers workshops on Teaching From Your Heart: Connecting with Children Through Compassion. These workshops are appropriate for teachers, school counselors, and anyone who works in a school.
During these workshops, we learn how to:
- Listen to the feelings and needs of our students and colleagues as well as our own
- Reduce conflicts and support cooperation with and between students without using threats, punishments or rewards
- Learn communication skills that can reduce conflict and support effective collaboration among teachers & administrators
- Use "power with" strategies rather than power over strategies to manage student behavior
- Teach and practice how to communicate effectively across differences of race, class, gender, age etc (anti-bias education)
- Develop our own skills through games and activities we can use with students
The Teaching From Your Heart workshop series seeks to support educators in creating schools and classrooms where compassion, respect and cooperation naturally thrive and where we can feel the joy of learning. The workshops are based on the work of Marshall Rosenberg and the Center for Nonviolent Communication (for more information visit the web site www.cnvc.org). We refer to three books in particular: Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Compassion" and “Life Enriching Education”, and "The Compassionate Classroom" by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hudson.
The Teaching From Your Heart workshops have been run as a series of 5-6 two hour sessions within the Amherst school system (free to Amherst teachers; open to teachers from all districts) in the Fall of 2004, the Spring of 2005, and the Spring of 2006.
Send us an email if you would like to explore attending a Fall 2006 series or if would like to discuss bringing these workshops to your school or organization.
The Institute for Peaceable Communities is a registered professional development provider in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Every state has its own unique method for approving professional development points (PDPs) or continuing education credits (CEUs). IPC has been pre-approved to award PDPs for Massachusetts teachers (minimum 10 workshop hours). In New York and other New England states, PDPs may be approved before (preferably) or after a workshop according to the local school districts' criteria.
The NVC In Education internet forum is designed to solicit your input, let you know who is up to what, and encourage email dialogs among its members.
The intent is also to keep you informed about what is going on in the Education Project of CNVC, what is happening in schools, provide a way you can connect with others working in schools, to exchange educational ideas, to create an online archive of resource materials that support NVC in education, and for you to share your input about creating our network as it is being developed.If you would like to join the NVC In Education internet forum (a Yahoo group known as the "EdGroup"), click here.
Institute for Peaceable Communities jerry@communicatingwithcompassion.org
120 Pulpit Hill Road #8, Amherst, MA 01002 413-549-1747