Wednesday, Nov 07, 2007

Creating a classroom beyond ego: From following class rules to choosing to be autonomous and taking responsibility for developing. Joan Berland (part 1)

Download this episode (13 min)   
Imagine being nine years old and having a teacher with twenty five years of experience who was resolute in her intention to create the perfect classroom for learning and development.

In this episode I talk with Joan Berland, a third grade teacher working in the public school system in Upstate New York. Joan contacted me several months ago and wrote that she wanted to create a classroom beyond ego, a classroom where the kids would be coming to school each day entering and co-creating a field of consciousness where everyone’s attention would be more focused on continually taking responsibility for developing and learning than anything else. She wanted to know how this could be done. While we definitely do not have all the answers, we both found it a hugely inspiring question. This kind of question and the ongoing enquiry it has started points to, I believe, the future of education. It points to the potential of a collective engagement between individuals where we care more about our autonomous responsibility, going beyond ego, and exercise it to expect development from ourselves and each other.

In this first episode Joan talks about how she went from thinking about the need to create a set of class rules that the kids themselves formulate but seldom follow. Instead her class formulated seven statements, similar to a constitution, that inspires them to autonomously choose to take responsibility for developing.

To find out more please contact nick.drummond@nordicintegral.com, http://www.nordicintegral.com

Posted by Nick Drummond at 6:11 AM |   

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