Notes from our meeting 12/3/10

 Happy New Year, everyone!  Welcome 2011.  I apologize for the belatedness of these notes, but thought they might still be helpful to prime us for our January 26 meeting.  It felt great to reconnect with everybody in December!  Here's what I remember us talking about:

·      Regroup and Check in: What do you do to reset?  Answers included “go away.”  “Turn off the electronics.” “Declare Friday an email Sabbath.”

·      Continuing reflections on Fran Scoble’s visit: we revisited the list of core values that we said we bring to our work, and found ourselves talking about the importance of maintaining relationships and connection.  What does it mean to simply walk into a teacher’s classroom and say “hi, how’s it going?” . . . without an agenda attached.

·      Cultivating empathy and compassion: we engaged in an activity to cultivate these qualities from Resonant Leadership; imagining someone else’s day. 

·      RSA Animate of Philip Zimbardo’s talk, “The Secret Powers of Time.”  The discussion that followed focused for some time on how, absent active strategies, the pace of life, particularly with the volume of tech we deal with, will leave us feeling stressed and out of control.  Therefore we talked about placing limits on communication and cultivating right communication and some control over time: establishing guidelines and norms; slowing response time; not being “always on,” and yet being always available in the event on an emergency.  Ultimately the conversation turned to an optimistic sense that there is so much available to us, so many teaching modalities, and that it’s a both/and world: building "the functional equivalent of a dulcimer" and managing a Smartphone are skills we ought to be teaching in our schools. 

·      Interested in more RSA talks?  Go to YouTube and type in the search string “RSA animate.”  Fascinating!

·      Crystal broached the topic of focusing on mindfulness at our next meeting: it ties in with the later chapters in Resonant Leadership; and the sense of the meeting was that this would be a good direction. We may have the good fortune to be visited by UC Davis’ Erika Rosenberg, who runs the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, and conducts research on the effects of meditation on health and cognition. More news to come, but if you would like to explore Rosenberg’s web site, go to http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/people/erikar; or the Mindful Schools Web site, go to http://mindfulschools.org/

Please comment here or email either Crystal or me if you have topics you'd like addressed at one of our meetings.  Thanks so much!