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So far Carla Gerstein has created 24 blog entries.

Circle Up with Empathy!

From our Sept. 2016 Newsletter, by Jackie Hicks:

Start the School Year with Circle Time

I’m hoping that you are starting the new school year with excitement, energy and enthusiasm, armed with fresh ideas, confidence in your curriculum, and eagerness to meet your new students.  This is the time of year when possibilities are abundant.  How you deal with the first two to three weeks is crucial in getting off to a good start with students and establishing your classroom culture.  If you are willing to invest in building relationships amongst you and your students as the priority for those first weeks of school, you will reap the benefit throughout the school year.  For that purpose, I suggest you provide regular time and guidance practicing CIRCLE TIME with your students, starting on the first day of school.

CIRCLE TIME can be extremely effective in establishing rapport among students and teachers, while also developing a classroom culture that teaches and strengthens social-emotional skills. Kindergarten is a good place for students to begin experiencing sitting in a circle facing each other as they get to know themselves and each other by listening and sharing their thoughts and feelings.  HOWEVER, Circle Time isn’t just for Kindergarten.  In fact, at every grade level there are important social and emotional developmental growth goals that can be addressed during CIRCLE TIME.  Parents, teachers and community members want to see children develop character, which is becoming more urgent as we see the lack of empathy, kindness, and personal responsibility occurring in our society.

What is CIRCLE TIME?  It is special and regular time when everyone in class (students and teachers) sits together in a circle on the floor or in chairs facing […]

By | September 28th, 2016|Education, Empathy, PCA, Teacher|0 Comments
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Educate For Tomorrow

by Jacqueline Hicks

I recently attended a presentation at the 2016 Carl Rogers Annual Conference that both influenced me, and resonated with my own thinking. In her presentation, “Person of Tomorrow”, Maureen O’Hara shared research and examples from the book she co-authored with Graham Leiscester, Dancing on the Edge. The presentation inspired me to read their book and to review the essay “The World of Tomorrow and the Person of Tomorrow”, by Carl Rogers. I found it most interesting to consider that although we certainly have benefitted from, and still need the amazing technological advances and intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century, they are not enough for people to enjoy success and satisfaction in the 21st century. The complexity of the world we live in now will continue to become increasingly more complex. The conditions that we deal with are changing constantly and rapidly. As a result, people are feeling high levels of stress in our society, and crisis in our institutions.

The challenges of the moment will continue into the future as complexity increases and chaos provides fertile ground for a paradigm shift that requires qualities we may not yet be developing in our future citizens. What are the necessary traits for navigating the 21st century? These are some competencies that seem important to me:

  • Authenticity, and trusting our own experience
  • Reflective
  • Creativity
  • Open to new experiences, ideas, concepts and ways of being
  • Ability to adjust to change, and deal with ambiguity
  • Harmonious in relating with others
  • Collaborative
  • Having integrity
  • Commitment to grow and learn
  • Able to live fully in the moment and enjoy life
  • Trusting of human nature
  • Spirituality and searching for meaning
  • Connection to nature
  • Questioning and challenging rules
  • Psychological literacy
  • Cultural awareness

Of course, I immediately began thinking about how this applies to educators and students. What we […]

By | July 31st, 2016|Education|0 Comments
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Let Students Make Mistakes! by Serena Pariser

Making Mistakes Represents a Critical Element of Comprehensive Learning —Let Students Make Mistakes

Can you think of a time in school when you made a mistake? Was it a learning experience or just humiliating? The title of this blog may make some of you cringe, recalling some of your biggest mistakes in your own classroom experiences. Allowing for mistakes to be made is much different from how many of us were taught growing up. A friend once told me of a horrifying memory in 5th grade when she raised her hand to answer a question, incorrectly, and had to suffer the embarrassing laughter of her classmates. She remains fearful of raising her hand in a class-like setting to this day. Mistakes, handled improperly, can be scarring.

The flip side is that mistakes can also, should also, be opportunities to strengthen and empower students. When I say mistakes, I of course don’t mean letting them get the answer on a math problem wrong and telling them “good job”. Give your students a non-judgmental forum for trial and error.

Making an attempt at active participation should always be encouraged, and it is in the students’ trying where much of the learning happens. Let them feel safe and confident enough to leap knowing they may indeed fall. You’ll be surprised at how much student engagement and interaction will soar once they realize that nobody is going to laugh or be angry with them, including the teacher, if they get the answer incorrect.

How to make your classroom a safe-zone for making mistakes:

  • Teach your class that mistakes are part of learning. (You may wish to reference one of Thomas A. Edison’s more famous quotes: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 […]
By | January 7th, 2015|Congruence, Education, Empathy, Teacher|1 Comment
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One Exceptional Math Teacher!

This post was first published on Glennon Doyle Melton’s blog, Momastery, on Jan. 30, 2014. In less than a day it was shared more than 1 million times. It is inspirational, and we wanted to share it with you.

Every Friday afternoon Chase’s teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.

And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, Chase’s teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.

Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
Who doesn’t even know who to request?
Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down — right away — who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.

As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children — I think that this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of […]

By | December 10th, 2014|Bullying, Education, Empathy, PCA, Teacher|1 Comment
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Where’s Waldorf?!

Education Transformations sat down with Lyra Matthews, a first grade teacher at Sparrow School, a Waldorf inspired charter school in San Diego, to find out what she likes about this method of education. Waldorf Education is a humanistic approach to instruction based on the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, focusing greatly on use of imagination, nature, hands-on activities, artistic and social expression, and fostering both creative and analytical modes of understanding.  One of the reasons Matthews likes it is because she has the freedom to teach in a way that allows her to take into account the developmental stages of her students. She says she takes a subject and comes up with her own way of presenting it, in order to find ways to pique the students’ interest and appeal to their natural curiosity. Also, she uses stories as a basis for lessons, with imaginative images that children can relate to, since they inherently have a pictorial way of thinking. Matthews has been teaching the Waldorf method since 1998 and, having had all of her own children go through and enjoy the Waldorf inspired educational approach, she is motivated to stay with this method of teaching.

Through years of classroom experience, she has discovered she can use music and rhythmic movement as ways to attract the interest of her first graders, and to have them work as a group. She has seen that starting a lesson with a song draws their attention to a subject, and presenting ideas in the form of stories makes it understandable to them. The subjects are further enhanced by incorporating art into the work, as the children draw directly into their own […]

By | April 9th, 2014|Education, From the Staff, Teacher|3 Comments
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7 Most Common Mistakes Teachers Make in School

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