Yoga Ed

Next week I will participate in a 40-hour intensive yoga teacher training workshop. I am looking forward to this with excitement, as it will prepare me to teach yoga at school to 7th and 8th graders as part of their phys ed classes. Kids who choose to participate in Sports Conditioning engage in a potpourri of various activities. New this year will be yoga every other day. 

Robin has emailed that since the class size is small, she will be able to touch upon the high school training, so if all goes well, I may wind up teaching some upper school yoga sessions in the spring.

I am guessing the middle schoolers will have mixed sentiments about doing yoga, and my hope is they discover that yoga can:

• feel good
• build physical strength
• provide a way to relax
• enhance their attentiveness and focus
• be calming
• be energizing
• increase appreciation of themselves
• be fun!

Now cross fingers that lots of people will be away on vacation next week so the traffic between Mamaroneck and West Babylon will be on the light side!

Gentle Edge

Take it to your gentle edge of expression – where any more would be too much, and any less would be too little.

These words are embedded in my approach to yoga, thanks to Deb Gorman, my first yoga instructor. She regularly exhorts us with this suggestion, and I have taken her words to heart. Indeed, this advice is helpful if you want to make the most of your practice while avoiding potential injury that could come from being over zealous. 

These words also bring to mind Lev Vygotsky and his idea of ZPD – the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky believed that children could learn from watching and following adults, with the adult assisting the child to go beyond what the child was able to do on their own. He felt that optimal learning experiences should take place in each child’s ZPD, with that zone being specific to each learner.

I have learned yoga through a combination of observing my teachers, following their cues, giving my teachers permission to make subtle changes in my postures as they adjust my body into a pose, and practicing regularly. My teachers have taken me beyond what I could do on my own. They have helped me get to my gentle edge of expression and over time, with their assistance, the placement of that gentle edge has shifted. They have met me in my ZPD and guided me beyond. (I never took an educational psychology or philosophy course, but I do smile at the meshing of my yoga teacher’s words and Vygotsky’s ideas 🙂

David Warlick’s 2¢ – Ok, No More Staff Development

In November 2005, David Warlick blogged Ok, No More Staff Development. In February 2006, I sent an email to faculty at my school sharing the link. If they chose to skip the blog, I shared the portion which struck me as most relevant:

…need to strive for a school environment where teachers:

• Have the time to reflect and retool (at least three hours a day),
• Have ready access to local and global ideas and resources that are logically and socially indexed,
• have the skills to research, evaluate, collaborate, remix, and implement new tools and techniques (contemporary literacy),
• Are part of an ongoing professional conversation where the expressed purpose is to provoke change (adapt),
• Leave the school from time to time to have their heads turned by new experiences,
• Share what they and their students are doing with what they teach and learn – their information products and relics of learning become an explicit and irresistibly interwoven part of the school’s culture.

If we are trying to help our students to become life-long-learners, then this is what teachers should be right now. The question, “Who’s going to teach me to do that?” should be replaced with “I’m going to teach myself to do that!”

I am in the midst of doing a massive clean out of my desk space. Several times a year I get an overwhelming urge to pare down “stuff”, and this current not-quite-mid-August motivation is that school begins in just three weeks. And so it was that I came upon my yellowed print out from Friday, February 17, 2006.

Warlick’s post made an impression upon me because, despite all the other formal and informal titles that describe my job, I see myself as a professional development provider. For myself and my colleagues, if we teach, then we must learn. We must model what it means to be ongoing, life long learners, complete with our failures, for it is from our failures – our goofs and mess ups – that we are able to recalibrate and continue on with the process of learning.

And so, with opening faculty meetings beginning the week of August 30, I mention Warlick’s message here as a reminder for what I and my colleagues can strive to be.