Diving deep into courageous conversations

This week we hosted the first of our new Staffroom Sessions - a monthly online gathering for our members to explore, share and learn together about the practices of self-care, people-care and earth-care in schools.

We started the session by asking people to share the last time they had a difficult conversation. Participants shared common barriers to holding challenging conversations, whether with friends or family, students or colleagues. It is clear that these conversations call for us to sit with each other in the discomfort of uncertainty - not knowing the answer, not understanding emotions, and even the uncertainty of the future. While uncomfortable, these conversations are the way forward to increase our understanding, express and explore difficult emotions, and plan for the future.

This session focused around the 3 key principles of our Courageous Conversations Toolkit, introduced in the session by ThoughtBox Founder, Rachel Musson. Rachel explained that to help hold these conversations, we can keep three simple ideas in mind - Be Brave, Be Safe and Be Connected. We encourage you to dive into the toolkit to further understand the what and how of these practices, with supportive resources to get you started. 

In the session, participants were then invited to share from their own experiences, surfacing key themes, questions and tools. When considering the barriers to courageous conversations,  key concerns were voiced around managing and supporting the range of student emotions, as well as supporting students to share their thoughts and opinions in a safe and supported way.  What emerged from our discussion were some fantastic tips and tools including using emotional scales, illustrated diagrams of emotions, options for anonymous sharing of thoughts and questions, as well as approaches to co-creating classroom rules with impact.

Ultimately, as clearly expressed by one of the participants, courageous conversations are those that require you to be brave as a teacher, in order to at times place opportunities for SEL (social-emotional learning) above the academic learning. 

These are just a snapshot of the rich ideas shared during the call, which brought together teachers from across our communities - from Jaipur and Mumbai in India to California and Wisconsin in the US to everywhere in between!

You can find more, and contribute your own ideas on our Community Wall, as well as join the conversation in our Facebook Staffroom to support each other in exploring new approaches. 

Finally, we welcome you to sign up to join us for our next Staffroom Session on the 14th June where we will be exploring how to inspire students to bring Self-care, People-care and Earth-care to life beyond the classroom. 

Maya Bahoshy is Head of Impact & Engagement at ThoughtBox.