Teacher Training continues

Day One of Part Two went swimmingly.

We have a full house- about 50 folks- in the training and it is amazing to see the groups come together like this. The force of the assembled group was amazing this morning. For me, it was quite palpable. Darren felt it also. he said, "Wow, this is a different group then we started with!"

And that's the thing- the bonds are closer, the ties are stronger, the trust is deeper and the commitment is higher. Level Two teacher Training is also a lot less hand-holding. We have tighter boundaries about time, higher expectations about accountability and Darren and I start turning more and more over to the trainees to do for themselves. Instead of breaking every little thing down to its component parts, we start giving the trainees more and more balls to juggle at the same time. It's exciting, really.

We spent the morning in an opening circle, in a theme development exercise, in asana class and ended with some Q&A. The group had lots of lunch time homework and then we spend the afternoon in Q&A and in practical teaching exercises on observation and demonstration which were much more challenging than last weeks work on the topic. All in all it was a full day.

One thing I am really psyched about is that we seem to be successfully integrating some feedback from the first 2 trainings. At the end of the first week we asked the group to give us feedback about what worked and what we could improve and we got some great suggestions- they liked the morning period of silence, they liked the time structure, they like the practical exercises and drills, they like teaching in front of the whole group, they liked the two of us sharing our varied perspectives.

The suggestions for improvement were also interesting. The first group said they would prefer to have homework for things like reading in the manual, writing sequences and developing themes instead of using class time with me and Darren for that. They said that less talk about videos would be better and several people wished for more boundaries on tangential questions.

Anyway, we were able to incorporate those things into the second week of Part One and then the feedback from the second week students has also been incorporated into this week. We have empowered the group to hold each other more accountable as peers for silence in the morning, for sticking to the teaching exercises we are practicing, we have added a period of formal sitting in the afternoon, we are tabling more questions and while we didn't take out the lunchtime homework, we did give the students an option to complete it the night before.

So its cool because I think we have bee able to improve our training and offer a better experience for the students as a result of the feedback. In fact, we had a very enlightening conversation today as a group about Looking for the Good and feedback and the powerful ways they inform each other. More on that tomorrow.

Time, for now, to wind down.