My first teaching job was in the teacher credential program at UC Berkeley. Many of the students in the program had been teaching for years and they simply needed my course to renew their recertification. My class was titled “Instructional Strategies” and…. I’d never taught a course before in my life. For three years, [ Read more … ]
Teaching, Coaching & Facilitating
Teaching and writing are inquiries
I love inquiries. My books have always been an inquiry… an inquiry into art (Sky’s the Limit: The Art of Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey) an inquiry into teaching (Getting Messy: Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches, and Mentors) an inquiry into how we know (Deep Knowing: Entering the Realm of Non-Ordinary Intelligence) [ Read more … ]
Pay attention to the spaces
In music, the space between the notes is what creates the melody. The beauty of a piece is formed in the pauses, the spaces in-between. I’ve always been fascinated by these “spaces in-between” and have explored and written about them extensively in teaching (check out my book Getting Messy), art (check out my book Deep [ Read more … ]
How can the wisdom that emerges through a group process serve the collective?
In a letter to the president of the Fetzer Institute, Jacob Needleman wrote: “[I believe] that the group is the art form of the future. In our present culture, the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perceptions and through that sharing, to become a conduit for the [ Read more … ]
Teaching as a creative playground.
Teaching has always been a creative playground for me–a way to explore things that fascinate me and experiment with new ideas. Peter Vaill wrote, “The essential starting point of artistic consciousness is acknowledging that something is more than I can possibly know.” That place of the unknown is mysterious and juicy. We don’t know what [ Read more … ]