Newsletters Words of EnCOURAGEment #4
Words of EnCOURAGEment #4
Remembering What is Essential
By Co-Director Marcy Jackson
I know better than I do, and this kind of slowing down helps me remember what I know and do that!
—Retreat participant, National Staff Development Conference
Sometimes it takes someone or something to stop us in our tracks long enough to get quiet, slow down, and remember what is essential. All kinds of things can do that—unexpected news, illness, loss, even winter! As I write this, the Midwest is in a deep freeze and the necessity of stopping and attending to the essentials of staying warm, making sure there is enough food and keeping your pipes from freezing is very real. But there is another way of slowing down and remembering what is core, what is real—one not born of catastrophe, but born of intention. We see this happen all the time in the work we do in “circles of trust.”
Last December, some colleagues and I led a pre-conference retreat at the annual meeting of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC). Our group of twenty-two participants were staff developers, curriculum specialists, teacher mentors, and school leaders from across the country. Several said they weren’t even staying for the NSDC conference and had only come for this retreat. For most of these folks, the stakes were very high—they are passionate educators who are trying to contribute their best “lights” in the midst of often untenable situations, leadership demands and dysfunction, and a fearful school culture focused primarily on raising test scores.
Winter’s Grace: Crystalline Gifts of Self-hood
By Courage & Renewal Facilitator Paul Michelac
December in my house is the month of garden and seed catalogs. And when they start arriving I know the winter solstice must be near. I like looking at the colorful flowers, especially as I gaze out across my snow-filled backyard. It is fun, in an escapist sort of way, to mentally melt the cold and frost and see tulips and daffodils. Eventually I come to my senses and honor winter and its gifts as much as I look forward to spring and turning the flat pages of colored ink into three dimensional living and growing plants.
I live in Colorado where winter is typically the season of cold, snow, and unexpected mountain blizzards. My personal and professional winter mirrors the natural world and is the season of chilling realizations of unmet dreams and sudden losses. If I can, I’ll avoid winter with all kinds of professional distractions. Yet the Courage tradition reminds me that winter is necessary and, like other seasons, has a gift to offer. I need only look to the natural world to know this is true. The tulip bulbs I planted in the fall are resting under the snow, and without the time to harden-off they may never emerge into their full potential.
“Soul-Making” in Circles of Trust
by Parker J. Palmer
In times of trouble like our own, earlier generations referred to the world as “a vale of tears.” But John Keats, the nineteenth century British poet, rejected this misleading image of the world and the opportunities it offers us, even in hard times. In a letter to a friend Keats wrote, “Call the world if you please ‘the vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world… Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a Soul?”
In the “stump speech” I’ve been giving as I travel the country celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Courage to Teach and the Center for Courage & Renewal, I’ve been lifting up three “pains and troubles” of our time that invite us to become more soulful, for our own sake and the sake of the world. Exploring them has given me a deeper understanding of what we are doing when we support “soul-making” in circles of trust—and of the importance of doing it.
Courage in Schools: The CORE Program
by Chris Love, Montana Courage & Renewal Facilitator
“Principals and teachers need to make concerted efforts to promote an environment of trust and respect – of each other and of students,” advocates the 2004 National Research Council report Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn. At Havermale High School in Spokane, Washington, Courage & Renewal facilitator Dr. Cindy McMahon, and her administrative colleagues, Fred Schrumpf and Jay Jordan, are walking this talk to transform not only their students’ school learning experience, but perhaps even their very lives.
To increase trust and respect at Havermale, Principal Schrumpf, Assistant Principal Jordan and Principal Assistant McMahon have introduced many changes in the past several years. The innovative CORE (Communities Of Respect and Empowerment) Retreat Program offers students and staff a day-long opportunity for transformational trust-building. This year each of Havermale’s five “core” groups of 60-70 students – and the 8-member staff team that teaches, counsels and administers each core group – will leave school for its own “day away” retreat. Goals common to all five retreats are building trust, understanding and respect for all. Additional goals are created to address the unique needs of the particular core group attending each retreat. The program was adopted after two highly successful pilot retreats were held last year at Havermale.
Leading From Within
Looking for a book to start the New Year AND support the Center for Courage & Renewal?
We invite you to check out Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead,edited by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner. Modeled after Teaching with Fire , leaders share how they turn to and reflect on poetry to make sense of the challenges and possibilities in their work. The poems they chose, and their commentaries, open a window into the challenges leaders face when they try to work by their best lights, to meet both the demands of the world and their own integrity. This is a book that someone, from any field, can pick up and find inspiration as well as concrete ideas on how to use poetry in their work and life.
We’re delighted with the response to Leading from Within. The book has already sold over 12,000 copies since its release in late September! This is a tremendous achievement for a poetry anthology (the average lifetime sales of a poetry anthology is about 5,000 copies).
The Thread He Follows: A profile of Courage & Renewal Facilitator Chip Wood
It’s Monday morning at the Sheffield Elementary School in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Classes have begun, and the halls are quiet and bright, decorated with students’ colorful posters saying “peace” in over a dozen languages. But this calm belies the reality of Principal Chip Wood’s morning. He’s just met with a mother who’s distraught over her daughter’s behavior at home. And before he can sit down to talk, he needs to call the probation officer of a fifth-grader who’s headed to court the next day. “Monday morning,” Chip says, dialing the phone, “often feels like Friday night in the emergency room.”
The threads of Chip’s deeply held values are easy to follow as he describes the journey that brought him to Courage to Teach ten years ago, and to Sheffield today. “As a student in the ’60s, I was fire and brimstone, along with lots of us who were in college at that time. I got my MSW in Community Organization at Howard University right at the time of the Black Power movement, ’65-’67.”
A second-year graduate placement eventually led Chip to a job as assistant to Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League. “I had extraordinary admiration for Whitney. I believe he would have been the first black President. He drowned in Africa while at a conference, under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
“That did it for me,” Chip says. “I was personally spent. Dr. King had been killed, and Bobby Kennedy, and there was a sense of despair that everything had been taken. A friend who was running the MAT program at the University of Massachusetts said, ‘Why don’t you come up here and teach?’ I was thinking about it before Whitney died, and he had actually written a reference letter, so I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it now.’”
One year later, when funding for his position ended, Chip accepted a principalship in Gill, MA. “The superintendent said, ‘Cut your hair, put on a tie, and we’ll give you the job.’ I was a teaching principal. I taught sixth-grade and ran a school, no problem. That’s how much education has changed! It was a good time to be in education at the beginning of the ‘70s, but it got progressively worse as the decade went on.
A Circle of Faith: Courage & Renewal for Clergy
by John Fenner, Program Director, Courage to Lead for Clergy & Congregational Leaders
January 2008: the heart of winter in Indianapolis. The famed Speedway is silent, covered in snow. The RCA dome, home of the football Colts, empty and hushed. Yet several miles away at a small retreat center, clergy, congregational leaders, facilitators, and friends of the Center for Courage and Renewal, led by Parker J. Palmer, spoke loudly from their hearts about their yearlong experiences in the Courage to Lead program.
[This work] has been a conscious attention to the connection between by soul and God. I’m aware that when I connect with my soul, I connect with the depth dimension. – Program Participant
The Program
In 2005, with the support of the Lilly Endowment, the Center for Courage & Renewal created the Courage to Lead for Clergy and Congregational Leaders - the first large-scale effort to introduce Circles of Trust (COT) in religious contexts. The primary goal of the program was to invite clergy and congregational leaders to move beyond the “what” and “how” questions of leadership to the “who” questions. This approach is rooted in the belief that effective service and leadership flow from individuals’ identity and integrity. The COT approach focuses on creating opportunities for participants to listen to their inner wisdom and to each other in communal spaces that invite the voice of the soul to be heard.
What enabled my soul to show up here, from the beginning, is a kind of practiced care and compassion. I felt it, and so gave myself to it. - Indianapolis Retreat Participant
A second purpose of the pilot program was to begin to learn how to carry the principles and practices of Circles of Trust into congregational life.
The power of this work is that the program believes in me as I am and trusts me to do the work. No one else has offered this for me. Now my question is how do I offer this to my congregation. - Program Participant
Seasonal Retreat Series
During the Indianapolis gathering, participants shared that their deepest experiences of the program occurred during the Seasonal Retreat Series. These cohort based retreats met five times over the course of a year. The long-term nature of this format fostered the strong sense of trust and experience of community necessary for a meaningful exploration of the inner territory of personal and spiritual formation. In addition, the seasonal nature of the retreats created a framework for participants to examine the themes of resurrection and new life (spring), abundance (summer), harvesting and letting go (autumn) and death, dying, and hidden life (winter). For many it was their first look at the world outside of the liturgical calendar in many years.
The Lessons
The Indianapolis Retreat and Learning Conference was an opportunity for participants to share the impact of the program on their lives, and for CCR staff and facilitators to inquire into their understanding of this important work in religious contexts. Among the lessons:
• Courage to Lead (CTL) retreats create safe space that is unique in the lives of clergy and congregational leaders and allows them to share both the joys and deep sorrows and disappointments in their ministries.
[My Circle of Trust gave me] a sense of a small community holding each other in a circle of faith. A sense of exploring the unknown together, freefalling through space…a venture into self-disclosure, becoming vulnerable. - Program Participant
• CTL retreats provide practices (e.g., Clearness Committees, listening without “fixing”) that are being hailed by participants as both radical and useful in sustaining their vocations in ministry.
What I’m learning here is the art of deep listening; It’s powerful for me; I’m observing and it is powerful; - Indianapolis Retreat Participant
• Clergy and congregational leaders are seeking opportunities to integrate the Circles of Trust approach into their faith communities and congregations.
The capacity of this process to create a space to encourage, trust, and honor one another is really apparent…it has a way of inviting persons to live up to their own best lives. In our own congregations, this is our own deep calling… - Program Participant
Completely Unexpected: A Writer's Journey
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Megan LeBoutiller
In 1996 I was living in South Carolina, and I had just entered graduate school. I needed to assemble a doctoral committee and asked Sally Hare if she would consider my invitation. She had recently completed Parker Palmer’s initial Courage to Teach program and was actively assembling one of the first four nationwide pilot programs: Coastal Carolina’s Courage To Teach Program. I was grateful when Sally agreed to help my educational efforts, but I had no idea what our exchange would involve.
One component of my doctoral program required me to construct a meaningful internship. My field was creative non-fiction and quickly Sally discerned that a need of hers could elegantly fulfill a need of mine. She wanted a “scribe” for her two-year program--someone who would sit in the circle as a participant-observer and create a narrative of the group’s experience. She described the three-day weekend retreat format, meeting quarterly over a two-year period. I agreed to become scribe, and initially approached it as a job that would fulfill my school’s requirement.
The twenty-three teachers and school administrators who showed up for the first retreat in September, 1996 had self-selected themselves for the experience by applying for the privilege to participate. They either knew Sally, or they knew Parker’s work. They felt unhappy and/or overly stressed by their work within the school system. Each person spoke of needing to experience “formation” work while none of them were very sure what “it” was. I, on the other hand, knew almost nothing about the program. I was only vaguely aware of a man named Parker Palmer. I was not a teacher. I’d never had a relationship with the public school system. I wasn’t seeing myself as a member of the group at our first meeting. I was just doing my job.