Pahoa School Staff sponsoring Agreements Workshop?

[Kerry]

A newspaper article I'd like to read.

Pahoa School Staff sponsoring Agreements Workshop?

Pahoa High and Intermediate School Staff are looking at the possibility of sponsoring a Creating Agreements Communication-Skills Workshop—for teachers, parents and students. The proposed all-day workshop would take place early fall of the 2023 school season. The free workshop is offered by Community Communications, a 501(c)(3) educational organization—serving since 1989. The workshop would be an all-day Saturday (8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) event.

The workshop would begin with a brief overview of the fundamentals and principles of communication, followed with open-mic sharing. Focus will be directed towards expanding ones definitions of the words acknowledgment, incompletes, perpetrations, responsibility, integrity, withholds, agreements, and support.

After a one-hour brown-bag lunch participants will form into groups of ten for the purpose of co-creating a Homework Agreement. Then, a spokesperson from each group will share the individual agreements they are willing to support followed with open-mic.

After a 1-hour evening brown-bag meal break participants will vote as to which individual agreements they are willing to support. They will be tasked to compose a Homework Agreement to be used throughout the school year.

The workshop finishes with paired sharing.

Kerry, the workshop facilitator, says the workshop is about teachers, students, and parents, together co-creating a homework agreement that works. Typically, most homework agreements are presented unilaterally; students are manipulated into accepting what has been dictated. Most students and parents are unaware that they have a homework agreement or an agreement to attend classes; there is no sense of owning the present implied agreements therefore many students have no experience of having agreed to choose to honor them. Even fewer are aware of the consequences for breaking an implied agreement; parents are unaware that to thwart their child's teacher, the person they pay to teach their child, reaps unfavorable karma for everyone. 

The workshop is about tapping into the benefits of functioning with an awareness of the correlation between integrity and outcomes. The premise: Observation supports enlightenment; simply watching yourself choosing to honor or not honor an agreement (the very conversations that take place within ones mind) eventually leads one to choosing to honor ones word all the time, of having the reputation of being trustworthy.  It's about supporting No Child Left Behind; specifically, it's about acknowledging what it is about our leadership-communication skills that keeps causing one or more graduates per class to end up in prison. A student who isn't acknowledge for a broken agreement soon breaks another; they keep hoping to get caught so that they can then respect both their parent(s) and their teacher. A student who is misbehaving and failing in school is communicating non-verbally that he/she is not in-communication with anyone, yes anyone; specifically, the adults around him/her have become stuck doing their imitation of communication. There are no exceptions to this phenomenon. A child will misbehave, fail, even get sick, so as to re-create the experience of love that once was between their parents. The vibrations between parents who withhold significant thoughts from each other cause their child anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. Most parents don't acknowledge the majority of their abuses to each other, especially in front of their child.

Fundamentally, the workshop is about expanding our ability to be in supportive communication with each other (read recidivism —about the effects of unacknowledged perpetrations).

Feedback/comments welcome.

Last edited 12/26/23