Strengthening Early Years to Kindergarten Transitions
SEY2KT 2023-2024
Welcome
It is such a pleasure to be working together this year. On this page, we will provide updates month by month, and all of our slides will be available for you to download and use. We also encourage you to go to the Resources & Tools page so you can dig deeper into the practices and tools as they fit for you.
Introductory Session: October 2023
Ongoing Learning and Doing
Focus for this month: reflection!
How are you starting this year?
What is your dream for the coming year?
What do you want to let go of?
What else do you really need to know?
Links to relevant resources & tools
Settling & Intention Setting - The most important part of entering into connection and relationship with others is to pause, gather your sense of your energy and intention, and settle to be fully present and engaged. This is a settling and intention-setting (3 - 5 min.) guided meditation. There are many ways to undertake this exercise. The key is to provide a mechanism for all to arrive into the session with awareness and intention.
The Check-in - The Check-in is a tool to incorporate at the start of the day, in a classroom, or at any meeting. Besides giving individuals a voice, this practice can help people tap into their aspirations and creative orientation and also begin to develop a shared vision and understanding.
Introducing an Integrated Framework for comprehensive action that brings together all of the CSL components and encourages balanced attention to each of them.
Session One: November 2023
Ongoing Learning and Doing
Focus for this month: Bring ourselves into the work!
Complete your personal journey and aspiration.
Bring your personal aspirations together in a group meeting and spend time with each other connecting.
Start to weave your personal aspirations into a collective aspiration.
Links to relevant resources & tools
Use the concept of Creative Tension to build a concrete understanding of where you are starting from and your vision.
The integrated framework for comprehensive action brings together all of the CSL components and encourages a balanced attention to each of them.
Personal Journey - We all bring our experiences, our passions, our dreams, our values and our assumptions. Bringing these into awareness provides a deeper understanding to our roles and influence as actors in the broader system.
Session Two: January 2024
Ongoing Learning and Doing
Focus for this month: reflection!
Create and or revise your systems map.
Engage in a generative conversation with someone you want to bring closer to the initiative.
Links to relevant resources & tools
Systems Mapping - An essential component of systemic change is a shared understanding of what the system is – its components, its relationships and interconnectedness, its boundaries and its intended outcomes.
Perspective Taking - This is a simple tool that serves as a reminder of the importance of acknowledging the limitation of our own perspective and of integrating a diversity of perspectives before taking any action. We used the metaphor of the elephant.
Building generative spaces and relational practices benefit from a variety of Relational Leadership tools.
Generative space allows for conversations that generate shared meaning and lead to action reflected in the levels of listening described in Theory U. They involve an authentic exchange of sharing and inquiry, leading to the emergence of new knowledge or understanding that could not have been created individually. They are built on a culture of respect, reciprocity and trust.
Session Three: February 2024
Ongoing Learning and Doing
Focus for this month:
Create/revise your systems icebergs
Share a story of someone who has been a leader in your life.
Practice your awareness about the Ladder if Inference and Mental Models.
Links to relevant resources & tools
What is Leadership? - A non-traditional definition of what leadership is and what makes someone “leaderful.”
Ladder of Inference - The Ladder of Inference is a model for understanding how we can often jump to conclusions based not on the facts or what we have observed, but rather based on our own values and assumptions through which we filter the reality.
System Icebergs - The iceberg provides a framework for understanding an entire system and reminding us to not focus solely on a particular problem or event, but to dig deeper. We introduced both problem and aspirational icebergs.
Session Four: April 2024
Ongoing Learning and Doing
Focus for this month:
Continue your conversations about how you lead with compassion
Reflect on your own personal practice and development.
Take the self compassion and fears of compassion questionnaires
What structures and processes can you put in place to support?
Links to relevant resources & tools
What is Compassion, why is it important and how do we cultivate it?
Self compassion as a foundation for leadership and the self compassion test.
Why are we so fearful of compassion and why does it fade - Paul Gilbert’s Fears of Compassion scale. There is a useful video on empathy, compassion and why sometimes it is hard, here.
How do cultivate a compassionate leadership approach. We are consistently being asked to do “Hard Things in Human Ways” to be able to try out new approaches and strategies in a relational way.