An Instructor’s Guide to Educating with Kindness and Leading with Love: A Workbook of Sustainable Support Practices for Educators, Parents, and Facilitators

By Amy Grimes

An Instructor's Guide is both a philosophy text and personal workbook for anyone who identifies themselves as a teacher, educator, facilitator, caregiver, or parent who wants support in sustaining, maintaining, or improving their teaching practice. Its kindness and love based mindfulness approach to sustainable teaching focuses on exploring and resolving the limitations we have about teaching and learning to support students, and ourselves, in the long-term. Written to open you up to your teaching potential through self- reflection, mindfulness, some teaching stories, breath exercises, and kindness practices, this workbook and its exercises are for in person and remote teaching environments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982276416

Amy Grimes

Amy Grimes is an educator and healer who works with students to help them understand how they learn, so they can experience greater success. Other work by Amy includes, "Book of Daniel: Love Songs for the Pandemic" an e-chapbook of poetry. Amy received her master's in medieval and modern languages from the University of Oxford, Christ Church, and wrote her dissertation on gender, subjectivity, and identity in Italian island authors' writing. She has taught in classrooms world-wide with students from all walks of life and continues to find the human mind to be the most interesting thing there is. She resides with her family on Hawai'i Island.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-7640-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-7639-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-7641-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922193

Balboa Press rev. date:  11/10/2021

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   What Are You Doing?

Chapter 2   Motivations and Balance

Chapter 3   Confidence in Teaching

Chapter 4   Where and How Are You Teaching?

Chapter 5   Nurturing Your Class:

Appendix 1: Love and Kindness Awareness Practice

Appendix 2: Belief Survey

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.

— Ben Sweetland

Twentieth-century author

To educate another is the often-repetitive act of acknowledging our species’ ability to evolve. Unfortunately, modern education has repeatedly been implemented to create prescriptive, repetitive, and oftentimes obsolete protocols that consistently fail to maximize our learning potential with the brain capabilities we have. These obsolete protocols, while successful for some, consistently reinforce fear, anxiety, doubt, and shame associated with learning for both teachers and students alike. These protocols are based on a belief system about learning that reinforces separation and hierarchies as well as social, intellectual, and emotional division in many of the spaces we inhabit while learning. Learning occurs in many spaces; the macro and micro ecosystems associated with our bodies, from atoms to cells to organ systems to bodies in communities and so on are potential learning spaces. At any point, while learning how to learn, we may have experienced something uncomfortable, confusing, painful, challenging, or even completely untenable and traumatic. When foundations of learning are dysfunctional, the potential for a generational ripple effect of unwillingness or inability to help students succeed to their highest potential becomes commonplace. We see and experience firsthand the long-term effects of this apathy and negligence playing out across all areas of our lives, in minor and profound ways.

Even the most successful individual can exhibit dysfunctional behaviors when it comes to learning, and for this reason, examining how we learn and experience limitations to our own learning is a helpful endeavor for everyone. So many of our learning issues are direct results of our experience and the way our brains forge connections and assimilate information. The conditions through which our brains learned how to learn continue to exert influence on us throughout our lifetimes. If we experienced challenges ourselves as students, those dysfunctional patterns can be passed on through the way we teach. When we shift our focus as educators away from our own fears and issues about learning, we can be present with our students with love and kindness. This approach supports learning in a manner that is full of possibility and allows for inclusivity and differentiated approaches.

To teach sustainably for both students and teacher, you must be ready to embark on a journey of being unapologetically yourself and allowing the truth to flow fluently between you and your students without fear. Are you ready? Do you want to know what it feels like to be excited to know? To encounter that part of you that yearns for empowerment during this time of great change and growth for our species and our planet? We must work on being honest with ourselves and committing to changing our reality to improve the outcome for everyone and everything. This is a total shift from educational methodologies employed throughout history. Older approaches focus on individuals’ learning potential and success as separate from their micro and macro communities and therefore does not inspire students to cultivate sustainable confidence, curiosity, and inspiration based on kindness toward oneself and others.

I have always been inspired by the way the human brain works and what motivates us to act and behave as we do. Being an educator was something that I did not go willingly into, and yet I found myself called to do it; year after year, I was surrounded by students and in a position to offer a hand to those around me who were engaged in study of various kinds. I have taught preschoolers, adults engaged in post-graduate study, and people of all ages in between. I have worked with individuals across many academic as well as creative and artistic subjects using inclusive and differentiated approaches. I found a calling working with learning-diverse groups of students whose success as students often requires creative and unorthodox approaches. I have authored curricula for academic writing, tutoring agencies, after-school programs, home-school programs, self-healing programs and workshops, standardized tests, schools, and many other areas. Since 2010, in addition to teaching, I have also been a healing facilitator offering self-healing, meditation, and action-based empowerment approaches to clients and students, which often focus on assisting them to maximize the way their brains operate. I have taught countless individuals how to identify limitations and resistance in their lives and forgive, change, and heal limiting or destructive behaviors. I have, more recently, honed my focus to work with students who need creative support approaches to achieve academic or professional success. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, my practice was already around 90 percent virtual, so my experience working online predates the recent surge in online teaching by a significant amount of time. As a result of teaching virtually for many years, I have learned a lot about what works and what falls flat in this medium. My approach to teaching has always been to show up with kindness and love, as due to the volatile learning experience of the population I work with, it is necessary to be flexible and adaptable to ensure their success not just with me, but beyond their time learning with me as well.

My goal as an educator has always been to be temporary support for my students. I want, at most, each of my students to need me for only a short while until they get their bearings and feel confident in their learning experience so they can continue. I have lived through numerous life dramas that posed potential roadblocks for even the best of students, which invited me to participate in a life-long conversation and exploration of what makes learning easy for one but difficult for another. This has given me a deep appreciation for the infinite challenges, both small and large, that students may face as they learn. It has also motivated me to prioritize the application of deep and active listening in all of my teaching roles.

I have long believed that our roles as educators, teachers, facilitators, and caregivers are shifting. Educators worldwide could not have anticipated what would be expected of them in 2020. Teaching in person, online, and sometimes a hybrid of the two, while making special accommodations for learning-challenged students and students from diverse backgrounds, and facing the dangers of being the focus of politicized anger, fear, and distrust, stretched and expanded the role of teacher since 2020. In some cases, these factors razed that role to the ground. This is a special place to be. On the one hand, we experience exhaustion, anger, frustration, trauma, and disappointment. On the other, we have opportunity. When everything is broken, the only thing to do is pause and listen for ways to recover, heal, and eventually reconfigure for future self-sustaining success. More than ever before, as teachers, taking action to educate ourselves and others to be inquisitive, curious, and, most importantly, to avoid creating trauma associated with learning is essential for the success of this planet. So much of our collective future relies upon the choices we make, how much we can evolve as a species to learn more efficiently, and our ability to collectively create more well-being for the world. The implication of this requires us to ensure that we give our students the best possible chance to become more aware of how their minds work as they learn. We no longer have the luxury of time to figure it out and accidentally bring all our issues to