SchoolTalk

There were at least (6) circle exercises. One would have sufficed for an ice-breaker.

The agenda was never clear (there was no board for writing or no writing at all). I understand the emphasis was kinesthetic but there also were no rules on group cooperation, speaking out of turn, speaking excessively, not making snarky remarks or snickering. Time and again we wanted to tie this to educational theory but there were few if any connections made. The impression was the facilitator didn't understand much educational theory, just practice.

There was some group shaming going on. The PM part was rushed and poorly executed. We had a group exercise that involved charting but the directions were vague because the teacher did not model the exercise. Again he allowed this person to show off (she may have taken the class before).

There was some race stuff going on where we should all be treated as equals whether yellow or brown. When I brought up ELL and ELA there was no followup as if subcultures do not matter (except for the major dominant subculture of this region). There was nothing really tying it together and again the last closing out circle was used by the toxic person to take more digs with others snickering. The level of professionalism of the participants was also slack.

The participants were poorly dressed and their attitude was that to work you must look or act as ghetto as possible which actually matches what we see on the ground at some of the schools. So if you were silly enough to expect this to be a real educational seminar, the end result was you were disappointed. While the emphasis appeared at the start to be about community, restorative justice, and victim advocacy, the end result appears to be little really relates to schools and if you were wanting to have useful discussions on contemporary threads with homelessness, language barriers, teen addictions to violence, drugs, or gaming, none of that took place because everyone was being forced to obey and conform.

So there was a real mismatch between the so-called relaxed communitarianism and the actual sense of totalitarianism if you wanted to bring anything up. That is also the trend on the ground with working that if you ask questions, it is used as a way to marginalize the worker and used as fuel for gossip or worse.