To achieve the safety and openness required for meaningful exploration of spiritual development, I work carefully with my students for weeks and months. I remind my students that only when each of us honors these groundrules or agreements can our classroom become a safe place. In addition, games help students focus, relax, and become a team through laughter and cooperation. Symbols allow students to speak indirectly about feelings and thoughts that are awkward to address head-on. With everyone sitting in a circle where all can see and be seen, the Council process allows each person to speak without interruption or immediate response.
Students learn to listen deeply and discover what it feels like to be truly heard.
Silence becomes a comfortable ally as we pause to digest one story and wait for another to form, when teachers call for moments of reflection or when the room fills with feeling at the end of a class. English teacher organizes the entire curriculum around the theme of relationship and love, selecting literature that relates to these themes. In addition to reading, analytical discussion, and writing, her students keep personal journals to express their own feelings about these themes. Once a week, they sit in Council, relating stories and feelings from their own lives that have been stirred by the required readings. Curriculum and technique in the classroom are not enough, however.