Giving and receiving feedback seems like a natural part of the territory in a workplace or classroom, but it can sometimes feel like a trick--and, if it isn't a waste of time work, it can be at the expense of a positive team culture . How do we fix this? We look to living systems to see how living feedback loops are designed. Learn how to set up a feedback system as a living system, customized for your specific scenario, whether it's in a classroom, team, school, or org. Leave this keynote or workshop with a clearer understanding of why feedback usually doesn't work as intended and strategies for doing it differently.
Patterns exist everywhere we look in natural systems. By focusing on three distinct patterns, and what's in your locus of control as a leader, we can start to design work flows that operate with more ease and even create energy, instead of zap it. These patterns can be applied to all sorts of energy flows: everything from meeting formats to parent calls to community programming and lesson planning. Leave this workshop feeling more connected to the natural world while providing strategies and consideration for application.
We know that growth is all about challenge and the cycles of those challenges. Living systems are based on cycles, too: life, new iterations, death, life again. In an ecosystem, if a challenge is too simple or too difficult, the living thing will be thrown out of balance, and the results of the imbalance usually become concrete and visible. There is a sweet spot to being with challenges, and living systems actually have a lot to say about where you can find those sweet spots and why it matters. This keynote/workshop topic will help you understand where you might be selling yourself, your students, or your staff short when it comes to challenges. We'll use examples and metaphors from the living world to better understand how to concretely create more challenges in our work spaces, and you'll leave with a clearer understanding of why and when to push others and yourself, too.
Sure, there are benefits to standardization, but the thing is, they're often short-term benefits, especially when it comes to elements of the human workplace. This keynote or workshop will give you the opportunity to identify the standardization around you that's causing stagnation and sacrificing longer-term benefits, remember who you are, and create space for you to do your unique work in this world. We'll discuss this concretely with strategies and practices you'll be able to use immediately. If you work with students, we can apply these learnings to your work in helping them be their most creative selves, too.
You're interested in kicking off a new project: founding a school, creating an educational business, organizing a homeschool co-op, or something else. You have the confidence and understanding to build your project on a regenerative foundation. It's not as easy as it seems in a world where extractive, industrial paradigms show up deeply in our structures.
Sarah will help you move forward with a connection-based approach and energizing regenerative principles you'll be excited to apply to your new foundation.
Do not remodel on top of a faulty foundation! We'll work together to discuss principles based in regeneration, processes for determining your core values within your work and your ecosystem, then we'll put together your vision and mission statements that represent your role in a new, regenerative world. Importantly, we'll make sure this new orientation is supported with structures, so your mission statement doesn't just go in a folder to die and is reflected on as a nice thought exercise for everyone. We'll plan these structures with relationships in mind.
While we often work with schools, we have worked with nonprofits and businesses in the past here, too.
You are new to your identity as a leader or maybe just new to your specific leadership role, and you're wanting to find your voice as a leader for a regenerative future, instead of aligning to an outdated hierarchical, power-over structure. Sarah can help you find not only who you are as a leader, but how to use your voice to clearly communicate to folks in your ecosystem, becoming the leader who is making huge inroads for a more regenerative future.
Perhaps you would like to add a class, club, professional development series to your school that has to do with identifying where we have industrial, extractive practices and mindsets, and seeing how we can replace them with regenerative practices, and you need one that is 100% customized to your exact audience, place, and needs.
You've got no space for teaching anything new, but you're interested in someone looking at what you're currently teaching and developing practices and principles that weeds out extractive mindsets and weaves in regenerative thinking. We're not adding an "extra thing". We're enhancing what's already there.
What is the problem you are trying to solve or the change you're trying to make widely, and how can we do it through a regenerative lens? We have hundreds of hours of experience creating and training on train-the-trainer models that solve your problems using regenerative principles. We can create engaging trainings that relate regenerative practices to a problem/solution in your work, and then supportively share and train individuals to internalize these workshops to be more widely shared within your network.
Given that we're soaked in an extractive, industrial culture, the default creation point of most of our documentation, procedures, and more are from a place of mechanization. We'll take a look at important documents, policies, and/or norms at your school, organization, business, institution, and provide suggestions to change those documents but more importantly: use those changes as a foundation for instruction in making changes in your institution.
This multi-day, immersive workshop in design-thinking with a regenerative frame will bring your team to shared visions and solutions for larger pivots, re-sets, and more to avoid remodeling on top of a faulty foundation. This is about the idea you want to bring to life as an organization, a problem you want to solve, a foundation you want to reimagine.
Our methodology centers on your team's participation as you work together to design solutions based in regenerative principles and collaborative processes. Save time in the long run, ensure every voice in your team or school is heard, and learn useful bite-sized exercises you can use in your own classrooms or meetings as well as the larger design process you can replicate to design solutions for the next problem. You'll walk away with a process, next steps you've already begun, and an energized team.
Where to focus: Is it this or that high-quality curriculum? SAT scores? STEAM? SEL? DEI? Culturally Responsive Teaching? Respectful Parenting? Yoga in the classroom? Sure. But when we bucket all of those things (vital as they are or seem to be!), we're forgetting to answer the question: What is education for? What could education be for?
If you're interested in backwards planning from there with us...
You're in the right place.
"Sarah and Jess blew me away with the ridiculous quantity of research and scientific knowledge that supports every aspect of this learning framework.
They are living proof that these practices open up the energy to get shit done, as they have clearly accessed whole new levels of energy to produce this amazing workshop while also holding down careers and families. The structure, graphics, and pacing of the framework that they share make understanding the purpose of the vast number of positive practices very accessible and meaningful. The tools embedded into the workshop make it realistic to actually put these ideas into practice. Utter respect."
- meredith Charpantier, teacher
“I thought I was impacting my students on a daily basis, but Sarah taught me to raise the bar with engaging them in academic talk. GAME CHANGER in my room.
They learned to respectfully resepond to one another and our classroom transformed with considerate conversation about content. I am truly grateful for the year of coaching I had with her and the knowledge she shared with me.
- Traci Athanason
900
approximate amount of classroom lessons around which Sarah has personally coached 1-1
100%
survey results from workshop participants who said we exceeded their expectations
3
years we've spent developing our regenerative TOLIFE! Framework for educators
approximate amount of hours of workshops and talks Sarah & Jess have lead on the topic of regenerative ed
550
"This program was a wonderful introduction into sustainable, holistic, and human models of education.
Sarah and Jess were fantastic and encouraged all thoughts, ideas, and connections we made as learners. They fostered a supportive environment with various ways to access the material."
- S.A.
“This program provided unique benefits to me as an autistic adult interested in helping to make education more universally accessible for all learners.
It not only helped me clarify a direction for my future work in this area, but it gave me space to engage in much needed conversations that facilitated my ongoing social-cultural-linguistic development and helped me engage in more playful and creative ways of thinking overall.
- S. W.
"Not only was it valuable for myself, but I am now able to share this information in an easy to understand and accessible ways to my students and colleagues"
- Stephanie
come on!
We can't wait to show you the possibilities when we remember ourselves as a part of a living system.