The Large is a Replication of the Small

When I first began leading trainings in Mindfulness and Restorative Practices (RP), I was still an educator. I had no interest in becoming a consultant but the school counselor became interested in what I was doing in my classroom. She asked,

"Kids seems happy in your class. You haven't sent anyone to the office this year and yet you have some of the toughest kids. What's going on in there?"

I was shy in my response because of how Mindfulness and RP is often viewed as "hippy dippy" or "too soft." But, she was a colleague I trusted so I said,

"I do some Mindfulness and circles. We have class agreements and talk about things like 'what does respect really mean.'"

I filled her in on my approach of using short check in and connection circles to build relational "ballast" in the room between students. And how we spent a week learning about the brain and how it does and doesn't work well under stress. We shared what it looks like for us when we are stressed and not able to be our best selves AND we took turns describing what we needed from others in those moments.

At the end of those first few weeks of every year everyone in the room had a "behavior plan" — including me. These "plans" were basic strategies we could use ourselves and with each other to keep our community on track. In this way, everyone became responsible for the collective wellbeing of the learning community we were forging.

It was not perfect. In fact, some days were miserable as we did the hard work of learning how to be together, how to resolve conflict together, how to support each other effectively. But we always got there and it made teaching a joyful collaboration instead of an exhausting game of "wack a mole."

The reason I became a consultant was because I began to see the "small" work I did in my classroom ripple out and impact the large. Other teachers asked if I would teach them. Those teachers experienced big changes. Students asked for circles. On and on it went until I chose to become a consultant full time.

After we started Starling Collaborative I read a book called Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown. In those pages I found the words that would inspire and encourage me and the Starling team in this sometimes challenging work of supporting whole school change:

How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.

I knew we were on the right track when I saw the murmuration of starlings on the book cover and read that adrienne was as inspired by how they move together as I am.