by Denise Flora

Kadampa Center in Raleigh, North Carolina has been using 16 Guidelines as the curriculum for the children's Sunday classes for four years now under the coordination of Valerie Jones. About 30 children from infants through teens attend in five concurrent children's classes during the weekly teachings. Last year a new classroom building was moved onto the property to help accommodate the need for classroom space. This spring two new co-coordinators have stepped up to take the program forward: Erin Sloan and Linda Saah. About 25 teachers and assistants volunteer with the program. Personally, this is my home center, and I have been helping to lead the 4th grade through 12 year old class and supporting teacher training.

This spring we began a more extensive offering of training experiences for the teachers at Kadampa Center. The first of these was offered May 1 where I presented a program on the subject of How we Think or The power of the mind. At this training attended by more than half of the volunteers, I tried to focus on giving the teachers experiences to draw from, rather than a list of exercises to do with the children. We covered Humility and Patience, touched on mindfulness, visualization, perception, optical illusion, selective attention, the potential for transformation, neuroplasticity, paradox of choice, synthesized happiness, different learning styles and did new exercises like snake breath and magic string. I gave out suggested booklists.

Essential Education is a way of learning everything such that we are thinking about the important ideas like interconnectedness, patience, respect, no matter what we are learning, so we connect our lives to these. In particular I suggested the teachers each take some time to determine who their personal role models were for the guideline they were about to teach. For example for humility they listed these qualities for their role models: laughs at self, always willing to listen, not prideful, gives without expecting something in return, willing to be wrong, confidence, very thankful for others' contributions, open to learn from the kids and their amazing insights. Then I asked them, "How would you practice humility while you are teaching your class?" The answers were similar to the previous list, because the guidelines are the tools, and the teachers are the models.

We are still trying to determine the best balance of presentation/exercises/sharing that will make use of the teachers' limited training time to both learn about fundamentals and share specific exercises and class management strategies with each other. We hope to get together every two months or so for more sharing. Feedback so far from Erin, "I'd like to thank Denise for taking the time to share her expertise with us. I'm very grateful to have such an amazing resource willing to lead our group. " Attendees called the meeting "Motivating" and "Practical".