We believe there is a fundamental error in our society today when it comes to the emotional development in children. When children are born they are treated as empty vessels to be filled. Instead of treating them as full of curiosity, joy and able to achieve. They learn to walk by trial and error and just watch them playing creatively in pure delight. Then they go to school and have to be someone they are not, and that can continue throughout their life – are you one of them?
Creating an environment where children are excited to come to school
The purpose of our TEAL school is to create an environment where children are excited to come to school and to fully express themselves. They are comfortable to be who they really are – to be their genius self. They are able to take off the mask of who they are expected to be, or who they feel they must be. In other words to feel safe, to share their vulnerability and trust everyone around them, their peers, teachers and parents. Students, teachers and parents will design, create and run, in a committed collaboration, our transformative TEAL school.
Three transformative concepts
Our TEAL Schools foundation is three transformative concepts to improve emotional development in children:
1) An evidence based personal development program
Incorporating advanced coaching, emotional literacy and mindfulness techniques. Underpinned by neuroscience to create personal empowerment and self-responsibility it also builds self-esteem, self worth, emotional resilience. Perhaps more importantly life skills, self-responsibility and the emotional development in children. Our innovative evidence based methodology provides a solid foundation to foster these attributes.
2) An evolutionary TEAL company structure comprising three elements
Based on a book by Frederic Laloux “Reinventing Organisations”.
- Self-management: To operate effectively based on a system of peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.
- Wholeness: People no longer have to show only their “professional” self, or hide doubts and vulnerability. Instead, a culture invites everyone to bring all of who they are to school.
- Evolutionary purpose: Instead of trying to predict and control the future, the school has a life and a sense of direction of its own. Everyone is invited to listen in and understand what the school wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve and create.
A Summary of his approach is here and a school case study here.
3) A new way of learning
At the moment we’re considering ‘Topics instead of subjects’ from Finland. One of the leading educational hotspots in the world, is embarking on one of the most radical overhauls in modern education. By 2020, the country plans to phase out teaching individual subjects such as maths, chemistry and physics. Instead they will teach students by ‘topics’ or broad phenomena, so that there’s no more question about “what’s the point of learning this?”
What does that mean exactly? Basically, instead of having an hour of geography followed by an hour of history. Students will now spend, say, two hours learning about the European Union, which covers languages, economics, history and geography. Or students who are taking a vocational course might study ‘cafeteria services’. This would involve learning maths, languages and communication skills. So although students will still learn all the important scientific theories, they’ll be finding out about them in a more applied way.
The world of work is changing
We need to better prepare our students for tomorrows way of working. Rapid development of technology, equipment and software is transforming how we work. To take advantage of this opportunity our students need personal skills like creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship. These skills are embedded in our personal development program.
It’s time to change
How can we expect our students to take responsibility for themselves and make a contribution to society? Some are coming to school tired, hungry, unable to concentrate and leaving school as unemployable. With teachers becoming administrators, exhausted with dealing with bad behaviour and leaving the profession.
Our children need to feel good about themselves, the school structure needs to create mutual respect and trust, we need to prepare our students in a way that fits for today and be flexible for tomorrow. This is our aim – to improve the emotional development in children.
Not only are we facilitating genius in the students, but students will in turn, imbued genius in every teacher, parent and family.
For this project to be successful we need collaborators with a passion to transform education, who are comfortable in themselves and are life-long learners. Contact us if you have the passion.
