The Compassion and Cognition Framework

The Goal:

Shaping your talents and experience to grow professionally

Tools and Topics: 

• Securing mentors and nurturing your career trajectory
• Building leadership skills
• Maintaining motivation: the difference you make
• Rediscovering a vocation vs. forging a new one
• Managing fear and perceived threats in the workplace
• Quieting your harsh inner judge
• Using criticism as fuel
• Do-anywhere breathing and mindset exercises

The Goal:

Creating a school filled with energy and expertise that serves students, teachers, administrators, and parents

Tools and Topics:

• Proactive communication as a hallmark of healthy culture
• Establishing and scaling an empathy approach: compassion as action
• Collaboration models for projects and groups of all types and sizes
• Defining and creating an inclusive environment
• When positivity is negative: making sure your brand of positivity is nontoxic
• Tools over talk: how to create solutions, not noise
• Guidance over platitudes: how to apply practices, not bandages
• Onboarding teachers, faculty, and staff
• Teaching the teachers: from head knowledge to shared resources
• Developing the critical support: guidance counselors, specialists, aides, and nurses

The Goal:

Minimizing tension anywhere it occurs in your school using proactive communication and a posture of curiosity.

Tools and Topics:

• Jennifer’s famous Calm The Friends Down (CTFD) model for diffusing conflict and forging alliances
• Solving people problems between and among students, parents, teachers, and administrators
• Addressing and managing anger
• Reacting with compassion to build credibility and trust
• Avoiding the amygdala hijack: brain science awareness
• Distinguishing character issues from typical behavior issues
• Learning experience or trauma: creating the former, not the latter
• Chemistry, genetics, and experience: discovering different lenses through which we view situations
• Managing intrusive parents
• Working with unions

The Goal:

Setting up and leading classes for an entire year of learning, calm, and fun.

Tools and Topics:

• Safety means consistency: creating welcoming spaces via clear expectations, shared rules, and predictable responses
• Engaging the full range of learning styles and speeds
• Scaling your results in the age of personalized learning
• Empowering students on their learning journey
• Teaching social awareness
• Communication methods for parents and families
• Managing the unpredictables: pandemics, emergencies, and other events beyond our control
• Managing the repeatables: discipline, learning struggles, and other challenges within our control
• Best practice classroom SOPs in a high-tech, fast-paced world

The Goal:

Facilitating buy-in among all stakeholders regarding educational programs, courses, and materials

Tools and Topics:

• Presenting and communicating Common Core
• Navigating the political climate, particularly during election years
• The whole photo vs. the individual pixels: how the big picture builds consensus and collaboration
• How and why to embrace controversy rather than avoid it

The Goal:

Making progress in the areas that matter in an environment of competing priorities and tasks

Tools and Topics:

• Overcoming overwhelm for good: priority setting and productivity on things that move the needle
• Transforming a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset
• How to be all-in without getting burned out
• Measuring success: How and what to evaluate in order to protect your objectives