All our workshops and courses are tailor-made to fit your organization’s needs. Workshops and courses can be given in English or Dutch.
Contact us at: info@connecting2life.net
NVC in schools:
We deeply believe that one of the most powerful ways to create the world we wish to live in is to bring to and live NVC in our relationships with young people, who will in turn carry it out into their lives as a strong base for how they interact, cooperate and engage with others, as well as with animals and nature, in a deeply creative and caring way.
We have the following programs in place (You can click on each one to see more details):
→ Anti-bullying program for schools: Beyond right and wrong
→ Trainer
NVC Course for teachers:
Teachers often find themselves stressed out, trying to hold everything together:to manage a required amount of material in a limited amount of time;to keep order in the class; and to deal with parents, children, colleagues and staff. This clearly requires powerful communication skills!
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a set of skills and principles focused on the concrete HOW TO create a quality of connection and cooperation, even during stressful situations.NVC is looking at the source of conflict- what is it in the language we speak that is the source of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, and distance between people? It proposes a concrete alternative that brings clarity to daily situations and encourages cooperation and understanding between people.
During this training, we will address:
❀ Self connection for teachers How to care for your emotional well-being in and out of the classroom
❀ Connecting with children How to listen to children and hear their true message and resolve conflicts without using punishment or reward
❀ Relating to Parents: How to create cooperative, peaceful relationships with parents, where they can experience being heard and included
❀ Relating to colleagues and staff: How to address issues with one another in a way that can avoid conflict and increase understanding
NVC course for teenagers:
Teenagers have a lot to navigate: school, friendship, parents, love, sex, peer pressure, alcohol and drugs, bullying and cyber-bullying, health and body image…and all this within a landscape of changing hormones. An NVC course for teenagers gives them clear tools to use in order to gain understanding towards others and themselves. It improves relationships with teachers, parents and other adults as well as with peers.
During this course we will address:
❀ Self connection How to care for health and general well-being
❀ Connecting with peers How to express honestly and listen empathically to peers
❀ Relating to teachers and other adults: How to create mutually respectful relationships with adults.
❀ How to deal with (cyber)bullying: How to understand what bullying is, where it comes from and what to do about it.
Anti-bullying program for schools: Beyond right and wrong
Administrators: a two-hour informative presentation
Teachers: minimum 6 hours, suggested: 18 hours
Students: minimum 6 hours, suggested 12 hours
This program is designed to establish and maintain systems in the school environment to create harmony, understanding and compassion on all levels: for administrators, staff and students.
For administrators there is a two-hour presentation, to bring awareness of the content of the program and the basics of the concepts being taught.
During this training, teachers receive the basics in Nonviolent Communication. It provides a framework from which they can implement listening and speaking skills that foster compassion. They will gain insight into judgemental language that blocks communication and receive tools for handling conflicts.
Students will attend workshops to learn the basics of Nonviolent Communication. They will gain insights into bullying behaviours and the effect that has on others, and even gain understanding of the pain in the heart of the bullier. This is the power of NVC, to go beyond right and wrong to, understanding what motivates humans to do things and to search ways to care for everyone’s well-being.
Team Emotional Hygiene:
Cordelia comes on location to facilitate team meetings in which tensions between members can be discussed and worked through using the four steps of Nonviolent Communication. Tensions experienced between team members, parents or students, can be worked through using the four steps. Because Nonviolent Communication brings clarity to the language we speak and way of thinking that is the source of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, and distance, these meetings can support a concrete alternative that brings clarity to daily situations and encourages cooperation and understanding between people.
Cordelia works in a teaching team herself which has used Team Emotional Hygiene since 2015, and she assists other teaching teams to use this method. She calls TEH the “glue” that keeps the team together.
Trainer:
Cordelia Addison is a Nonviolent Communication certified trainer and mediator. She is the founder of Democratic School Amsterdam, an alternative private school for primary and secondary education. She has been a staff member, board member and teacher at the school since 2015. Before teaching in school, she provided English language training in businesses for 20 years in the Netherlands. Her passion for bringing Nonviolent Communication into education led her to founding the school and to becoming a certified trainer. She now shares her knowledge and skills with schools throughout the Netherlands and elsewhere, supporting students, teachers and administrators to learn concrete tools for increasing understanding and compassion, preventing bullying and creating harmony in the school environment. Besides being a school founder and teacher, she is also a mother with two sons and two stepsons, all now adults.