Ginott's Letter To Teachers

I was listening to a discussion this morning about how someone like Assad, a trained doctor, who has sworn the hippocratic oath, could be capable of such inhumanity toward the Syrian people.

It made me think about the inhumanity displayed every day in our own country against people with disabilities, some deeply vicious inhumanity from people in the form of hate crime, and a mundane and insidious inhumanity from the bureaucracies and systems designed to deliver support to people with disabilities.

I remembered this poem written by Haim Ginott back in 1972, that describes why merely educating people is not enough.

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

Children poisoned by educated physicians.

Infants killed by trained nurses.

Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.

Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

We tend to believee that a good education somehow makes us better people. Certainly in human services there's a very strong culture of valuing people's qualifications. But if those qualifications become a barrier between us and our humanity, then something is going wrong.

What helps us become more human? How do we prevent ourselves from being well educated, highly efficient agents of dehumanisation?

Ground Rules for Person Centred Thinking and Planning

Linkability's Person Centred Planning Task Group
wrote these ground rules for their
meetings

Whenever we do any kind of person centred thinking or planning, we try to establish ground rules with the focus person and the group.
One set of things to establish early with the person is exactly WHO will be involved, (and often also who won't be involved) which will usually be determined by the purpose of the planning. It's important that we're clear with the person about how we're going to keep them involved or informed about those conversations. We also establish whether any particular topics are 'off limits', or need to be thought about at a different place, perhaps with a different set of people.

There are also rules that can determine how the meeting will be conducted. Often the participants will generate these themselves, but facilitators often have a few rules up their sleeves that they might seek the person and the group's agreement to.

Agreeing a set of ground rules is also a kind of ritual that separates the planning session and planning space from the concerns of normal everyday life. They're a way of saying 'for the next hour or so, we're going to focus solely on the work of thinking together with this person, in a way that requires our careful and mindful attention'. They also make sure that people feel safe and orientated within this space, they understand what is expected behaviour. They're also a summary of the key skills involved in person centred work. It's no accident that the first 3 rules all relate to listening well and welcoming diverging viewpoints in a way that makes sense to all involved.

The rules belong to the whole group, and the whole group has permission to invoke and use them. The person they apply to most of all is the facilitator of the group. They must embody the rules because if they don't follow them, then nobody will.
Here's a short list of possible group ground rules, then an explanation of why those rules are there:

Everyone’s views are welcome.

Listen with respect.

No Jargon

Speak from the heart as well as the head

No fixing

No obsessing/5 minute rule

Inperfect spelling is OK

Do what you need to do to be here/misery is optional

We believe everyone’s views are welcome because the person and everyone who knows and cares about the person and has been invited to participate can impart valuable knowledge that will help us support that person better.

It’s necessary to listen with respect because this is how we make sure that everyone’s views are welcomed. We’ve learned that good listening that gives people time to think helps people think and express themselves better

Jargon is banned because it’s a way that one group of people can maintain power over another. It’s a private language that excludes the person, their family and frontline staff from the discourse. It can be used as camouflage for deep ignorance. If you really understand a concept, you should be able to explain it in everyday English.

We ask people to speak from the heart as well as the head because Person Centred Thinking deals with the world of feelings and emotions as much as the world of facts. We want people in the meeting to feel able to express their emotions so that this is a real discussion about someone’s life, not just a business transaction.

No fixing. We’re not here to ‘fix’ the person, we must ‘accept the person, change the situation’. Nor do we wish to jump quickly to the easiest and most obvious solution. Sometimes spending a bit more time gathering information and defining the problem will help us find actions that are far more creative and productive.

We don’t want to get obsessed with a small detail, or spend more than 5 minutes discussing issues that the people in the room can do nothing about. If we do get stuck on issues like this, anyone can invoke the ‘5 minute rule’, the facilitator can write the issue down, so that it can be taken to the people who CAN do something about it.

Person centred work is not a spelling test. We need all that rich person centred information that’s in people’s heads. So inperfect spelling is OK.

Misery is optional, We want everyone to feel comfortable during our work! If something’s making you uncomfortable, do something about it!

What ground rules do you use in your own person centred planning?