Well, folks, I finally spent a night (two nights!) away from my sweet little guy. There were moments of sadness here and there, but he had a great weekend with Matt and I was thoroughly absorbed and distracted by the workshop I attended!
I am partway through the process of becoming officially certified by ICEA to teach childbirth classes, though I have been doing so through the hospital for 9+ months now. One of the requirements for my certification pathway is to attend a 2-day in-person training with a certified teacher trainer. I have been looking forward to this for almost a year, and this one finally coincided location and schedule wise. I am so glad that I chose the workshop through Mothering the Mother and Michelle!
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Michelle is an experienced birth doula, massage therapist, post partum doula, and childbirth educator who runs a non-profit in Wisconsin called Mothering the Mother. It sounds exactly like the kind of maternity services that Broome County could use - meeting many emotional, psychosocial, educational and logistic needs of expectant families. Five other students and I gathered in the cozy living room of her hotel suite for two 8-9 hour days outlining a wide variety of topics and techniques in childbirth education with this wonderful woman. There were laughs, conversations, the sweet coos of a 6 month squishy squish, booty bumps (kidding, kind of), and ah-hah moments had by all. It was such a relief to have exactly the kind of guidance I had been craving on how to develop a curriculum, how to evaluate that my teaching was effective, how to broach potentially difficult subjects, how to include partners, how to make everyone feel heard, and much more!
Michelle, who humbly insists that she is not creative, is actually wildly creative and innovative as an instructor! She introduced us to so many things that, to quote her, I had "missed the boat" on thus far. Things like making sure that you have a way to know whether your students understand the material - in other words not just talking AT them, but checking for understanding. Making sure that you are considering the needs of both parents and the family as a whole in addition to mom's as an individual. Making sure that as an instructor, you are examining your biases and checking yourself. My very favorite activity was on day two. I won't give away the specifics but it forced me to examine my assumptions about certain situations, and hear different points of view. Ultimately for this activity the group had to come to a consensus and the overarching theme was "it depends on so many things". There are always two sides to the pancake!
In true "practice what you preach" mentality, Michelle had us take breaks at the appropriate intervals for adult learners (60-90 minutes, folks!), get up and move around, teach each other, and shift between hands-on activities, lecture, video, movement, return demonstration, quizzes (whether overt or covert), and brainstorming. Sometimes you didn't know until partway through or until the end of the activity that it was a META activity about teaching. Importantly, she let us know whenever something was going to be important for our upcoming exam, even if it does not seem relevant to our particular venue or population. She exhibits a great balance between letting everyone speak and participate and reigning in the class if we got too off-topic; exhibiting leadership without being domineering.
So inspired was I by this weekend that today (my first day back home), I had to rush out to Five Below to purchase supplies for the new activities I want to try in class. I'll share these later in another post.
Many thanks to Michelle & to the other participants of the workshop!
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