Goals & Schedule

Community

In your relationships with teachers, with children, and with the larger Children First community, we hope you will…

  • Demonstrate an open-minded and open-hearted curiosity about other people, and an awareness and appreciation of diversity.
  • Develop empathy – an ability to listen to and take the perspective of others, and to see that their rights and needs are as “real” as your own.
  • Show others kindness, compassion, courtesy and respect, and communicate your own needs clearly, so that others know how to treat you with kindness, compassion, courtesy and respect in turn.
  • Feel a sense of belonging – of caring connection and shared history. Know you have an unconditional place in a “we” that embraces and celebrates your unique “me.”
  • Build mutually enriching, joyful and enduring friendships
  • Fall head over heels in love, at least once, with someone or something that is part of your life in this community.
  • Collaborate in work, play and learning.
  • Ask for help when you need it.
  • Practice being both a leader and a follower.
  • Learn to engage in lively, respectful discourse with both adults and children, and to resolve conflicts so that everyone’s needs are met.
  • Question authority, and actively participate in the co-construction of community agreements that support and protect safety, freedom and joy.
  • Share responsibility for the care of our classroom and community.
  • Come to see all the people in your community as teachers, and learn more about their work, their stories, their expertise, their passions, and their cultural traditions.
  • Come to understand that your well-being is inextricably connected to the well-being of all; develop the will, knowledge and skills that enable you to align your choices and actions with that understanding; and grow the imagination and agency to envision and work towards a world organized for love, freedom and joy.

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