Pedagogical strategies for SPT teaching

Here we will present different themes that we have been working with while developing our SPT teaching strategies.

We are Liv Fabricius, Andrea Chlopczik, Anders Fabricius, and Vivian Fabricius. We have worked together in different constellations and had different types of SPT training, SPT courses, and retreats in Sweden since 2015. Together we have worked systematically to develop the pedagogical approach that we use in our SPT teaching. Here you will find a few examples of what we have been working with and some reflections on that.

Find your authentic SPT expression!

Arawana has given us a genuine and situationally adapted SPT training. When we teach SPT we would like to be as faithful as possible to that way of working.

Arawana’s teaching and work methods are based on a complete internalization of the work she conveys. As practitioners it takes years of training to reach some degree of internalization of the SPT training. For us it has requires both courage and trust to realize that when we teach from an authentic place in ourselves, it will be a different expression than Arawana’s. We think that this is a “problem” that you always must deal with, when knowledge is conveyed in a teacher-student relationship.

So; you should not copy your teacher’s authentic expression, you should instead find your own authentic expression.

Work with general challenges

We have put a great deal of effort into how we can make the various SPT exercises as accessible as possible. We have observed at what stages of the training we encounter resistance or confusion. According to those observations we have worked on and tested new ways of working to get around those more general problems in our teaching.

An example of this is that when we introduced new participants to the Dance of Five or Village, we noticed that some participants found it very uncomfortable when we worked with slightly longer sequences straight away.

Liv Fabricius discovered that particularly new participants, but also more experienced participants, was learning and understanding the exercises much faster when we worked in shorter sequences that was repeated several times. So we started working with short sequences of movement, around 1-2 minutes, followed by reflections and conversations in the group. Then a new sequence of movement, with new instructions based on the reflections on the first sequence. By repeating this process of shorter learning loops, the practitioners gets into the work faster, with less confusion and more precision.

After researching the method as a prototype, and developing it, this has become our new normal when we teach those exercises.

So; discover general teaching challenges and investigate alternative ways to improve your teaching.

Teach in teams or pairs

Some “problems” or challenges in the teaching situation comes from the teachers themselves, from the teacher’s blind spots. Everyone who teaches has different habits and personality traits, that for better or for worse affects the teaching.

You cannot see your own blind spots, therefore you need feedback from the outside. In this case the best way of illuminating the blind spots is to invite colleagues to give you feedback and mirror you. Colleagues who are actually on site in the situation.

That’s why we work in teams or pairs as often as possible. That turns every teaching situation into an opportunity to learn and improve the teaching skills from the feedback from the colleagues or from the inspiration it might bring to see a colleague teach.

Reflecting together with a colleague on what went well and what could be improved provides a great opportunity for development, as long as one is open to the feedback and one dares to let go of the prestige and any defensiveness. This requires as certain level of trust and courage in order to work out in a good and constructive way, and it may need some practice.

So; work with people you trust and be open to feedback as a way to enhance your teaching skills and understand your blind spots.

Process-oriented teaching

We try to have several levels of educational strategies at the same time while teaching SPT courses and retreats. This is something we have developed over time. In the beginning our focus was to teach how to do the various SPT exercises. The feeling was that we had certain material to get through within the normal two-days SPT basic course format, but that it could feel fragmented.

As it stands today, we teach much more process-oriented. A course of two days or a retreat of five days is not only about teaching how to do the SPT exercises, but also an overall process, a U process using the SPT exercises as tools.

We still introduce each exercise in the same way as before, with the care and the view we have learned from Arawana. The difference is that the exercises are put into the context of the overall U process that the course is shaped after. This way new layers of learning are added, as the participants not only understand how to execute the exercises but also deepens their understanding of the exercises as they also have experienced it within a context.

You can compare it to how you can learn to use a hammer. You can stand and hammer a lot of nails into a plank to practice the skill of hammering. But you can also get to know the hammer by building a fence or nail new panels on your house. Either way, you get to know how to use the tool, it is just two different educational strategies. In our experience it does bring a wider and deeper understanding of the tool by using it within a context, in our case the overall U-process shaping the courses.

So; For us learning is reinforced and makes more sense, when placed in a context.

Awareness is emphasized in our teaching

SPT’s main foundation is built on assets from three main areas: creative expressions, systems science, and contemplative practices. Since all of us, who are teaching SPT, have different backgrounds and experiences, we are also more or less rooted in the different areas that SPT builds on. The results is that the teaching takes on different nuances and different teacher emphases different aspects of the work.

The four of us are deeply rooted in a spiritual path that we started long before SPT entered our lives, and we have all been in intensive meditation training. Therefore, it has become natural that we emphasize the awareness part or the contemplative part of the SPT training when we teach.

We used to have separate courses in meditation and in SPT, and we still do, but now it can be difficult to discover the difference between the two. The two paths have become more integrated in us when we teach. The meditation training naturally supports the SPT teaching and the other way around. Our experience is that the two assets support and reinforce each other rather than dilute or weaken each other.

For example, Anders Fabricius has been authorized by his meditation teacher, Jes Bertelsen, to give advanced meditation training based on the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition. And somehow this goes completely hand in hand with the SPT training, a seemingly happy marriage.

So; be true to your roots and skills, without diluting or manipulating your SPT.