"a roving, spacious and also cozy study space"
Want to include a Supportive Spiral in your online community?
Set up a time to chat with Cassandra to see if you are a good match for one another.
Cassandra is offering to host Supportive Spiral gatherings within diverse online communities.
She is choosing to offer this with the personal intentions of meeting new friends and colleagues and practicing the art and craft of holding space for belonging, change and (un)learning.
More about Cassandra
Cassandra hosts virtual gatherings that inspire, nurture, and connect. She studies service and experience design. She dances and practices yoga. She loves to be in nature and remember that she and all of us are nature.
She serves as a Creative Partner, a role she is iteratively co-designing with her first creative partnership client. As a Creative Partner, she supports creative people in bringing their creative projects to life, whether it's podcasts, children's books, digital products, and more projects as as the process unfolds with more partners.
Read here for more about Cassandra
Why do this?
As a lover of learning, Cassandra has observed and experienced firsthand that many course creators often miss out on the opportunity to support their participants' extended learning beyond the timeframe of their live course.
When she started observing this pattern (and before the self-awareness, experiencing the pattern herself), she realized this, of course, isn't only a phenomenon within the more recent pandemic-related expansion of online learning but it's a phenomenon within all places of learning.
How does a learner continue their own learning journey after they finish the book? ...after they finish the training?
And, perhaps more importantly, what about all the learners who don't finish the book during the class but want to pick it up again after the class is long over (raises hand)?
What about all those learners who excitedly step back into a curriculum only to lose momentum right away due to feeling lost on how to re-engage?
a bold question
What if we don't need more knowledge chugging out of our brains and fingers and more containers of communities of practice or private memberships to hold all that "more" but rather we need more time, space, and containers for learning, synthesizing, digesting, and playing with all the knowledge that's already out there?
(Speaking from an American millennial perspective here) What if, through our capitalist consumer ways of living, we've misinterpreted, mismanaged, and maybe even abused what learning is all about?
What if learning is a spiral? (It is)
What if each person takes a different amount of time and space to process new learning? (We do)
What if...?
To you, the learner: What if you could receive the support you need to joyfully re-engage with the material sources you have paid good money for?
What if you could gain the momentum that you deeply yearn for in your personal and professional development?
What if you could know that you aren't constantly letting yourself down by not following through but instead know that you have the superpower of connecting with humans who can meaningfully hold you with a sense of collective care?
What if you could experience a way of learning that reveals that the weight of learning isn't solely for the individual to bear but can be generously and compassionately shared within a network of learners?
To you, the course creator: What if you making a course and not offering pathways forward beyond the timeframe of the course (and within that same course because no, buying another course from you isn't what I mean) does a massive disservice to your learners?
What if you could invite them into a supportive spiral study room where they could do that synthesizing, digesting, and playing that you do genuinely want them to do with your material but you simply aren't equipped to offer that space-holding for them?
To you, the community host: What if you could give your community members a way to actually integrate the new knowledge that they receive within and beyond your community?
What if you could offer your community members a transitional bridge between knowledge intake and active production?
What if you could hold space for your community members to more deeply resource themselves, resource one another, and in turn, resource your community?
a Supportive Spiral enters from Stage Left:
Introducing the Supportive Spiral: "a roving, spacious and also cozy study space"
It's a virtual gathering to synthesize all that you want to learn.
Bring all the half-finished online courses.
Bring all the just started workbooks.
Bring it to a Supportive Spiral and you'll have space, time, and care shared with you so that you can savor the learning and synthesization process.
Bring it all to a Supportive Spiral so that you can learn in community with fellow learners who are equally curious about learning and life.
Though many miss out on the opportunity to savor, it doesn't mean you have to as well.
This is a lovely opportunity for you as a learner to join and reclaim your role as the captain of your lifelong learning ship (cheesy much? yeah, I know and yes, I am).
This is a lovely opportunity for you as a community host to give space for your members to be the captains of their own lifelong learning ships.
This is a lovely opportunity for you as a course creator to give space for your students to be the captains of their lifelong learning ships.
Are you a community host or course creator? Set up a time to chat with Cassandra about including a Supportive Spiral in your online community. Cassandra will start to host one a month and would love to schedule one with you and your community in the near future.
Want to bring a Supportive Spiral to a community you are a member of? Fill out this form to connect Cassandra to your community host.
Want to join a Supportive Spiral but not a part of an online community? Fill out this form to share your interest in taking part in one that's not connected to an online community. As interest builds Cassandra would love to host a Supportive Spiral in an open invite format.
Supportive Spiral Process by Cassandra Louise Ellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work here at www.bewithcassandra.com/supportive-spiral.