The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness

I recently read a fascinating book, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness by Christopher M. Bache. For those of you interested in work on generative dialogue and ways to bring a group of people into synergistic ways to think, learn and create together, this book is well worth the read. In business leaders often move from department to department, starting over as they grow a new team to identify challenges, vision stretch goals and then work again a plan to realize these shared goals. One of the phenomena that most interested me was his reporting on energy fields and how a new class would seem to pick up where the former class left off. How can that be? Yet well-known research with rats done decades earlier suggests that once new learning is discovered it becomes like an energy field, there for all others to tune into.

I’m always hungry to keep stretching my own capacity to learn, lead and team effectively as well as to bring to all our clients some of the most powerful ways to leverage the collective intelligence possible and strategies to grow learning organizations. There are plenty of fresh insights one can experiment with by focusing on the ways we team within our families, work place and communities. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline cites that Bache leads us to rediscover our hidden connectedness. If you choose to read this engaging book, you will become keenly aware that we can’t harm others without it coming back to us. The illusion of being separate beings is just that, an illusion. And that has huge implications as to how we lead and nurture all those in our work places and lives.