Aloha! Welcome to Teaching with Aloha.
One of the reasons I most admire you who are teachers, no matter what you teach, is that I am confident you are a lifelong learner. I am convinced that learning is a superpower, and teaching is the enabling of that superpower, growing it to epic proportions. Therefore, I am delighted to welcome you to a brand new exploration of what I call your Teaching Ho‘ohana: YOUR value-driven intention with learning the art and heart of teaching.
Not a typo: I will explain why “YOUR” is capitalized in a moment.
Our Language of Intention
TWA Glossary Entries:
Learning: A human superpower
Teaching: Enabling and growing the learning superpower
Teaching Ho‘ohana: A teacher’s value-driven intention with learning the art and heart of teaching
And there you instantly have one of the first things you will love about the learning you will experience here at Teaching with Aloha! It took 13 English words for me to say “Teaching” with the distinction of one Hawaiian value [Ho‘ohana]. As you will soon discover, what a vibrant and dynamic distinction it is.
Our intention here is not to teach you Hawaiian; visit Hawai‘i and you’ll discover that the vast majority of us do not speak the language either. However you will learn Hawaiian words for universal values, and many other phrases which altogether do compose a language we will share in our TWA community. Some words will be Hawaiian, some will be English, and some hapa, a combination of the two – like Teaching Ho‘ohana. Collectively we refer to the TWA website construct as our Language of Intention with the art and the heart of teaching.
As a teacher, you know that words are powerful, and language makes our words optimally useful. Hawaiian is beautiful and quite melodious, but here is its true goodness: Hawaiian is a contextual language, not a literal one of word-for-word translation. Hawaiian context primarily refers to personal story (we call this kaona) and a person’s values as connected to innate spirit and learned belief (we call this mana‘o).
Read that last sentence one more time and sit with it for a moment. Getting impatient with the wordiness of English yet?
What this means, is that YOU step into our TWA Language of Intention almost instantly, for the language you will learn here will be brand new: It will develop based on your kaona (your teaching stories) and your mana‘o (your spirit and convictions). With Dean Boyer’s gentle (and brilliant) guidance, it will become YOUR language of intention for your very personal, values-based Teaching Ho‘ohana.
Believe me, you will want to share your language of intention, for when you do your own superpower with learning and Ho‘ohana for teaching grows exponentially! However even if you choose not to share your new language in the “real world” initially, the process of learning the language of your own kaona and mana‘o is one I am confident you will enjoy.
For we both know what an extraordinarily special thing your Teaching Ho‘ohana truly is, don’t we. It is your calling, and very much a part of your Aloha spirit.
Why Choose Values?
Like you, I am a teacher. I am truly in my element when I am working to cultivate the learning superpower. My students are adult learners, and they are workplace managers.
When managers speak of their staff, they talk about wanting an increased sense of responsibility, better reliability and dependability, honesty and integrity, humility and a hunger to do whatever it takes to learn, grow, and improve in the pursuit of excellence. What they are longing for, are “old fashioned” values in the innate character of their staff.
They want these things with good reason. If I was forced to choose just one thing from the revered Business 101 triad of vision, mission, and values for my managers’ toolbox at work, regardless of the kind of company or industry I was in, I would choose values without any hesitation whatsoever.
Why? Quite simple, really. Values determine behavior.
When you
— choose the values which will be the hallmark of the character found within your company, and
— you align all your operational systems and processes with those values, and
— you use your values to create a workplace where people thrive when they practice them,
What you will get, is the performance which separates winners from everyone else, for they are self-managed and self-led. They are self-aware.
As a teacher, you will reveal the self-motivating actions which develop and grow lifelong learners. As you will soon learn, and first do for yourself, your students will become self-aware of their Aloha.
When you choose the right values, you get everything else you need to be successful —including those other two we business people revere; vision and mission, whether personal or professional.
Said another way, in cultivating the learning superpower, values are your secret weapon.
“To manage with Aloha is to draw out the best performance of your own management practice from the values that are inherent in your nature and a match for the demands of your business. To be a great manager, is to realize your success depends on the people you manage, and they are driven by their values just as much as you are. You have to respect their culture, and learn to speak the language of their values. In all likelihood, their values will match up with your own much more than you think.”
—Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business
Choose this Community. Get involved
This has been long enough for a first posting! I can get very excited about these things and keep going on about them endlessly, and I mostly wanted to extend a warm welcome to you for now, and say mahalo, thank you so much for being here – I do appreciate your reading this far!
You may be anxious to hear more about the fullness of Aloha, and I want that for you too, however we shall leave that for Dean, our Mea Ho‘okipa (host) for he is a fabulous teacher. You will read of his kaona and mana‘o for Teaching with Aloha in his welcome.
Then, it will be your turn! Start with a comment for Dean: Introduce yourself and say Aloha. As you continue to read each new posting, please share your art and your heart with us and with each other: We are eager to learn from you too!
When you participate in our conversations you instantly become part of the Ho‘ohana Community of Managing with Aloha practitioners, and you don’t even have to read my book – though that would be quite cool, and may help in an accelerated course should you want turbo-charging with your superpower.
(If you are an administrator who manages others, yes, I am not going to be shy about this: Buy my book! It will help you.)
One last tip: Get an email subscription to keep in touch, for it makes quite a difference in creating the Teaching with Aloha habit. (Habits are a magic potion in MWA, and you can use them too.) Then water the seed of your learning superpower with conversation and connection here in our Teaching with Aloha community. You already have the best fertilizer there is: Kaona (your teaching stories) and Mana‘o (your spirit and convictions).
Hana hou; see how much you have already learned about our Language of Intention? I knew I recognized that lifelong learner in you! This is going to be absolutely joyful.
We Ho‘ohana together, Kākou.
With much aloha,
Rosa
Workplace Aloha Coach and Author Rosa Say
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