Hi Friends,
Just like that it’s July! It’s getting hot out there. We’ve seen our first ninety-degree temps of the summer and are doing our best to keep cool. Several of you have asked for a progress report on the book. Things are coming along super well. The copyediting and layout work for all the chapters is complete! Huge shoutout to Adrian for all her hard work! It’s rather surreal reading an awesome ebook that we wrote! We’re deliberately trying to take this process slow to allow for lots of reflection and time to enjoy and learn from every aspect of this familial labor of love. We truly appreciate your patience. What’s next? Once we’ve all given the beautiful final draft a read, we’ll compile testimonials, finalize our acknowledgements, introduction, contents and conclusion, copyright the contents, then set up pre-order opportunities on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Timelines are fluid but we anticipate doing all that in the next month or so.
One of the tools Siva loves to use in his educational consulting practice is the Kolb Cycle of experiential education, which we’ve seen at play at every step of this book experience. The Kolb Cycle goes through Active Experimentation, Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation, and Abstract Conceptualization. Working with educators, students, and families around the world, we’ve found the greatest challenge is often finding time for reflection, as we all tend to get lost in the weeds of the day to day, managing endless to-do lists, and fighting fires that inevitably crop up. The irony is that, upon reflection, we consistently find that engaging in the reflective process is often where the greatest learning happens. A beautiful feature of the book writing and publication process is that it takes time, time we’ve learned to embrace and not take for granted.
When we embarked on this journey about a year ago, we made it a point to highlight reflection at every step of the way, following this cycle. After our first ideation session, we came up with tons of stories we thought might be fun to share. We then reflected on our list, highlighting takeaways from each story, iterated, and eventually reached a set of stories we were happy with. Then came the writing. Cycle again. Every chapter. Similar process. After writing, we reviewed, reflected, and put our reflections down on paper. Cycle again. Then the edit process. Cycle again. What’s remarkable about this is that every step of the process brought a feeling of renewed excitement and joy. We understand life happens and everyone has different life circumstances. That said, we encourage you to take a little time, whenever you can, to reflect on your experiences and learn from them.
Cheers!
The Sankrithi Family