In this episode of the Transactional Analysis Podcast, hosts Jr-Earn Lam and Sarah Lowes speak with Cat Cornthwaite (PTSTA-E), an Educational Transactional Analyst working with schools and training institutes to support their relational practice.

Cat taught English in mainstream schools for around thirteen years before moving into training and consultancy full time. Her focus is the educational encounter, and in particular what has to be in place before an encounter can be transformative at all. She draws on the existing TA models together so that we can work from a place of awareness, rather than allowing script beliefs to take hold and lead the encounter.

You’ll hear them explore:

• How the existing TA models can be drawn together to invite an encounter that is truly transformative.
• What we each bring as individuals, how we then exist as a group, the wider systems always at play, and the educational object we have gathered around.
• Working where the system feels stifling: looking to the health, the tension between what we hope to be doing and what we feel we have to do, and why that difficulty cannot be ignored.
• Reflections on the educational script adult learners arrive with.
• A script activity with a room of teachers who felt entirely on the same page, until they were asked what they had understood education to be for.
• Educational TA beyond the surface: the nature of education itself and the wisdom of the educator.
• Hospicing the wound: the work of tending, and an honouring of what was, what is, and what will be.

Guest Information

Cat Cornthwaite (PTSTA-E)

Cat Cornthwaite is an Educational Transactional Analyst working with schools and training institutes to support their relational practice. She taught English in mainstream education for approximately thirteen years before moving into training and consultancy full time. Her area of expertise is the educational encounter.

Cat first came across TA in 2018. Difficulties with her institution’s approach to staff training led her to look at externally funded courses through the teaching union, one of which was a TA 101 delivered by Giles Barrow as a two-day residential with a follow-up day six months later. She was immediately hooked, both by the course itself and by its transformative effect on her, her practice and those she worked with, and wrote to Giles as soon as it finished to ask about further training.

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