Newsletter #1
Human bells of mindfulness
The life of teachers at
school can be frenetic. How can we remember to slow down and pay
attention to the present moment? Several years ago Ann, another
experienced teacher and I were leaving an opening meeting for new teachers,
where I had cautioned them to carefully monitor the number of extra duty
assignments they took on. Ann remarked to me that even without any extra
responsibilities, life at school was already too full. I agreed and made
a suggestion, which I thought could be helpful to both of us. “Every time
we see each other this year, no matter where we are and what we’re doing, let’s
stop, breathe in and out slowly three times and smile to each other.”
Ann was not
a meditator and was not familiar with mindfulness practice.
However, this idea appealed to her. We honored our agreement for the
entire year and grew closer in the process. Eventually Ann became curious
about how the idea of this practice had come to me. I told her about my
mindfulness practice and about using a bell of mindfulness as an invitation to
stop and come back to the present moment. “We are human bells of
mindfulness for each other.” Mindfulness struck a chord in Ann, and she
went on to attend days of mindfulness and mindfulness retreats by herself and
with family members.
Running energy is so
strong that this practice does not work for everyone who is attracted to
it. Recently I tried the practice with a friend who was also very clear
that his life was too full. However, this colleague had difficulty
stopping to smile, even for a moment. I suggest that should you
find a colleague who wants to give the practice a try, you propose a trial
period of a couple of weeks to see whether it works for both of you.
Newsletter #2
Meditate before tests
Quizzes, tests and exams
are major sources of stress for many students. Some come to class already
so stressed out that their ability to show what they know is compromised.
My setting aside five minutes for meditation before the start of quizzes, tests
and exams has proved to be very beneficial for many of my high school math
students. I start this practice before the first quiz by asking the class
if anyone feels nervous. When hands go up, I tell the class that we'll do
a short meditation aimed at reducing stress.
The meditation is in two parts. We turn out the lights, and I ask the
students to sit, eyes closed with their bodies erect but relaxed. In the
first part of the meditation, the students turn their attention to their
feelings, noticing any nervousness, excitement, worry, etc. and simply
letting it be there. Experiencing these emotions is
natural. While some emotions aren't helpful, there is nothing
intrinsically wrong with them. Learning to accept these emotions as
natural parts of ourselves, helps us avoid magnifying their effects on us.
On the other hand, there is more to the students' experience of mathematics
than this quiz and these feelings. So, I next instruct the students to
change their focus and tune into a time when they had a very positive
experience with math. This may be a recent course, project, or activity
or, perhaps, a memory of learning to count or tell time. Sitting with
feelings of accomplishment for a couple of minutes readies the students to
begin the quiz with a positive mindset. I further suggest that if
students find themselves getting nervous as they work, they stop, close their
eyes and slowly breathe in and out three times, getting back in touch with
positive experiences.
Here is an end of the year observation from a 10th grade student:
During the course of this year the meditations
at the beginning of class and before tests and quizzes have really taught me to
relax. At the beginning of the year I would get nervous before tests and
quizzes because I would quickly try to review everything we needed to know, but
for the second half of the year, I learned to clear my head. More importantly,
I learned to breathe! I learned how to clear my mind and trust that I
would remember all of the theorems and formulas. When I was able to clear
my head and relax, I made fewer and fewer mistakes.
As this quote suggests, meditation, once tried
out by the students was not mandatory. I asked students to put away notes
and books and silently use the several minutes before the quiz or test as they
best saw fit, meditating or thinking about the math they had learned or about
anything else. Most, like this student, ended up finding that meditation
was their best option.
Newsletter
#3 The importance of community
One of the things “Our
experience tells us” that you’ll find on the Mindfulness in Education Network (MiEN) Website is that “To effectively teach mindfulness
requires a solid mindfulness practice.” It will not work to ask students
to do as we say not as we do. The solidity of our practice is quite
visible to our students. If we lose our equanimity, they see it. If
we fail to use compassionate speech, they hear it.
What can we do to make
our mindfulness practice more solid? The answer I and most mindfulness
practitioners I know have found is practicing with a community. The
community may be a meditation group, a yoga group, a prayer group, or a group
engaged in some other contemplative practice. It may be a religious group
or a secular group. Communities help our practice in many ways. They
provide a place to practice on a regular schedule. This serves to
strengthen our accountability and commitment to our practice. Our
practice benefits from others in the community who share their practice with
us. We can go to our community with the challenges facing us in our
practice and get help.
There is much to be said
for finding an existing community in our area where we feel at home. However,
if there are other educators in our institution who have an interest in
contemplative practice, forming a group that meets before or after school or
during lunch can be a tremendous support. You might organize such a group
originally as a study group, using a text such as Parker Palmer’s The
Courage to Teach or a book with a secular approach to mindfulness such
as Jerry Braza’s Moment by Moment Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming to
Our Senses. Whether we are already practicing in a community, trying
to find or start one, or unsure about how to get started, joining the MiEN listserv, is to join a virtual community of 325
people interested in just what you’re interested in, a community that can give
you encouragement, answer your questions, and let you know that you are not
alone.
Newsletter
#4 The conditions are perfect
Several years ago, after
a particularly challenging fall semester, I spent the week after Christmas
at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Maple
Forest Monastery perched in the snow covered hills of Vermont. Even
in that beautiful, peaceful place it took me several days to fully relax and
regain my equanimity. A day or two later I suddenly realized that all too
soon I’d be returning home to my job. This thought unsettled me, and I sought
counsel from Sr. Annabel Laity, the abbess of the monastery.
I described my anxiety
to Sr. Annabel, explaining how after every retreat I would return home
to Maryland and live more slowly and mindfully, in touch with the
beauty around me. At least I would for one day, maybe for several
days. But I was like a tire with a slow leak. By the end of my
first week home, I’d be so caught up in the flurry of my home and school life
that friends who hadn’t known I’d been on retreat would never have guessed that
I had been (if you’re a teacher, perhaps you’ve had similar experiences
returning to school after a relaxing vacation).
When I finished talking,
Sr. Annabel laughed. “Richard,” she said, “you know that mindfulness
practice is the practice of the present moment. The present moment is
determined by many causes and conditions. You are here at the monastery
practicing the Maple Forestpresent moment
with the causes and conditions you find here. You shouldn’t expect to
do Maple Forest practice in Maryland.” Then she
added, “Here is the good news. The causes and conditions back home are
perfect for the Maryland practice.”
I’ve often recalled Sr.
Annabel’s words of wisdom. When I have a bad day, when I have a difficult
student, when I have a difficult class, I try to stay in touch with the fact
that there is really nothing wrong. It’s only that the practice called
for isn’t the practice I was hoping to do. Often the practice called for
is that of compassion, starting with compassion for myself and then compassion
for the student(s). Patience is another important practice called for by
many difficult situations. Additionally, Thich Nhat Hanh recommends the practice of asking, “Am
I sure?” This goes hand and hand with being patient. All of these
practices contribute to my looking deeply at what is happening inside and
outside myself, to better understand the causes and conditions affecting the
present moment.
To better understand
what is going on for students, I have also learned to ask them directly.
Once, students in one of my 9th grade algebra classes told me
that they were unfocused in class because we met right after lunch and they
were tired. From a yoga teacher friend I learned
a movement that helps chi energy rise in the body. I demonstrated it to
the class, the students tried it and thereafter took turns leading it at the
beginning of class with very positive effects.
Newsletter #5 Slow learning
Reacting to the ills of
fast foods, the slow food movement is promoting the old fashioned practice of
home cooked meals with healthful ingredients. Eating mindfully aids the
digestive process and deepens one’s appreciation of a healthful meal.
Just as nourishment has been squeezed out of fast food, personal meaning is
being squeezed out of education when the goal is to master information and
methods that will be tested on year end state evaluations. This
education, geared to covering material, promotes finishing units in order to go
on to the next ones. The learning engendered might aptly be termed “fast
learning.”
What the slow food
movement and mindful eating bring to nutrition, the contemplative education
movement brings to learning. Contemplative or “slow” learning is old
fashioned learning. It’s the learning of medieval church schools and the
monastery, characterized by “dwelling with” rather than studying and moving
on. In this form of education learners may read a single passage several
times, sit with it in silence, respond to it in a journal, and share their
responses to it out of the silence in pairs or as a class (see chapter 6 in
Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness). Slow learning unites the
learner and the learned just as eating meditation unites the diner and her
food.
Just as slow foods have
ingredients with high nutritional value, slow learning lends itself to
particular kinds of textured experiences like reading poetry; conducting
investigations; addressing paradoxical, controversial and ambiguous material;
and resolving challenging questions and problems. These kinds of
experiences naturally generate slow learning. How important it is to
nurture habits of slow learning in students in too much of a hurry to get on to
what is next. Ultimately, the habit of approaching learning (and then
life) in a deeply mindful way is the most important fruit of slow learning.
Newsletter # 6 Slow learning Part 2
Teachers are using
mindfulness activities in elementary schools, graduate schools and everywhere
in between. Starting classes with practices such as meditation, yoga and
journaling can help students focus and approach the activities that follow with
more awareness. However, a significant part of student learning takes
place at home, where old habits prevail.
For the last few years I’ve
had an understanding with my students that I expect them to work up to 45
minutes each night: to study the new material and solve as many problems as
they can in that time. As I see it, both a 45-minute homework session and
a 45-minute period of meditation should invite the participant to be fully
present to the matter at hand. Last year, to try to make this point, I
gave my students Thich Nhat Hanh’s story
about the practice of washing dishes. Most students understood the story
only at the intellectual level at best, however. This year we devoted our
short first class to a very concrete activity, raisin-eating meditation.
I instructed the students to take 5 minutes to eat three raisins with full
awareness of their taste and texture, putting one in the mouth only when no
trace of the previous one remained. If they weren’t able to eat all three
in the time allotted, that was fine. The next day I explained that I
wanted the students to do their homework with the same concentration they had
given to eating the raisins. “Chew each homework problem
thoroughly. Digest it fully before going on to the next one. In
that way you’ll receive the full nourishment that the problem has to offer
you. Even if you don’t have time to do every problem, you’ll find that
you will come away with a better understanding of the material than if you work
hurriedly in order to complete it.”
I find it possible to
encourage slow learning in this manner because in mathematics there is no set
number of problems that must be completed in insure a student has learned a new
concept or mastered a new skill. In an English course it would make
little sense to tell students that they could stop after carefully reading
three-quarters of the assigned pages or in a foreign language course to stop
after thoroughly learning two-thirds of the vocabulary words. Encouraging
students to do their homework more mindfully in most subjects is feasible only
if teachers are able to assign less reading, fewer vocabulary words, fewer questions to answer. If you try this, I
believe that you’ll find that less is indeed more.
Newsletter # 7
Planting seeds
Those of us who share
mindfulness with young people so often ask ourselves, “At the end of the day,
has it made a difference?” We believe it has, but controlled research
studies aside, do we really know?
Every year during the
holiday season my school holds an alumni reception. This year I had a
memorable conversation with Tom, a former student whom I last saw when he
graduated in 1989. Tom shared something of his career path, ending with
his current job as a compliance lawyer for the World Bank.
When he asked me what I
was up to, I handed him my Minding Your Life business card. “Mindfulness
Education,” he read. “That’s like the story you read to us about washing
the dishes (Thich Nhat Hanh’s story
about being present to washing the dishes from The Miracle of
Mindfulness).” I was surprised Tom remembered the story 18 years
later. It turned out that he had also read several book on mindfulness in
the interim. Tom wondered whether I had any books to recommend now.
I suggested that the comprehensiveness of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming
to Our Senses might appeal to him.
Five weeks later I
discovered that the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society would be holding a
meditation retreat for law professionals at Spirit Rock
retreat Meditation Center this spring and sent Tom an email
suggesting he check it out. I also mentioned that I had been moved by his
recollection of the dishwashing story. Tom replied immediately, thanking
me for the recommendation and concluding: “And if it means something to you,
I'd be very surprised if there are any of us who were in that BC Calculus class
back in '88-'89 who don't remember the introduction you gave us then to Thich Nhat Hanh.”
So it goes.
Newsletter # 8
Growing mindfulness organically
It seems to me
especially wonderful when mindfulness practices arise organically in response
to the needs of students. The following is a story about one way in which
this happened.
Ten years ago my
afternoon 9th grade algebra class was giving me fits.
They took forever to settle down. This class regularly got half the work
done during class that my morning class accomplished. My first impulse was
to blame the class’ problems on a small group of immature students.
However, a friend suggested that I survey the class to learn how they viewed
things. One observation shared by a number of students was that students
were often tired because the class was right after lunch. Reporting back
this “finding” to the class, I told them that I’d do some research over our
winter break and see if I could come up with a remedy.
Bahnte Rahula, one of
the monks at the Buddhist center where I spent part of my winter break, taught
yoga. I shared my school challenge with him and asked his
advice. Bhante showed me an easy
stretching exercise that brought chi energy up from the feet. “Standing
on your toes with your hands up over your head, breathe out as you bend down
and touch the floor. Then breathe in as you slowly raise your hands back
up over your head. Repeat this exercise nine more times, remaining on
your toes throughout.
I returned to my
challenging class with the hoped for remedy for the problem of tiredness.
Gathering the class in a circle in the front of the room, I led the students in
the stretching exercise. All were aware of its effect. “In the
future,” I said, “we’ll start each class this way. I’ll ask you all to
take turns leading it. If you’re wide awake and ready for class,
participation will be optional.”
For the rest of the year
almost all of us participated in the daily exercise. People passing our
door would peer in the window at us with a look of surprise. Our opening practice
became something of an identity for the members of the class. Best of
all, class members became more focused on their work and more attentive to me
and to each other.
Newsletter #9 We teach who we are
Some years ago I taught
a seminar on conflict resolution to high school seniors. The class met
one evening a week for three hours. Most weeks I invited guests to speak
for the first hour. Afterwards the class reflected on how our guest’s
teaching related to our broader field of study and discussed the weekly
assignment.
One evening I invited my
friend, Anh-Huong Nguyen, to talk to the class about developing inner
peace. Besides being a Buddhist teacher, Anh Huong also
happens to be a niece of Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. After her departure from the class,
one student had this to say, “All my life I’ve heard people saying the things
she did, but I’ve never before met anyone who lived them.”
Indeed, Anh-Huong’s teaching was not so much in her words, as in her
spacious, relaxed and mindful presence.
This experience points
directly to what is perhaps the most important factor in contemplative
education. Because, as Parker Palmer posits, “We teach who we are,” the hurried,
unfocused teacher who invites his or her class to slow down and dwell in the
present moment by sounding a bell, guiding the class in some form of
meditation, or by any other means, lacks credibility. Contemplative
education requires teachers who embody what they teach, not necessarily
lifelong meditators, but people who have at least begun to engage in some
type of regular mindfulness practice.
Newsletter # 10
Non-judgment Part 1
Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as: “moment-to-moment
nonjudgmental awareness”. In my recent workshops for teachers and parents
I’ve begun to put more emphasis on the nonjudgmental piece of his
definition. The workshops commence with a 5-minute “experiment” in which
participants are instructed to sit back and relax, close their eyes, and watch
whatever appears on their “stage”, that is, passes through their
awareness. I ask them to just watch the thoughts, emotions, bodily
sensations, and input from their non visual senses,
but not get involved with what they’re seeing, not go up on stage and try to
hold on to something or try to push something off stage, just observe.
“However”, I continue, “if you do find yourself reacting to something you’re
observing, then your reaction is what’s on your stage. So, watch that.”
At the conclusion of the
experiment I collect data, asking for a show of hands of folks who observed
sounds, smells, …, their heartbeat, muscle tension,…,emotions (1?, more than
1?) , thoughts (1?, 5?, more than 20?). Then, focusing on thoughts and
emotions, I ask how many participants experienced positive ones, negative
ones. At this point I share Kabat-Zinn’s definition
of mindfulness and point out that “positive” and “negative” are judgments that
minds apply to particular thoughts and emotions, and that it’s natural for
minds to judge.
Teachers are aware when
positive and negative judgments are appropriately voiced and/or acted on.
Teachers discern whether or not students’ work is correct, whether a class has
lost its focus and needs a reminder, whether an unexpected student sharing
should be pursued. However, many judgmental thoughts and feelings are not
of this discerning sort. Judgments are problematic when they interfere
with perception, unconsciously limiting its focus or distorting it by
unconsciously adding the teacher’s interpretation to it. These problems
occur with positive judgments as well as negative ones. Students judged
as “good” or “bad” may not be seen in their entirety. A period of silence
following a teacher’s question, during which the class is engaged in thought,
may be short circuited by her unconscious feeling of awkwardness. Lost in
his enthusiasm about something he is explaining, a teacher may miss perceiving
that he has lost the students.
Our minds will continue
to judge, but we can become more conscious of our judgments by becoming more
aware of the positive and negative thoughts and feelings that appear on our
stage. And when we observe positive or negative overlays on how we’re
seeing a student, when we become aware of our feeling awkward, or when we
realize that we’re lost in our enthusiasm, then, without judging ourselves for
this, we can stop and breathe and ask ourselves the simple question, “Am I
sure?” Then we can look with fresh eyes at the situation facing us before
responding.
Newsletter #11
Non-judgment Part 2
I often end my workshops
for parents and teachers with a series of meditations starting from lectio divina,
or sacred reading. For the first meditation, participants spend five
minutes contemplating a poem or short passage, just hanging out with it,
perhaps dwelling on a particular line or image, seeing what arises in them in
response to it. After five minutes, I ask the participants to take
another five minutes to record continuously whatever is coming up for them in
their journals.
Finally, I ask them to
pair up with someone they don't know well or, if possible, don't know at
all. I give each member of the pair four minutes to share anything that
he or she wishes about his or her experience of the reading or
writing. I instruct the person listening to just listen, not comment, not
ask questions, to say nothing, and not express approval or
disapproval in any way nonverbally. The listeners find these
instructions difficult to follow. Whether their experiences were
similar to or very different from their partner’s, many find it hard to contain
their reactions. They're not just listening to their partner but thinking
about what they're hearing, comparing it to their experience, often
appreciating some aspect of the sharing, occasionally having some kind of
negative response. Because they're not just listening to understand, but
also having personal responses, their positive and negative judgments are hard
to contain. In addition, because they are filtering what they’re hearing
through their judgment, they may not be hearing exactly what’s being said.
Some of the people
sharing also find it hard to continue to share without getting feedback.
They want affirmation, want to feel that the listener not only understands but
appreciates what they're sharing. And, if the listener doesn't appreciate
it, they'd like to know that as well so that they might clarify what they’re
sharing, or, perhaps, head in a different direction.
At the conclusion of
this practice, I've been asked what the point is of withholding judgment.
As teachers and parents don't we want to let our students and
children know when we're pleased or displeased with what they're saying?
What is the point of suspending judgment, of just listening? I respond by
saying that there are certainly situations that call for judgment. But we
do want to hear young people clearly. Furthermore, how are young people
ever to discover and own their own feelings if they are constantly being
critiqued by adults. Given a steady dose of judgment, it's all too likely
that a young person will respond by becoming a pleaser or a rebel, not a
person who knows and shares him or herself.
Newsletter #12 Happiness
While many adults and
young people have discovered and practice mindfulness, the majority of
educators and students have little or no knowledge of or interest in
mindfulness. This presents two kinds of challenge. If our offering
is optional, how can we “sell” it to those who have no sense of its potential
value? And, if our offering is required, e.g. a faculty in-service
workshop or something all students in a course must participate in, how can we
promote a positive attitude from the start?
Here’s a promising
solution. Regardless of their relationship to mindfulness, people want to
be happy. What would it be like to share happiness practices with
educators and students rather than mindfulness practices? For starters,
it would be important to show our participants that happiness and unhappiness
have a lot to do with the mind’s response to external conditions and that the
participants can learn how to better govern this response. This is the
approach I’ve taken in the stress reduction class I’ve given to hundreds of 9thgrade
students. (see my paper, “Schooled in the Moment:
Introducing Mindfulness to Students and Teachers” on the resource page of the
Minding Your Life Web site, www.mindingyourlife.net). This approach might also include meditation practices
that lead to deep connections, eating and outdoor walking meditation, or other
practices that promote happiness. Participants might also enjoy
reflecting on their happiness during the course or workshop.
If you try this
approach, I’d be very interested in hearing about your experience. And,
if you have thoughts or questions about this or other dimensions of mindfulness
in education, I’d also like to hear them. I’ll do my best to respond to
you individually or in future newsletters.
Newsletter #13 Being present
My friend Kai Romhardt has written a book titled Slow Down Your Life. While the book is available
only in German, a good summary in English can be found at: http://ezinearticles.com/?In-Praise-of-Slowing-Down&id=383533. Kai gives workshops on this theme at
German universities. One, required of architecture graduate students,
drew particular criticism from many participants. These aspiring
architects saw themselves as being required to produce high quality work in an
expeditious manner and prided themselves in having the ability to do so. They
said that they had no need to slow down. I received a similar reaction
from a school administrator at the close of a faculty workshop. She
questioned the emphasis I put on walking and eating raisins slowly in two of
the meditations I presented. She said that she came from New
York and enjoyed speed, enjoyed flying through her work, which entailed a
lot of writing. Slowing down simply would not do for her.
This administrator and
these students have a point. Slowing down is not the heart of the
matter. Rather, it is being mindful of what one is doing, being fully
present. My teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, not only does walking meditation, he also
does jogging meditation. But he brings the same mindful presence to his
jogging that he does to his walking. It’s important to make our goals
clear to our students. Perhaps some of them are able to eat or walk
rapidly and be as present or more present than when
they do so slowly. Why not give them the chance to see for themselves?
Newsletter #14
Vigor
At Thich Nhat Hanh’s recent
retreat in Hanoi, my friend Gratia Meyer, whose work can be found at www.meahfoundation.org, described training
two Denver, Colorado sixth grade public school teachers to
employ mindfulness in several dimensions of their teaching. The positive
effects on the students were significant, and the effect on the teachers
themselves was also remarkable. On the verge of burnout, both teachers
came to life and became excited about their work. Author George Kinder uses
the word “vigor” to describe that quality of life where one’s work gives one
back as much or more energy as one puts into it. Gratia’s
two teachers found vigor, as did I when I brought my mindfulness practice into
my classroom. If you are incorporating your mindfulness practice in your
teaching, I’m interested in hearing whether it has changed your relationship to
your work.
Newsletter #15
Channels
Every year I teach the 9th graders
at Sidwell Friends School how to
use mindfulness to reduce stress. I begin by inviting them to sit quietly
for five minutes and simply watch whatever comes into their awareness.
Invariably, most students observe some negative thoughts or emotions arising
during that time. I explain to the students that the mind is like a
television set. It has many channels, including the happiness, the
boredom, the confidence, and the anxiety channels. All people have the
same channels, but in each person some channels have stronger reception than
others. The strongest ones are default channels, ones that tune in
automatically much of the time. If these are negative channels, chronic
stress is the eventual result.
Then I show the students
how they can change the channel. I lead them in a guided meditation that
focuses their awareness on several positive channels like solidity, freshness,
and freedom. In the future, when they find their minds stuck on negative
channels, they might use this mindfulness tool to prevent stress from building
up. In fact, if they develop a meditation practice and tune to positive
channels regularly, in time these positive channels can become their default
channels.
Newsletter #16
Motivation
Motivation for learning
and practicing mindfulness varies tremendously. On one end of the
spectrum are the stroke and heart attack victims who come to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness based stress reduction clinic
at U Mass Medical Center. They understand that to incorporate meditation
and yoga into their daily routine may be a life or death matter. At the
other end of the spectrum are the noisy students in Naomi Baer’s inner city
public high school math class who decline their teacher’s invitation to quiet
themselves and join her in stillness for the first 60 seconds of class, but, in
time, enter into this daily period of silence with their classmates.
What motivates students
to be still and pay attention? In some cases it’s a challenge or
contest. Irene McHenry tells junior high students that, like any muscle,
the mind can be strengthened by practice and challenges them to see whether
they can focus their minds on their breath for 30
seconds. Sumi Kim asks students to listen for a minute, then
list the different sounds they heard. The one who hears the most shares
them with the group. Then the students have a chance to repeat the
exercise. In other cases it’s the opportunity to explore something
familiar in a new way. Mindfully exploring taste and texture during
eating meditation and mindfully watching awareness itself (described in Schooled
in the Moment available on www.mindingyourlife.net) are two examples. Guided meditations and visualizations
that address the needs of the group can also be very motivating. There
are a variety of age appropriate guided meditations useful for stress
reduction, a need common to many educational settings. Metta or lovingkindness meditation
is another wonderful meditation to share in the right circumstances.
If we’re teaching
mindfulness to our own students, students we know, or to students or workshop
participants attracted by the description of what we’re offering, motivation
may not be a major challenge. However, when we’re working in an
unfamiliar setting with students or educators who aren’t present by choice,
that’s another matter. A 9th grade English teacher once
invited me to teach mindfulness to a class that was studying The
Catcher in the Rye. I began by introducing myself as a meditation
teacher, then asked the class why they thought their teacher had invited me to
teach them. They came up with 5 or 6 good reasons, including addressing
their difficulty staying focused in class and the book’s theme of
alienation. It wasn’t difficult for me to choose a couple of practices to
share that met the agenda the students had laid out for me.
Newsletter #17
Getting support
For the past eight
Januarys, Irene McHenry and I have offered a 3-day, residential workshop on
mindfulness for educators. Participants tell us that their workshop experiences
are deeply meaningful and that they learn a lot. However, the conditions
present in a retreat setting with others engaged in the same practices and
having similar aspirations are very different from those they return to at
home. There, life patterns and home and school environments are usually
less than ideal for implementing new mindfulness practices. So, the final
morning of the workshop we offer an exercise aimed at helping them take home
what they’ve learned. Participants identify one goal for their teaching
or for their personal life and then do what is known as a “force field
analysis.” They begin by making two lists. The first is a list of
“driving forces,” conditions already in place that support their accomplishing
their goal. The second is a list of “restraining forces,” existing
conditions that stand in the way. Next they look over the list of
restraining forces and, with the help of another participant, come up with a
concrete “action step” to diminish or eliminate the effect of one or more of
these forces.
Most of our workshop
participants have had previous experience with some form of mindfulness
practice. Few have done much to incorporate mindfulness practices in
their teaching. Doing so is a goal of many of the participants’
analyses. In the workshop, participants learn a number of practices that
Irene, I, and other teachers have used successfully with students. Many
participants would like to share one of these practices with their
students. However, having only done the practice once, in a very
different setting, insecurity can be a restraining force. So, getting
support at home is a very good action step. In the past I’ve recommended
that teachers join the Mindfulness in Education Network’s listserv (see the MiEN Web site www.mindfuled.edu) to get support from
educators all over the world. Wonderful help is available, but only a
small percent of the listserv’s almost 450
participants tend to seek it out. This year Irene and I were happy to be
able to offer an important new support for the participants and for many other
educators, our new book, Tuning In, described above. If you
are seeking more support for increasing mindfulness in your educational
setting, I’ll be very pleased to see a request for support from you on
the MiEN listserv, and, if you do use our
book, please share your experience with me.
Newsletter #18
Mindful recollection
Add mindfulness to
recollection and a special method of review is produced. Review’s basic
purpose is to help students assimilate their learning. In the right
situation, mindfulness practice can contribute significantly to this
process. Mindful recollection provides learners an opportunity to mine
their previous experience for deeper meaning. Here’s an example.
At the recent
mindfulness in education conference in Philadelphia I was responsible
for conducting the closing plenary session. The day had been a full one
for the 330 participants, starting with an inspiring morning plenary followed
by lunch time interest groups and twenty afternoon breakout sessions with
almost fifty presiders and presenters. Participants arrived at
the closing session filled to overflowing with energy and rich
experiences. To prepare the group for a review of their day, I began by
sharing a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "If you want to build
a ship, then don't drum up men to gather wood, give orders and divide the work.
Rather, teach them to yearn for the far and endless sea." “The
ship being built here is the mindfulness in education movement,” I said, “and I
hope that today’ conference deepened our yearning for the success of this
movement.” I then invited the participants to close their eyes and let
their mind review their day, seeing their arrival, hearing the plenary presentations,
letting their day unfold like a film with its chance meetings and conversations
and its moments of practice. After you’ve revisited all that happened for
you, return to one particular moment, a moment of special inspiration, a moment
with particular energy, and just hang out there,” I suggested. Several
minutes later I sounded a bell and asked participants to find a partner.
Each partner then had five minutes to share whatever wanted to be shared, the
other partner listening deeply. The hall was alive with animated speech
and profound silence. The day’s rich experience had been mined and
honored.
Newsletter #19
Work in progress
Many kinds of activities
can become vehicles for teaching mindfulness. I choose activities for particular
groups based on the nature of the course and the students for whom they’re
intended. The way I see both is always changing. When I offered
mindfulness practices regularly to my math students, I was able to observe
their reactions and get feedback. This suggested changes such as giving
students the option to do yoga when they were too tired to do free writing and
the option to review material in their heads to prepare for tests rather than
do guided meditations (most who chose to review subsequently returned to the
meditations). Another change involved finding new sources for journal
writing prompts at the request of students. The Internet became a great
resource, providing many wonderful quotes, including ones from Rosa Parks when
she passed away, ones on spring for the first day of spring, and these
surprising words of Malcolm X:
I’m sorry to say that
the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about
it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for
argument. If you made a mistake, that was all
there was to it.
This year I taught
mindfulness to classes of third year nursing students at the University of
Massachusetts. The spring class was very different form the fall class
due to a serendipitous meeting with a student. She helped me understand
that a greater focus on stress reduction would be more beneficial and
connecting than my fall semester’s approach. I eliminated Tonglen, a practice for transforming suffering that
had been challenging for the first semester students, as well as a
contemplative reading exercise, which hadn’t been particularly compelling.
Instead, I incorporated walking meditation and elements of the stress
reduction class I gave for many years to all the 9th grade
students in my high school (see Schooled in the Moment on the
Resources page of www.mindingyourlif.net for details). Several nursing
students stayed after the spring semester class to tell me how much they
appreciated the relevance of the practices they’d learned to their work in
nursing.
Knowledge of a variety
of mindfulness practices is most helpful in this ongoing process.
Experience using them is that much better. The Center for Contemplative
Mind in Society’s Tree of Contemplative Practices, which can be found athttp://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree.html, includes many practices that will be familiar
and, likely, some new ones. Many of these practices can and need to be
creatively adapted for classroom use. Last spring I was inspired by a
presentation on the imaginary journey, a class activity loosely related to the
vision quest, developed by New York City public school teacher Tom Roepke. Finally, the almost five hundred participants
on the Mindfulness in Education Network’s listserv (visit www.mindfuled.org for more information) are a tremendous
resource for recommending practices.
Newsletter #20 The mindful educator
In “We Teach Who We
Are,” the theme of a previous newsletter, I pointed out the importance of
embodying the mindfulness we hope to teach our students. Many of us have
a tendency to focus on formal mindfulness practices like sitting meditation or
yoga for which we set aside a particular time of the day or week and do in a
special place. Even educators with well established
mindfulness practices can find it a challenge to maintain mindfulness at
work. What might mindful teaching look like? What can one do to
support it? Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide
for Anyone Who Teaches Anything by Deborah Schoeberlein (Wisdom
Publications, available in early September) answers these questions. It’s
an important new resource for all teachers, regardless of their previous
experience with mindfulness practice. In her book, Schoeberlein paints a detailed picture of a day in the
life of a mindful teacher. The day begins with waking up to mindful
breathing and setting an intention. It ends that night with meditating on
one’s satisfaction with the day. In between, there are many informal
practices, described by Schoeberlein, which
teachers can use throughout the school day, on their own or in their interactions
with students. These descriptions aren’t a prescription for mindful
teaching. Rather, they provide examples that can inspire teachers to find
ways to infuse their days with mindfulness that work for them.
Teaching mindfully is
already a great gift to students. It’s where many teachers might stop, not
feeling that teaching mindfulness practices to their students is possible in
their situation. However, mindful teaching changes classroom
environments, creating new opportunities. Further, Schoeberlein’s many examples of ways to teach
mindfulness can suggest possibilities for such teaching even with what might
seem to be the most challenging student populations and curricula. Schoeberlein gives formal instructions for each
student mindfulness activity. However, as with her informal teacher
practices and with the approaches described in my book, Tuning In:
Mindfulness in Teaching and Learning, these examples best serve to
inspire teachers to develop approaches that fit their specific situations.
Newsletter #21
Motivation Part 2
Relevance is key to
engaging students and teachers in mindfulness workshops, especially when
attendance is required. For this reason, lectio divina, which I wrote about in Newsletter 11, has
special potential since the passages presented can be picked with an
understanding of the participants. Over the years, I’ve collected poems,
quotes, and short teaching stories related to many aspects of life. I
usually offer three or four for participants to choose from, hoping that each
person feels drawn to at least one.
In preparing a recent
workshop for the opening faculty meetings of an independent high school, I
located lectio divina practice
towards the end. I hoped the sharing in pairs, following contemplative
reading and journaling, would deepen faculty connections and help the workshop
conclude on a lively note. A new school year was about to commence for
all the participants, so used “beginnings” as a common theme for the
passages. There is a wonderful story about beginnings in my
collection. To it, I added three quotes I found by searching “beginnings;
quotations” on Google. The four passages follow. They fully engaged
the faculty.
What we call the
beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end
is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot
Nasrudin decided that he could benefit by
learning something new. He went to see a master musician. “How much do you
charge to teach lute-playing?” “Three silver pieces for the first month; after
that, one silver piece a month.” “Excellent!” said Nasrudin.
“I shall begin with the second month.”
Sufi
He who chooses the
beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that
determines the end.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
All this will not be
finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000
days, not in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime
on this planet. But let us begin.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Newsletter #22
Mindfulness in Education 101
Mindfulness practices
are benefitting students in schools and universities in three distinct but
related ways. Increasingly, school counselors, university student
services, and groups like Mindful Schools in Oakland, California that visit
school schools to teach mindfulness are helping students learn mindful
relaxation and emotional regulation techniques that reduce stress and promote
resiliency. Mindfulness for stress reduction is the theme of “Schooled in
the Moment,” the first essay in Tuning In: Mindfulness in Teaching
and Learning, which can be downloaded from Minding Your Life.
Mindfulness practices
are also being used by classroom teachers and professors, often at the
beginning of classes, to help students become more present, alert, and focused
so that they can enter into the learning process more effectively.
Examples include focusing on breath or on sounds, journaling, and mindful
movement. During my last two years of teaching high school geometry, each
class commenced with five minutes of mindfulness practice. Theses classes are the subject of my paper, “Learning to
Stop, Stopping to Learn: Exploring the Contemplative Dimension in Education,”
which is also available on the MYL Website.
Mindfulness is also
being used by educators as a tool for deep learning. At Holy Cross
University, Jody Ziegler’s art history students visit the same piece of modern
art weekly to observe it and write about what they see. Friends School of
Atlanta teacher Denise Aldridge has her 3rd and 4th grade
students observe and draw what they see in their school’s garden each season,
discovering what has appeared, what has changed, and what has
disappeared. In my teacher workshops I often use a mindfulness
exercise that includes contemplative reading, writing, and listening
practices. These last two examples are described in essays that can be
found in Tuning In.
Newsletter #23
Mindfulness in Education 201
At last fall’s
mindfulness in education conference in Oakland, California, I gave a
presentation on the benefits, described in my last newsletter, of teaching
mindfulness practices (stress reduction, preparation for learning, and as a
method of learning), Later in the day Shauna Shapiro, another presenter,
mentioned a fourth benefit, which she described as “inner knowing.” In
schools and universities students are constantly focused on learning concepts
and skills, analyzing and critiquing ideas of others, and observing different
dimensions of their world. Outside of art courses and creative writing,
they are seldom called on to share something of themselves, their inner knowing
or wisdom.
For my last two years of
math teaching, my main way of promoting inner knowing was through the use of
journals. Most Fridays students did free writing
for the first five minutes of class. Students wrote in their journals in
response to poems, quotes, or short passages several other days each
week. I asked the students to write continuously, putting down on paper
whatever came to minds, not stopping to think, letting the words come from a
place of intuition. This writing was done in the backs of their journals,
which I never read. Students wrote for themselves. I tried to
select writing prompts which would invite students to look inwards. One
such prompt was the following poem from the 13th Century Sufi
mystic, Rumi:
Two Kinds of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: one
acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
The habit of writing for
teachers is deeply ingrained in most students, so I shouldn’t have been surprised
to hear from one of my students that, in spite of knowing I wouldn’t be reading
his writing, it was two months before he began writing journal entries for
himself. This was one kind of success. Another kind was conveyed by
a student who wrote at the end of the year:
I have learned great things from myself in the
way that I respond to quotes in my journal and in how I respond to myself in
free writing. In writing continuously, I often write things that I did
not understand consciously before they hit the paper.
Newsletter #24
Parents
The Joy
of Mindful Parenting
Presence is the key
ingredient of mindful parenting, being fully present both to oneself
and one’s children. In this workshop participants will engage in contemplative
exercises that enhance awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings, sharpen
sensory awareness, and promote mindful speech and deep
listening. These skills are important building blocks of rewarding
relationships with children and adults as well.
After I taught
mindfulness for stress reduction to the 9th graders at my
Quaker school for several years, I saw the potential for mutual support if
school parents also had an opportunity to experience mindfulness
practice. So, for several years I offered a stress reduction workshop for
parents similar to the one I gave the students. The turnout was
disappointing. Were parents too busy to take the time to learn something
new that might benefit them? Perhaps they would come if the focus was on
how they could better support their children. This was the genesis of the
much more successful workshop described above.
Another way of
addressing parents: In her new book, The Mindful Child: How to
Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate (Free
Press, 2010), Susan Kaiser Greenland has created a wonderful resource for
helping parents who want to teach mindfulness to their kids. In it is she
describes the evolution of her work with kids, culminating in the founding of
the Inner Kids program for teaching mindfulness in schools. Based on her
experiences, Susan articulates principles to help guide parents and includes
many examples of mindfulness exercises she has used with young people.
However, she is quick to point out to parents that they should base their
teaching on their own experience of mindfulness practice.
If you’re working in or
have children in a school, you may be able to support the growth of a
mindfulness program there by offering parent workshops. Draw on Susan’s
book and share it with parent and teacher friends. If you’d like to meet
Susan, she’ll be the keynote speaker at the Mindfulness in Education Network’s
March 18-20, 2011 conference at American University in Washington, DC.
Newsletter #25
Ensemble learning
Two heads are better
than one, especially when the other head brings experiences very different from
my own. My new friend, Beth, has a background in theatre. When Beth
told me about her work, I could see how it might add a valuable dimension to a
new weekend workshop where participants would look at their lives, working
contemplatively with stories and poems. The weekend of reading,
meditation, journaling, mindful sharing, and deep listening might well lead
participants to new insights. However, as I thought about the structure
of the workshop, it seemed too sedentary. I asked Beth if she saw ways in
which some of the exercises might be embodied. Here are two of Beth’s
ideas we used in the workshop.
The first one involved
dramatization. After reading a story, Beth divided the participants into
two groups. First one group cast the members of the other in roles of the
characters of the story, arranged the set, and got the performance underway by
reading the introduction. After the members of the first group finished
their performance, they cast the second group into roles, and this group
performed the story. Finally, all participants wrote about their
experiences in their journals.
Beth’s second approach
involved gesture. Beforehand, Beth divided a poem into parts, one for
each participant. She numbered the parts, cut them into separate strips,
and placed them around a small table. To begin the exercise, the poem was
read twice by different people. Then each participant selected one part of
the poem from the table and had a short time to develop a gesture to illustrate
that part. Sitting in a circle, the participants rose in order, read
their part of the poem and remained standing, offering their gestures. In
the end, the whole poem had come to life, made visible by the group. All
that remained was for the participants to individually process their
experience.
Mindful learning is
often an individual experience. Here, the whole group recreates the
material, and its embodied form comes alive and lives in each person in a
unique way.
Newsletter #26
Parker Palmer
A “Day of Courage and
Renewal,” based on the courage to teach work of educator Parker Palmer, will
again follow next year’s annual conference of the Mindfulness in Education Network.
I was first exposed to Parker’s work in 1983 through his book, To Know
as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (Harper & Row).
Soon thereafter, a sabbatical took me to Pendle Hill
Quaker Center, where, for two terms I was fortunate to have Parker as my
teacher and mentor. In his book, Parker defined as the goal of teaching
“to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced,” where “truth”
refers to the collective truths of the subject matter, the teacher, and the
students. In his courses, Parker created just such spaces using the
method of lectio divina, described in one of my earlier
newsletters.
In 1998 Parker turned
his attention from the act of teaching to the person of the teacher with The
Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (Jossey Bass). Addressing the problems of teacher
burnout and lack of engagement, Parker argued for an end to the separation of
“soul and role,” for bringing the teacher’s true self into the
classroom. Establishing communities of learning in classrooms was
an integral part of his vision. This vision led to the creation of a
“teacher formation” program, a 2-year program for cohorts of school
teachers. This program is now supported by the Center for Courage and
Renewal (www.couragerenewal.org) and extends beyond the field of
education.
Courage work is based on
the creation and use of “circles of trust” where participants engage in a variety
of contemplative activities and relate to others in the circle using mindful
speech and deep listening. This process is described in detail in
Parker’s book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided
Life (Jossey Bass). My friend,
Valerie Brown, who is trained in Courage work and is also a mindfulness
practitioner, has invited me to join her in leading Journey toward an
Undivided Life: An Introductory Circle of Trust and Mindfulness Retreat at Woolman Hill Quaker Center in western Massachusetts
next May.
I highly recommend the
three books of Parker’s mentioned above and look forward to being with some of
you at the Day of Courage and Renewal at American University in Washington, DC
on March 20th and at our retreat in May.
Newsletter #27
Gifts
“Why have you come to
this workshop?”, “What do you hope to get out of it?” - questions
I often ask participants to respond to at the start of a workshop. Last
spring Beth Popelka and I decided to begin
our opening session on a different note. When the participants first
gathered, we gave each one a copy of Teachers Everywhere from
Rachel Naomi Remen’s book My
Grandfather’s Blessings (see below) to read silently. We then
asked the participants to contemplate the teachers who had passed through their
lives, animal and inanimate teachers, as well as humans. Then they wrote
for a few minutes in their journals.
We went on to suggest
that each participant brings many gifts with her to the workshop. “Take a
few minutes to choose one gift you’ve brought that you’d like to share with
others. Then create a gesture that embodies this gift,” we
requested. We gave as an example a gesture for the gift of humor.
To wrap up the session, we stood in a circle for introductions. One by
one, each participant said his name and where he was from, then, turning to the
next person and assuming the posture of his gesture, he said, “and the gift I
am bringing to offer this weekend is….” The introductions and gift
offerings proceeded slowly around the circle. When they were over, there
was a profound sense of intimacy, and I believe we all felt grateful to be part
of the group and looked forward to a weekend of giving and receiving gifts.
Newsletter #28
Listening
Listening is one of the most
important mindfulness practices in education. We expect our students to
listen to us and to each other, but, in my experience, not many students are
able to give their full attention to simply listening. Fortunately, we
can provide students with opportunities to improve their ability to
listen.
Starting a class by
sounding a bell is one of the most common mindfulness practices found in
education. Students are quiet, but are they listening? Some
elementary school teachers use a variation of this practice. They ask
students to raise a hand when they first hear the bell and keep it raised as
long as they can hear it.
I’ve used a more complex
listening practice with secondary students. I ask students to just listen
for two minutes, which begin and end with a bell. Then each student lists
all the sounds that she or he heard during that time. Students take turns
reading from their lists until all the different sounds that have been heard
are mentioned. Students then repeat the exercise. Their second list
is invariably longer than their first.
In Newsletter 22, I
described Professor Jody Ziegler supporting students’ contemplation by having
them observe one particular painting and respond to it in writing each week of
her course. Music can also be used as an object of contemplation.
My friend, Valerie, and her workshop co-leader, Karl, play a piece of Beethoven
(Karl recommends the Beethoven Piano Sonata opus 109, 3rd movement
and the Beethoven String Quartet in A major opus 132, slow movement) for their
adult students to just listen to and reflect on, then express their responses
in writing. Perhaps the ultimate listening practice would be to use,
instead of Beethoven, the televised version of John Cage’s 4’33” (four minutes
and thirty-three seconds of silence, performed by full orchestra), available on
You Tube at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E&feature=player_embedded#.
If someone tries this, I’d love to hear about it.
Newsletter #29
Waiting meditation
“Will this practice meet
teachers or students right where they are?” This is a good question to
ask when planning and sharing mindfulness experiences. At a recent
retreat for teachers and other professionals, I found myself with most of the
participants awaiting the last arrivals to our opening session. It was
Friday evening. Many participants had worked that day before driving to
the retreat and eating dinner. Some were ready to call it a day.
All were ready for the session to begin. It was an ideal time to
introduce waiting meditation. I asked those present to
consider how often they found themselves in situations where they needed to
wait. I continued, “These are wonderful opportunities for us to
practice mindfulness, to refresh ourselves for whatever follows, All we
need to do is close our eyes and bring our attention to our breath, saying ‘in’
to ourselves with each in-breath and ‘out’ with each out-breath. This
practice is simple and can be used throughout the day.” I invited a bell
to sound, and we did waiting meditation together for the next several
minutes. When I sounded the bell again and opened my eyes, the energy of
the participants had changed from restlessness to a more settled and collected
energy.
Red light meditation is
a particular form of waiting meditation frequently described by Thich Nhat Hanh.
In this meditation the driver greets a red light with gratitude for the
opportunity to stop, and breathes in and out three times. I suggested
that the participants look for opportunities to practice this and other forms
of waiting meditation when they returned home. Following the retreat one
participant, who was in the midst of a long flight delay, wrote me, “I am breathing
in and smiling on the exhale; it may not last the whole time but it feels very
good right now”. In their busy lives teachers and students often feel
they don’t have time available to dedicate to sitting, walking, or other forms
of formal meditation. Informal meditations, which can be done in the
midst of daily life, may have far more relevance and benefit for
them.
Newsletter # 30
Wellness
Greater wellness is one
of the most important fruits of mindfulness practice. It underlies the sharing
of mindfulness as a means of reducing stress, which frequently involves
promoting relaxation and a caring acceptance of negative thoughts and
emotions. However, wellness is also supported when positive emotions are
nurtured with mindfulness. In a recent, weeklong course for teachers, I
introduced the four immeasurable minds (of love) described in Buddhist
teachings. As I wrote:
Loving Kindness – the
intention and capacity to offer joy and happiness
Sympathetic Joy –
rejoicing in others’ happiness
Compassion – the
intention and capacity to relieve and transform others’
suffering
Equanimity – responding
to others without discrimination
on the board, I gave examples of each, drawn from
experiences previously shared by participants. I then gave the
participants 10 minutes to reflect on and write in their journals about a
recent experience of giving or receiving one of the four expressions of
love. Finally, the participants formed pairs, and each person had four
minutes to share whatever he or she wished while the other listened. The
sharing part of this exercise sustained and deepened the positive experiences
evoked by the reflection and promoted sympathetic joy as well.
My intuition tells me
that a variation of this exercise might also be successful with a wide range of
students. I’m interested to hear from readers of this newsletter who try
it.
Newsletter # 31
Motivation Part 3
During my last years of
teaching high school math, I began classes with five minutes of contemplative
practice. The most common practice was journal writing. I gave the
students journals on the first day, and they left them in the classroom during
the year.
Sometimes I asked the
students to share their experience of some aspect of the course in their
journals. They wrote these entries in the front of their journals.
I would read them and write “Thank you, RB.” Most Fridays we did free
writing. The students and I wrote continuously in our journals for five
minutes. Other days we responded to prompts, short stories form wisdom
traditions, poems, or one of several quotations that approached a common theme
from different angles. Students did free writing and responded to prompts
in the backs of their journals with the understanding that I wouldn’t read
it.
By the end of the year,
students had written quite a bit in the backs of their journals, and,
naturally, I was curious about it. So I asked the students to take their
journals home for one night, read all the entries in the back, select one that
seemed of particular significance and write a one-page paper, telling me about
it. I saw from their papers that their writing had borne much fruit, but
there was one, in particular, that struck me. A boy reported on an entry
he’d written in mid-November. He had read his entries chronologically,
and discovered that this was the first entry he’d written for himself. At
first I was shocked because he knew I never read these entries. Then I
realized that he was so used to writing for his teachers that it had taken him
two months to discover what it was to write for himself.
Teachers always hope to
have motivated students. However, there are many kinds of
motivation. Often students are motivated by success or motivated to
please the teacher. If we aim to strengthen students’ practice of
mindfulness, how much better that they should see this practice as being for
them! Not only did the motivation of my student change in this direction,
but he could detect the change himself.
Newsletter # 32
Mindfulness is not an individual matter
Susan Kaiser Greenland,
author of The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress
and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate, is my inspiration when
it comes to teaching interpersonal mindfulness to young people. Several
years ago at a Mindfulness in Education Network conference, Susan showed a
video of a 3rd grade class sitting in a circle on the floor. Each child,
in turn, looked at the child to his or her left and said something like,
“Hello, Bill, your eyes look brown.” The feeling of connection that went
around the circle was palpable. Susan’s book describes this and many
other interpersonal mindfulness practices that can be used with young people.
In my math classes, I
employed small group learning for many years. When classes began with
five minutes of mindfulness practice before the students started working with
their groups, there was a noticeable improvement in the presence students
brought to their work. Reflecting on prompts or doing free writing or
yoga, students had the opportunity to come back to themselves in the midst of
the busy school day, and their groups subsequently accomplished more in less
time. After new groups had worked together for a couple of weeks, I would
ask the students to reflect and journal on their group experience, notice what
was going well and what wasn’t. Then I asked them to reflect on how they
might modify their participation to improve their group. When the time
came for the groups to change, I suggested students write thank you notes to
each of the other members of their group. On the rare occasion I forgot
to make time for writing these notes, I was quickly reminded.
Mindfulness practice has
an ethical dimension. It’s not only sitting on a cushion. There are
many activist and relational mindfulness practices. However, being
mindful of others with understanding and compassion is difficult, if not
impossible, when one is not mindful of oneself. We offer a great gift to
young people when we share interpersonal as well as intrapersonal mindfulness
practices with them.
Newsletter # 33
Habits
Tom Bassarear teaches a course
at Keene State called Other Ways of Knowing in which
he invites students to change a behavior pattern for 21 days, the time it takes
to establish a new habit. One of his students decided to eat breakfast
every day, seemingly easy, but he had skipped breakfast for years.
Another, a shy young woman, decided to meet a new person every day. Her
experience was life changing. Like eating a single breakfast, being
mindful in a particular moment is not especially challenging. However,
overcoming the habit of constantly departing from the present moment is, and it
is life changing.
Habits are not easily
transformed. During my last two years of teaching, I began every math
class with five minutes of contemplative practice. Practicing daily,
students became aware of some of their habits. I’ve previously described
one such habit related to regular journaling:
The habit of writing for
teachers is deeply ingrained in most students, so I shouldn’t have been
surprised to hear from one of my students that, in spite of knowing I wouldn’t
be reading his writing, it was two months before he began writing journal
entries for himself.
Many mindfulness
programs offered to students are of short duration. For many years I had
the opportunity to teach mindfulness as a means of stress reduction to all the
9th grade students in my school, but this opportunity consisted of a single
45-minute class, hardly enough time to develop a new habit. Occasionally,
conditions may be right for a student to investigate next steps, perhaps
reading about mindfulness or seeking guidance from established mindfulness
practitioners. In other cases the seed that has been planted may sprout
later, perhaps through contact with friends who practice mindfulness or in
response to physical or emotional suffering.
It would be wonderful if
some day all education included other ways of knowing. But this will
happen only as we begin to practice other ways of teaching.
Newsletter #34 The pause that refreshes
In my
honors geometry class, our most common contemplative activities were free writing
and journaling on poems, short teaching stories, and quotes. When I began
every class with 5 minutes of contemplative practice, I was aware that I was
reducing the time for math by more than 10%. The students were also
aware. Yet, in this high achieving environment, I never received an
expression of concern from a student or parent. In fact, we covered the
usual mathematics curriculum, and student performance was as good as or better
than it had been before. A major reason for this was expressed by one
student as follows:
Writing
down my thoughts and emotions, giving myself time to purely focus on whatever
was going on in my mind, allowed me to focus for the next 40 minutes on math
more easily.
My
friend, Jim Kershner, who teaches writing, takes
contemplation a step further. After his students have been doing free
writing for 5 minutes, he asks them to stop and simply focus on their breathing
for 5 minutes. Then they do another 5 minutes of free writing. The
students are amazed at the difference they see in their post meditation
writing.
It was my
practice to use a bell in class, and I would often invite it in the midst of
student work, much of which was done in small groups. At the sound of the
bell, students stopped what they were doing and took three mindful breaths,
some with their eyes closed. Even these short pauses were sources of
refreshment for many students, though, I’m sure, some continued thinking about
the work they were doing. As the students were pausing, I was as
well. These mindful pauses helped me to come back to myself. They
might be an effective way to introduce mindfulness to students, especially if 5
minutes seems unworkable, and might
eventually lead to
practices of greater duration.
Newsletter #35 Buy in
In Teacher Man,
Frank McCourt describes trying to find a way to connect with his
unmotivated New York City high school English class. “What is
it they’re interested in?” he asks himself. The answers are immediate,
sex and food. Electing the latter, McCourt introduces what turns out to
be a hugely successful unit that involves the students in collecting and
sharing family recipes, cooking food for the class, and making presentations
with musical accompaniment provided by classmates.
The young people to whom
we introduce mindfulness practice may not be as challenging as McCourt’s
English class, but getting student buy in may still be difficult. This is
particularly true for older students, for students who are not receiving our
instruction by their own choice, and for students who don’t already have an
established relationship with us as teachers. Even in the best of
circumstances, we need to realize that asking students to fully attend to
something with nonjudgmental awareness and an attitude of curiosity is asking
them to care. Extending their care to something, even if doing so is
experienced privately, can require a good deal of vulnerability of some young
people. Therefore, in designing mindfulness experiences, carefully
choosing the objects we ask students to attend to is very important. We
might well consider the variation of Frank McCourt’s question “What is it they
care about?”
For Mary Scattergood, a
second grade teacher at Friends School Haverford, the answer to the above
question was “Beanie Babies.” Scattergood describes the Beanie Baby
Meditation she created for her class in Tuning In: Mindfulness in
Teaching and Learning, McHenry and Brady, eds.
In my case, I was given the opportunity to teach mindfulness as a means of
stress reduction to the 9th graders in my school as part of a
heath unit. At this age, students are in the midst of figuring out who
they are. They’re interested in themselves. They’re very aware of
their bodies, but few have paid attention to their minds. Watching their
minds do what they do when undirected is the basis of my “Mind as a Stage”
exercise. I describe this in my article “Schooled in the Moment: Introducing
Mindfulness to Students and Teachers,” which can be found on the Minding Your Life website, www.mindingyourlife.net.
If you’re not having
difficulty getting student buy in when you try to share mindfulness with them,
congratulations. If you are having difficulty, you might ask yourself
what they care about. And if you have trouble coming up with mindfulness
practices that meet the students where they are, I suggest you ask for advice
on the Mindfulness in Education Network’s listserv, available through
www.mindfuled.org.
Newsletter #36 The medium Is the message
In my experience, the
deep learning that students took away from my classes had less to do with the
content than with how I taught it. As I began to understand that the
medium was the message, I learned to pay a great deal of attention to pedagogy.
Steering clear of learning mathematics by rote, I focused on discovery
learning and problem solving. Later I introduced cooperative
learning. Without realizing it, I was developing a pedagogy that
supported mindfulness, which became a major factor in my last years of
teaching. I’ve described many of my experiences and thoughts related to
the pedagogy of mindfulness in Learning to Stop, Stopping to Learn:
Discovering the Contemplative Dimension in Education, which is
available on the Resources page of the Minding Your Life website,www.mindingyourlife.net.
How stimulating it was to
attend a presentation on “Exploring Pedagogical Underpinnings of Contemplative
Classroom Communities” at the recent Association for Contemplative Mind in
Higher Education Conference! Given by Tom Bassarear and
Katie Byrnes, assisted by Jess Caron, one of
Byrnes’ Bowdoin College students, the presentation
addressed pedagogical dimensions including: building community; designing
first-person inquiry; differentiating learning activities; and assessing
holistically. These dimensions are as significant for school teachers as
they are for professors. Hopefully, Byrnes and Bassarear will
soon produce a paper based on their presentation.
In the meantime, those
of us interested in exploring mindful pedagogy will find A
Buddhist in the Classroom (SUNY Press, 2008) by Sid Brown a wonderful
resource.
This is a book filled
with accounts of teachable moments, often moments that relate to Brown’s growth
as a teacher. A professor of religion, Brown uses her extensive
knowledge of and experience with Buddhism to help frame and organize her
teaching experiences. Her experiences illuminate the same dimensions
Byrnes and Bassarear described.
Brown’s inclusion of her own thoughts and emotions invite us to journey
with her. Here again, there is little need to distinguish between
teaching in schools and higher education.
In the end, wise
educators employ pedagogies that fit their own teaching situations and reflect
who they are, who their students are, what they teach, and their teaching
environments. Still, we have much to benefit from the lessons learned by
our contemporaries and those who have gone before us.
Newsletter #37 To create a space
In his book To Know as
We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey, Parker Palmer describes
education in this way: To teach is to create a space in which obedience to
truth is practiced. The truth he refers to is the truth of the
subject, the teacher, and the students, and the nature of obedience is not
compliance, but fidelity. In his own teaching Palmer makes
extensive use of contemplation to create such a space.
One day in my tenth
grade honors geometry course I told the students they’d receive a quote from
Malcolm X to journal on the following day. This is the quote:
I'm
sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I
have thought about it.
I
think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument.
If
you made a mistake, that was all there was
to it.
Their responses to the
quote were written in the backs of their journals, so, by agreement, I never
read them. I wish I’d been able to, because this quote suggests why
employing contemplation in creating such a space was challenging for
me. The students had grown up with the knowledge that mathematics
problems have right answers, and their job was to solve the problems in order
to find these answers. From the moment they encountered a problem,
they were analyzing it, comparing it to problems already solved, seeing what
known theorems might be applicable and so on. Sitting back and
simply contemplating a figure or a question, waiting patiently for insight,
happened only if they had no idea how to proceed but were not ready to give up
and move on to the next problem.
Given the reality, that
in this context, truth had little to do with the students or me; it was
inherent in the problem, I made the decision to reserve the first five minutes
of class for contemplative practices that didn’t focus on mathematics, most
often using journaling in response to quotes or poems, free writing, yoga, and
guided meditations before quizzes and tests. Beginning class this
way helped students be fully present to the mathematical activities that
followed. Occasionally, I was able to come up with a mathematical
question which seemed appropriate for contemplation, for
example:
We
have developed a formula for determining the area of a triangle given the
length of its sides. Do you think there
might be such a formula for determining
the area of a quadrilateral?
This question led to a
good deal of contemplation followed by vigorous small group discussions which
produced no resolution in most groups. Leaving the question hanging,
I invited further contemplation at home. The space this question
created was close to that described by Palmer. We got even closer to
that space the few times I presented the students with geometric figures or
other mathematical situations and asked them to formulate their own questions
about them. Curiosity and imagination helped some students
come up with original questions. The majority of the students, well practiced in answering questions, found asking them
daunting. However, I believe the approach of asking students to
formulate questions has the potential to be one of the most productive ways to
encourage contemplative learning in mathematics courses and others as well.
Newsletter #38 Skillful
Means
As mindfulness
becomes mainstream, it is being offered in settings including business and
the military as well as classrooms, medical centers and retreat
centers. With its growth in popularity, there is a corresponding
growth in the number of approaches to teaching mindfulness and the number of
people teaching it. Almost all the teachers I’ve met have roots in
some contemplative spiritual tradition. However, as scientific
studies show the positive impact of mindfulness training on a number of mental
and physical conditions, the spiritual and ethical dimensions of mindfulness
practice are no longer a primary interest for an increasing number of its new
students. These dimensions, foundations of traditional mindfulness
teaching, are minimal or absent in some recently developed mindfulness
curricula, including several used in public schools.
If you believe, as I do,
that mindfulness practice promotes wellness at all levels, then teaching that
explicitly addresses ethics, deep insight, and compassion is not absolutely
required, particularly if these qualities are embodied in the teacher. What
is essential is using skillful means to make mindfulness practice appealing and
accessible to the intended audience. The .b curriculum, developed for high school students by English
schoolteachers, does this through the creative use of PowerPoint images and
videos. The MindUPcurriculum
for elementary school students does this by including lessons on brain
science. Mark Williams’ teaching approach with adults, based on his
work with Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and laid out in his book, Mindfulness: An Eight
Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, draws on the nature of the mind in making a
case for students to commit to a half-hour daily practice.
In summary, my advice to
mindfulness teachers:
At the Mindfulness in
Education Network’s recent conference, plenary speaker Sam Himelstein, a psychologist who teaches mindfulness to
incarcerated youth, described the skillful means he employs in working with his
clients. His talk, posted on MiEN’s Website,
illustrates some of the best mindfulness teaching I’ve encountered.
Newsletter #39 Just Listening
In Newsletter #11 I
described a practice in which I asked the listeners to just listen without comment,
without questions, and without expressing approval or disapproval nonverbally.
That newsletter was about non-judgment, but just listening is
much more than refraining from communicating positive or negative judgments. It
is refraining from thinking about what one hears as one listens. There is
nothing wrong with thinking about what one is hearing, or seeing, or feeling.
Being mindful, however, of our experiences means that we are aware of the
difference between our direct experiences and the thoughts that these
experiences occasion. We can then see that what we experience may be more about
us than about the original stimulus. One way to help students develop this
awareness is to ask them to experience things like watching the breath or
noticing the sensations in one's feet without thinking about them. And these
are easy compared to just listening to someone.
On two occasions
during a recent residential mindfulness course for Italian teachers, I asked
participants to just listen to their partners for five
minutes. On the second occasion the listeners appeared remarkably attentive,
yet inexpressive. When I gave participants the opportunity to share their
experiences with the whole group, I was disappointed when no hands went up.
Then Loredana, who teaches in a school for
teenagers in Palermo, shared that she had found just listening to be
extremely challenging, but she'd done her best to practice it as she listened.
Then, for a brief moment, something completely unexpected had happened. As she
listened, she vanished. There was no longer a separation between her partner
and her. It was as if she were hearing her partner's words from inside her
partner. Loredana later told me that she
has had similar experiences before, but only in listening to her son. This
time, knowing that no response was expected of her, freed her from the fear of
being caught unprepared to respond and enabled her to stop thinking and just
listen. Knowing now that it is possible for her to listen in this manner
to a relative stranger, Loredana sees many
opportunities to just listen in the future. Loredana's experience inspired me and some of the rest
of the participants to continue to practice just listening when
we returned home.
Newsletter #40 Just Listening Part 2
At our mindfulness in education
conference earlier this year, Lisa Flook, a research
scientist at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, shared a mindfulness practice, which is a favorite with
preschoolers. Asking us to raise both
hands, she sounded a chime. We were
instructed to keep our hands raised until we could no longer hear the chime,
then lower them to our abdomens and breathe in and out three times. I’ve modified the second part of this
practice for older students and ask them to continue to listen to whatever
sounds are present after lowering their hands.
Most students are able to keep their
awareness focused on the sound of the chime.
However, staying focused on whatever sounds are present is more
challenging. The awareness needed is
more open and so more permeable. Because
there’s no single thing to focus on, extraneous thoughts have more room to come
and go. Another difference is the lack
of the goal like hearing the chime as long as possible. In an earlier newsletter, I described a
listening practice with the goal of listening for as many different sounds as
one is able to hear. This requires
students to mentally take note of sounds as they hear them. Identifying sounds involves cognition and is
not just listening. Even without this goal, the process of
labeling sounds occurs quite naturally.
In most listening experiences,
people need to think about what they’re hearing. Add to that the random thoughts that
continually intrude while one is attempting to just listen, and it’s no wonder that just listening is so rare.
Perhaps preschoolers appreciate this more than we adults do.
Many years ago I accompanied a
friend to a prison to offer a mindfulness presentation to a group of
inmates. At the conclusion I asked for
questions. There was one: “Would you please sound the bell one more
time?”
Newsletter
#41 Regional Groups
Connecting with other mindful educators can strengthen
one’s commitment, help generate new approaches to incorporating mindfulness and
support one’s personal mindfulness practice.
However, although mindfulness is getting more attention from the press
these days, its inclusion in educational settings is still quite young. Educators employing mindfulness in their
teaching or for personal support are fortunate if they can find a colleague
similarly engaged.
At the Mindfulness in Education Network’s recent
conference, more than 200 participants from all levels of education and all
parts of the US came to American University to learn, share, and practice
together. Back home, many will stay
connected by participating on MiEN’s listserv, which
now has over 1,200 members. I’m
fortunate to be part of a regional mindful educators’ group. Last year my friend and fellow mindfulness practitioner,
Willow Nilsen, director of a local Waldorf pre-school, shared her intention
with me to from this group. We
approached Tom Bassarear, another friend and
education professor at Keene State College, who is also a founder of Keene’s Monadnock Mindfulness Practice Center. With the approval of the Center’s Board, we
began to meet there from 9:00 to 11:30 am the first Saturday of each month,
starting last January.
Last month eight educators from Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Massachusetts, early childhood educators to college professors, enjoyed sitting
and walking meditation, sharing their uses of mindfulness, journaling on a
short reading, then sharing in pairs, and learning a new mindfulness practice –
focusing fully on the end of each activity before moving on to the next. Afterwards seven of us enjoyed a delicious
lunch at a local Thai restaurant.
I’m aware of other regional mindful educator groups in
Maine and the Midwest. Regional groups
employ a variety of methods for outreach
including: using the MiEN listserv, creating a group
Facebook page, sharing flyers with meditation groups, area schools and
colleges, especially schools of education and counseling, and putting them out
at regional education conferences. The
Midwest group is in the early stages of planning a regional conference. Are the conditions ripe for a regional group
to form in your area with some help from you?
Newsletter #42 Live
Encounters
Parker Palmer is fond
of saying, “We teach who we are.” If we’re mindfulness practitioners,
we are people on the path of embodying mindfulness in our lives. Our
teaching of mindfulness reflects this, regardless of the particular curriculum
we adopt or create. Our students get this in the way we talk, the
way we listen, the way we’re present, the way we attend to them and to
ourselves. The actual mindfulness curriculum we’re able to share in
our particular setting may be limited. We may be constrained to not
explicitly teach any mindfulness practices whatsoever. Even so,
students will get who we are. They will see that mindfulness is more
than reduced stress, emotional regulation, higher test scores. They
will see that it is a way of living. They will see that mindfulness
is not an individual matter. That it is the solid foundation on
which relationships are built.
In To Know as
We Are Known, Palmer’s first book on education, he suggests that “to teach
is to create a space in which obedience to truth is
practiced.” “Truth” here refers to the mutuality that exists between
content, teacher, and students. Teaching is a live encounter of all
three. That encounter will be different for different teachers
teaching mindfulness to the same students, for a teacher teaching mindfulness
to different groups of students, and for a teacher teaching different
mindfulness lessons to the same students. Generalizations about what
should and should not be taught and how it should or should not be taught may
be a helpful starting point, but must, in any case, be tempered by the reality
of the specific context of the teaching. It might be a helpful
reminder to add, “Students learn who they are,” to the opening
quote. In K-12 education, student learning may also be significantly
influenced by who their parents are. Teaching mindfulness from one’s
own experience, with an understanding of the truth the students bring with them
into the classroom, facilitates the choice of content, pedagogy, and language
that builds connection and willingness to engage in new kinds of learning.
Newsletter #43 Presence
Mindfulness underlies the most important gift educators can
give their students, their presence.
Many years ago I was inspired by Rachael Kessler’s beautiful essay, The Teaching Presence, which appeared in the November
2000 issue of the Virginia Journal of
Education. In it Kessler shared her
observations on what a teacher’s presence and lack of presence contribute to
the educational process. In my own
experience, being fully present to myself and my students invites my students
to be present as well. Beginning class
with a contemplative practice such as silence or journaling helps both me and
the students let go of what we’ve brought with us and arrive in the present
moment. Recently I heard a professor
describe a very different way of starting classes. Having been deeply affected by Thich Nhat Hanh’s slow, graceful
manner of erasing white boards during his talks, the professor begins his
classes in a similar fashion. The
message, “We are here to pay attention to everything.” is clear. His students get it.
Our habit of thinking ahead to what we will do next is one
of the greatest barriers to being present in this moment. Professor Tom Bassarear
uses a simple, but challenging, practice to help break this habit. Finish
what you’re doing. Focusing on
finishing this, precludes being distracted by that. When we have finished, we can pause to
appreciate what we’ve done and prepare for what follows. What makes this practice especially
challenging is that we are seldom aware of what we are thinking about. Our habits of thinking are so ingrained that
we’re on autopilot. This is also true
for our students. A practice of being
present to oneself can help loosen these habits. This practice involves stopping class once or
several times and inviting our students to join us in shutting our eyes, simply
noticing our thoughts and feelings, then opening our eyes and returning to what
we were doing.
Newsletter #44 A Mindfulness Initiative
The
principal of our village’s PreK-8 public school announced a school wide
mindfulness initiative last fall. His
approach is to expose the faculty to mindfulness and let it take root in an
organic way. The school now has a group
of teachers who meet regularly to discuss mindfulness, and the principal
recently purchased copies of Daniel Rechtschaffen’s
book The Way of Mindful Education for
every faculty member. Earlier this week
I presented a mindfulness workshop to the faculty as the next step in the
principal’s initiative.
Planning
for the workshop, I talked with the principal and the faculty mindfulness group
a few weeks beforehand. It quickly
became clear that a workshop focusing on the benefits of mindfulness for the
teachers themselves would have the best chance of interesting faculty members
who saw mindfulness as just another educational fad. I would emphasize stress reduction, as I was
pretty sure that, even in a quiet village, school teachers experienced
stress. This was confirmed by an almost
unanimous show of hands at the start of the workshop. I began the workshop with the four minute
“experiment” of observing all that passes through awareness, then related
negative mental states to stress. This
segued into a guided meditation visualizing positive qualities. I often use these exercises in workshops with
students and wrote about them in Schooled
in the Moment, which is available on my website.
The
workshop ended with a raisin eating meditation, just the right conclusion to an
after school faculty meeting. Paying
attention is often talked about in schools.
Here was a way to promote the teacher’s attention as well as the
students’. I’ll return in spring to talk
with faculty members interested in following up on their workshop
experience.
Newsletter #45 Teaching Mindfulness
Our knowledge of
mindfulness practices appropriate for the students we teach, our knowledge of mindful
pedagogies, our communication skills, our understandings of our subject and of
our students provide the foundation for our teaching of mindfulness.
However, it’s our own mindfulness that enables us to “create a space” in which,
as Parker Palmer writes, “obedience to truth is practiced.” Here
“obedience” is in the sense of fidelity and “truth” refers to the truths of the
teacher, the students, and what is being taught.
In my opinion, the
most important support we need as teachers of mindfulness is that which helps
us develop and deepen our own mindfulness practice. Practice has a
profound impact on our truth as teachers. Through mindful breathing, we
can become more aware of the present moment. Through the practices of
loving speech and deep listening, we can develop more effective communication
with our students. Through the practice
of looking deeply, we can better know ourselves, our
students, and our subjects, enabling us to more effectively utilize familiar
mindful pedagogies and practices and create new ones.
With the support of
our practice, we can teach in a mindful way, a way that is much appreciated by
our students. Additionally, employing pedagogies that promote mindful
learning enables us to more effectively create spaces obedient to the truths of
particular subjects and particular students. Familiarizing ourselves with
some of these pedagogies is a second support for us as teachers of
mindfulness. These pedagogies are as
simple as mindfully erasing white boards and as complex as helping classes to
mindfully make decisions by consensus. Some are spatial, such as
arranging desks in circles or groups of four. Others are temporal, such
as periodically providing time for reflection or free writing. With our
mindfulness we can successfully employ mindful pedagogies in teaching many
subjects to many different kinds of students.
Drawing on their own
practice, educators are increasingly developing ways to invite their students
to mindfully engage with course content.
Three times during the fall Denise Aldridge’s third and fourth grade
students sit for 40 minutes in their school’s garden and observe and draw what
they see. They discover how to look at
one thing and observe both details and change1. English teacher Hope Blosser’s
12 and 13-year-old students read Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and learn to engage in contemplation and
self-reflection in the process of writing their own micro-fiction1. Professor of Information Science David Levy
asks the students in his Information and Contemplation course to record their
thoughts and experiences in journals when they use a particular form of
information technology2.
Students in Economics Professor Daniel Barbezat’s
Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness course discover the effect of doing a
well-wishing meditation on their generosity2.
Students can learn to
engage mindfully without learning mindfulness practices. However,
becoming familiar with practices like pebble meditation3 and raisin
meditation4, which come from a variety of sources, contributes a
third support for teachers of mindfulness. In some secular settings, the
teaching of mindfulness practices may not be sanctioned. However, a mindful teacher using mindful
pedagogies already gives students significant experience with
mindfulness. When we are able to add mindfulness practices to our
teaching, we give our students the important benefit of having concrete ways to
take mindfulness home with them.
Newsletter
#46 Teaching Mindfulness II
When we help students develop their mindfulness,
what is happening? Mindfulness isn’t a foreign language that
students need to learn from scratch. However we define mindfulness,
it’s something everyone has experienced, though the experiences are usually
short and more abundant in childhood, before curiosity begins to dim and
responsibilities grow. Nor is mindfulness similar to one’s native
language, which students grow up hearing others speak and acquire it naturally
from them. Mindfulness is a kind of awareness. To learn
mindfulness is to learn how, when called upon, to invite and sustain this kind
of awareness in a variety of situations.
Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something,
but it’s possible to be aware of something without being mindful of
it. We’re aware of things all the time. But to be
mindfully aware of something involves choosing to be aware of it and only being
aware of it. Watching it, not thinking about it. We can
be mindful of objects, sensory input, bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts
themselves, seeing them arrive, change, and depart our
awareness. When we begin to think about what has arisen in our
awareness, judging it, for example, we lose our mindfulness unless we turn our
awareness to this thinking. This kind of
self-awareness most children don’t have nor do many adults.
We help students attend to their awareness by
giving them what we hope will be simple things to attend to: the
sound of a chime, the taste of a raisin, their breath, the movement of their
bodies as they walk. When other things intrude in their awareness,
we ask them to come back to their original focus, not to follow whatever else
their minds attend to. There is logic in this. A single
object of attention is clear. It’s also clear when that attention is
lost. Is this one-pointed attention the goal of learning to be
mindful? What about mindfulness in ever-changing life situations?
What’s the point of developing
mindfulness?
1 Tuning
In: Mindfulness in Teaching and Learning, McHenry and Brady eds,
2009, Friends Council on
Education
2 Contemplative
Practices in Higher Education, Barbezat and Bush,
2014, Jossey-Bass
3 Planting
Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children, Nhat Hanh, 2011, Parallax Press
4 Full
Catastrophe Living, Kabat-Zinn, 1990, Dell
Publishing