Cultivating Mindfulness for You & Your Students
It starts with you, the teacher.
If you model mindful behavior, your students are likely to become more mindful. It’s great to talk to students about mindfulness and to explicitly teach practices for mindfulness, but if you are not mindful, teaching mindfulness will not work.
So, how can a typical public public schoolteacher become more mindful?
1. Start by not taking your smartphone to bed with you, and when you wake up in the morning, don’t check your email or look for text messages while in bed. Instead, take sixty seconds to listen for sounds (maybe there are birds outside the window), to move (and feel) your toes or fingers, to feel your breath, the air moving in and out through your nose, filling your chest and out through your mouth.
2. Then, look at your surroundings, your room, the walls, the ceiling, without judgement, without thinking and without planning anything.
3. You can check your email or twitter literally after you have climbed out of bed. Wait until after a shower and a cup of coffee if you can, all the while, remaining curious, observant and meditatively aware.
4. When you arrive at your classroom door, the school door or your parking space, try to notice something new that you have never seen before.
5. Seconds before any of your classes begin, before your students arrive, stand in the doorway to your classroom or entrance to your learning environment. Take a breath or two, and without thinking about all the things you have to do (ten seconds tops) smile to yourself.
6. When students begin to arrive for class, greet each one by name at the door, smiling if you can, thinking to yourself as each one passes How is Jorge or how is Amelia? Try to sense what each student is feeling or experiencing or thinking as they pass. You may not be able to, but try. You will miss a few, who get past while you are distracted, Maybe one student will ask you something, and you won’t see another student walk by you. That’s ok. You are not taking attendance. You are just being present for your students. You have to do this nearly every day, for every class for it to work.
7. This is about you, not your students. As much as you are taking a moment to see your students, you are doing it primarily to enhance your own well being, your own calmness. Some of them will likely feel seen. There will be consequences for that — not as subtle as you may expect, either. All of them good, some immediately, others, eventually. They might see you back and they may reap the benefits of mindfulness, too. They may be calmer, more centered, more focused, more open, less stressed, less aggressive, more observant and more ready to learn. But, it’s for you, not them.
How do I Teach My Students to be Mindful?
You don’t have to tell them you are teaching them about mindfulness. You don’t even have to tell them what exactly you are doing or why you are doing it, if you think that will be a distraction, but teach your students to be mindful. First do this by actually being mindful yourself. Then create mindful activities for them that they will do during the class period or the day or the year. Some will be part of the curriculum, others won’t be. Here are some ideas.
1. Begin class with a one minute mindful activity. This could be a minute of guided meditation, an ungraded and uncollected freewrite, a story about your dog, the reading of a short poem, listening to a song, a stand and stretch or make up your own mindfulness activity. But, it should not be required or count for a grade. I repeat. It should not be mandatory. The only thing they have to do is remain silent during the one minute. The first time you do this, they might not be completely silent, but be patient, after a few days, they will gradually look forward to this. As will you.
2. When you see a student who is being mindful, acknowledge it subtly. This is not meant to be a reward or positive reinforcement. It may be, and that’s fine, but it is meant to be a reciprocation of mindfulness. You are being mindful of that student’s mindful behavior. Mindfulness leads to more mindfulness. Noticing might mean you gently tap your finger on a student’s desk, and when she looks up, you smile, making eye contact.
3. During class or during the day, listen actively to your students when they talk to you, making eye contact, letting them finish their thought or question and ask them questions about what they are talking about.
4. Focus more on the processes of learning than the outcomes. If a student writes a good sentence or paragraph, instead of praising him or her, ask what his or her process was, what steps he or she took to write it, how did he or she come up with the words in this particular order? Make it clear that the writing is very good, but emphasize the student’s method, not the product. You could do this privately (in a conference) or publicly (during a class discussion) depending on the student and the situation.
5. Take an art break. This could be scheduled into the lesson plan or available at all times, depending on your style of teaching. This requires having some simple art supplies available in the corner of the classroom or in a closet. Markers, paper, paint, colored pencils, posterboard, glue, beads, string, cardboard and clay are ok if you have the funds, but it’s just as good if not better to use junk for art supplies Ask your students to bring broken shells from the beach, old magazines, sticks, leaves, sand and rocks and cut up cardboard boxes. You buy the glue. Use recycled milk containers for storage, and give a different student each week extra credit for having the job of keeping the art corner well stocked and clean.
Other Ideas for Creating Mindful Activities
Mindful Walking: Teach your students how to pay attention to their footsteps as they walk.
Field trips to the state park or the beach: Take your students on a free frieldtrip to a local place where they can freewrite, discuss a book or to explore the natural world.
Singing a song: Make a song that relates to a lesson or topic or sing one that someone has already made up.
Creative Writing: Allow your students to write poems or stories about the subject you are trying to teach them about. And! Don’t grade them. Just a pass or fail is fine.
Poetry readings: Have monthly poetry readings, where students voluntarily choose (and you preview and approve) poems they want to read aloud to the class for extra credit. This can be done in math class too.
Stand up, take a breath and sit down: Pretty self explanatory.
Storytime: On Mondays, start each class by telling a 5 minute story from your weekend that has a hidden lesson in it related to the week’s curriculum. Students can contribute stories too, once they have heard a few of yours, so they know the format etc.
Mindful Eating: Teach students how to eat a piece of fruit or even chips in a mindful way. Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, has written about this. I’m sure it won’t take long to find it, using google.
Celebrate failure: In order to encourage students to admit they are confused, and to stay with that confusion until they have gained understanding, create a practice of celebrating failure, misunderstanding and mistakes that teache lessons. Start by celebrating your own failure.
Share dreams: These could be dreams you had while sleeping or dreams as in goals. This could be done in a class blog.
Googleculturalinstitute: This site allows children to discover artistic collections from around the world without leaving the classroom. Explore cultural treasures and use these as inspiration for centering a class in the moment.
Sit on the floor: Do this on a Friday afternoon or ten minutes. This will help you and your students to be more grounded. If students don’t want to do this, don’t make them.
Get rid of desks: Traditional classroom furniture was designed to create barriers between teachers and students. These barriers must be eliminated now.
Google 20% Time: Take one day out of each week to allow students to explore subjects (losely seated within an academic area) that they are interested in.
Low tone time: Set aside a specific period of time where everyone talks in a low tone. This will increase their ability to listen overall.
Close your eyes: Occasionally, even randomly assign students to close their eyes for 30 seconds and listen to their breathing.
Celebrate differences: When there is a discovery that someone is different, put a positive spin on it. For example, if there is a new student in class who is blind or deaf, ask him or her if it would be ok if the class had a 15 minute Q&A about blindness. Many blind people don’t mind talking about it at all. In fact, they prefer it over the whispers.
5 minute Birthday parties: Ask students to write their birthdates on an index card and hand them in to you on the very first day of class (if they want to), an then celebrate birthdays as they come up with a single nut-free cupcake for that person, playing a recording of the beatles’s “birthday.” You can find it on Youtube. Or, a big home-made card that everyone signs. For those students whose birthdays fall on the weekend or Summer, surprise them randomly.
Sign the cast: If someone gets hurt, make sure you allow time for the whole class to sign their cast or a card. Of course, you will ask that student if signing the cast is ok, before you do move on that.
Status of the class: This is a weekly meeting (usually held for 30 minutes on a Friday) where students can make suggestions for how the class could be run better. Whenever a student had an idea that made sense, I would shower him or her with positive reinforcement and then put that person in charge of making it happen.