In his book, The Courage To Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, Parker Palmer offers the notion that, “We teach who we are.” As educators enter the learning space with students and collaboration spaces with colleagues, they carry with them the inner condition of their soul. This is inevitably communicated and has lasting impact, even more so than the information taught or the outcomes of the projects on which they collaborate.
Adults play a vital role in providing a stable, centred, self-regulated anchor and model for the students we support as their brains continue to develop. Given this, educators must consider the degree to which they prioritise the quality of their attention and presence. Mindfulness offers a pathway to improved presence and attunement, not only in learning and collaboration spaces but also in our personal lives. The results include improved attention, self-control, emotional resilience and well-being, memory, relationships and even physical health.
According to Mindful Schools, mindfulness is a moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, emotions, sensations and surrounding environment. Through consistent and intentional practice, we can cultivate this awareness and strengthen our mindfulness “muscles.” This might seem easier said than done! We live in a time of significant distraction, resulting in our minds being somewhere in the past or future and rarely right here in the moment. However, beginning to bring a mindfulness practice into our daily lives does not have to be daunting or time consuming.
A simple way to begin is to bring small moments of pause to our day and attention to the breath. While breathing in and out, notice where you feel the breath in your body. Notice if you are breathing fast, slow, shallow, deep. Even one minute of noticing the breath and intentionally breathing in deeply and breathing out fully can offer enough stillness and awareness to calm the noise in your mind and body. Once you become comfortable with this, you can begin to shift your attention to noticing in other ways. Ask, “What sensations are present? What emotions are right here? What is happening right here around me?”
Cultivating this practice takes time and consistency. Release any discouragement or self-judgment about the distractions that continue to arise and simply begin again, over and over.
What about offering mindfulness to students? First, simply practicing mindfulness in our own lives and increasing our presence and attunement with students is in and of itself an intervention with tremendous potential for positive impact. We can also offer tools and strategies to students!
Using simple tools such as pinwheels, feathers, bubbles and “breathing balls” can be playful ways to help students begin to bring their attention to their breath while allowing them to experience the benefits this provides to their mind and body. Teaching students playful breathing techniques such as dragon breath, beach ball breath, ocean breath, firecracker breath and others, is also a way of bringing attention to their breath while having fun. MindfulArtsSF is one of many resources that offers engaging techniques and breathing cards to support educators with this.
As students become comfortable with noticing their breath, we can help them bring attention to the present moment through their senses, such as:
Ringing a chime and asking them to focus their ears on the sound, raising their hand once they no longer hear the sound.
Mindfully eating a raisin, guiding them through investigating the experience through all of their senses.
Rice and beans in a bag: Students are asked to still their body, close their eyes and use their sense of touch to separate out the rice from the beans.
Senses Awareness/Grounding in the moment: Students are asked to notice five things they see, four things they feel, three things they hear, two things they smell and one thing they taste.
Two mobile device applications that educators may find supportive are Insight Timer and Calm. These applications offer mindful music, guided meditations and other supportive functions to guide the development of a mindfulness practice. Engaging in mindfulness activities and playful games is a start to this journey. Over time and with practice, educators can move from playing mindfulness and experiencing it as a temporary state, to mindfulness as a way of being.