Back To School Mindfully

In this lecture, Amy Edelstein, founder of the Inner Strength teen mindfulness programs talks about how to establish a mindful foundation in high school classrooms. She emphasises that the atmosphere cultivated must be one of calmness, curiosity, and care. This talk is interspersed with short guided mindful breathing and instructions on how to create shared agreements that work to co-create a spacious classroom culture.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Classroom webcast.

My name is Amy Edelstein and I'm thrilled to be speaking together today about starting school mindfully,

The tools and practices that we can put in place in our classroom to be able to bring a foundational level of calm,

Curiosity,

Context and care into our classroom culture and as the way,

As our shared currency,

As the way that we work with our students and the way they work with each other.

Getting clear about foundational priorities is important for us in our lives as well as in our classrooms.

When we establish what is most important,

Those deeper,

Less event-specific values will be clear and they'll guide us through all kinds of happy situations that arise and challenging situations that inevitably will occur as the school year unfolds.

When we create shared agreements with our students,

It helps them understand what those foundational values are and it'll help them also internalize them.

So it'll be less of a push and pull and it'll be more of a positive classroom culture that we're co-creating together.

Now of course your students are going to arrive in your classroom having had all kinds of different experiences.

Sometimes it takes so much time just to get everyone to arrive,

To settle into their seats and to be ready to learn.

Having shared agreements that list the positive values and that arise from a supportive and interesting and fun activity that you do together at the beginning of the year and having those posted visibly helps reorient the students when they walk into your classroom.

It helps them feel the boundaries,

The stability,

The structure and the support that you're creating for them.

As a teacher and educator,

We're always imparting to our students content.

We're also imparting to them context how to relate to their lives,

To information,

To their futures,

To their aspirations.

And most of all,

Our students mostly absorb who we are and how we are.

And they crave stability as much as especially teenagers are exploring their world,

Testing boundaries,

Trying to find the next innovative and creative slang to use or dance move.

They're also craving stability.

They're craving a way to organize their world and their lives and their hopes and their dreams.

As a teacher,

As an educator,

When we provide that,

We help them learn.

We help them grow as people.

And we help them navigate through a world which can feel quite overwhelming,

Not only to our students,

But also to us.

In the inner strength system which is based on philosophical principles of a developmental context,

Looking at large scale influences and how our experience is formed and shaped by so many factors.

So seeing our immediate experience in context.

And the other component of the inner strength system is mindful awareness,

Contemplation,

Contemplative practice,

And all the exercises that help us gain objectivity on thought and feeling,

Enable us to calm and focus,

Experience stillness in this chaotic world,

And enable us to also explore the mysterious nature of human consciousness.

The fact that we are aware is a wonder and a mystery.

And paying attention to that quality of awareness,

Of consciousness,

Of being conscious,

Not just the things we're conscious of.

Evoke and inspire a curiosity and love of learning and an interest in how things work that is the bedrock of good learning,

Good teaching,

And a life well lived.

The third aspect of the inner strength system of course is care.

Care for self and other,

Care for learning,

Care for the future,

Respect for the past.

And we cultivate that care through specific contemplative practice.

We also cultivate that care in how we speak,

What we focus on,

How we create friendship,

How we create respect for experience,

For authority,

How we create sensitivity and awareness of group dynamics even among students.

When teens can learn to be kind to themselves and kind to others and when they can learn to care about the shared environment we're creating together,

They start becoming involved in improving classroom culture.

That takes the attention off of them either being to blame or being to praise and it teaches them how much we are a system bouncing off each other,

Working together.

Putting attention on jobs well done,

Putting attention on risk taking and answering questions and being creative,

Putting attention on someone's accomplishments,

Finding out what their experience was when things were positive helps to foster a classroom of care.

And it teaches students those all important values of kindness,

Support,

And interest in one another.

The final foundational building block I want to talk about in the webcast today is also an essential component of the inner strength system and what is unique in the way that we emphasize the way we create positive classroom experience has to do with context.

Expanding the framework in which we see what's happening,

In which students start to interpret what they're learning.

It helps all of us work with complexity.

It helps all of us step back and see the synergy,

The system,

And the whole between all things.

Just as when the astronauts first broke the Earth's atmosphere and looked back on that single beautiful orb swirling in space and Edgar Mitchell and others all described that indescribable experience,

That expansion of heart where they realized what a beautiful singular planet we live on filled with so many billions of people,

All of our lives and complexity,

So many trillions of organisms,

Species,

But still one single planet.

And that experience changed forever Edgar Mitchell's relationship to the world,

How he saw our problems and how he saw our solutions.

And he really wanted and dedicated his life to helping people realize the bigger context within which we exist.

We can always focus in and look in at complexity.

We want to start with expanding the framework so there's more context.

And when we can teach our students by the way we are to step back,

To take in the whole,

To take in even that which we don't know is an element influencing a situation,

Leaving room for information and experience that we don't quite see yet,

Then we're really enabling our students to learn an invaluable skill in the 21st century,

The skill of the ability to contextualize and to relate to complexity with simplicity.

I want to talk about each of these and then we'll go into the process of creating shared agreements in the classroom and how to do it in a way that will help them stick both for you and for your students.

Calm,

Creating calm.

We do that of course through mindful awareness.

If you've begun to use the tools of mindful contemplation in your classroom,

You can use mindful breathing at any moment in your day or in the period.

You can use it when your own students have a lack of focus.

You can use it when you have a lack of focus.

Everyone benefits from a few moments of watching the breath,

Noticing the inhalation and the exhalation,

Allowing the jitters to come to stillness.

Many teachers have found it a useful bookend to start with a moment of silence and mindful breathing and to end the class with a moment of silence and mindful breathing.

Those bookends help the students transition,

Letting go of whatever happened in the period before so they have space and are prepared to learn and be in your class and with each other.

And at the end of the period,

It gives them time to just integrate what they've learned and experienced,

Their insights and breakthroughs or their struggles.

And it also gives them a moment to collect themselves before they walk to their next classroom,

Before they have to open their minds and pay attention to another subject or a test or a reading exam.

Let's take a moment right now and do a short minute of mindful breathing.

And you'll see that in the middle of learning,

It's certainly possible to take that moment even when you feel like your students just aren't absorbing what you're saying.

Maybe you need to approach the subject differently.

Maybe you need a different example and one isn't coming to mind.

Or maybe they just feel full,

Their brains feel full and it's time to take a pause.

You can instruct your students like this.

Let's take a moment for mindful breathing.

Uncross your legs and let your feet touch the floor.

Notice the way your feet rest on the ground.

Notice your weight in the chair and how gravity pulls you down.

And then let your spine rise up out of your seat so that your vertebrae are stacked tall,

One on top of the other.

And your head is floating at the top.

Create just a little bit of space in your neck,

Letting your vertebrae adjust.

So there's a clear passageway in your spinal column,

Helping your nervous system to transmit information smoothly and unobstructedly.

Now put one hand on your belly and one hand on your lungs and take a deep breath in,

Noticing the rise of your abdomen and your lungs as you fill them with air.

And as you exhale,

Notice how your lungs empty.

Let your abdomen empty.

And now allow your breathing to just be natural without trying to take a deep breath.

And notice the movement of freshly oxygenated air going in and going out,

Each inhalation and exhalation.

And on your last breath,

You can begin to bring your attention back,

Wiggling your fingers and your toes and appreciating that little bit of pause,

That brain break.

Now we can focus back on the material that we've been learning.

You can see that just a short minute or two of mindful breathing can slow everything down,

Provide a nice break and pause as you move from sections of lesson to another section of the lesson.

And even though it feels like you may be pausing the flow of teaching that you're in the middle of,

It can give the students a way to just reset,

To come back,

To take a moment where they're integrating for themselves and then they'll be able to extend their attention again.

Other tools that really help with calm in the classroom are having a peace corner for quiet reflection,

For refocusing.

And in that peace corner,

You can have some pictures of nature,

A beautiful waterfall or a mountain,

A sunrise or sunset,

A huge tree.

Pictures of the natural world have an effect of calming the mind and the whole system.

It doesn't even have to be a plant or a window looking out.

It can be simply a beautiful picture of nature.

In the studies they've done at the Singapore Hospital,

They've noticed that patients who have either access through windows to nature or photographs of nature in their rooms heal faster,

Require less pain medication and have a better recovery rate overall.

Nobody exactly understands why the way the human organism integrates in that way,

But it does,

So we can use that.

You can also have a glitter jar in your peace corner,

A jar filled with glue and glitter so that the students can shake the glitter jar and hold it and watch the glitter fall to the bottom of the jar,

Allowing their emotions to respond and relax and settle.

What I've seen in some high school classrooms is that that becomes a very popular go-to,

Even for high school students.

Just as they feel agitated or they're angry about something,

They take the glitter jar to their desk,

They keep listening to what's happening,

They're not interrupting those around them and they're also allowing themselves to resettle and reset.

If you find your students particularly agitated and unable to focus,

You can also either have them have their own mindfulness journals or create a mindful index card so they're mindful moments and you pass them out and get them to list all of their emotions.

As integrative neuropsychologist Dan Siegel says,

Name it to tame it.

If you name the emotion,

The agitated emotion,

Anger,

Sadness,

Frustration,

Hurt,

Without the content of it,

If you do that for 90 seconds,

Then our emotional reaction in the brain starts to settle down and our problem solving part of the brain comes online a little bit more strongly.

You can teach these to your students,

You can use it with them or they can learn how to do these things on their own.

Curiosity is the second foundation of our conscious classroom.

Instilling a love of learning and doing that by helping students and creating,

Embedding the fostering of curiosity in our shared agreements.

So one way to foster curiosity and that we can use in our shared agreements is by asking questions.

How can we look at this differently?

So when a student is frustrated,

Angry,

Not participating,

How can we look at this differently?

How can you look at yourself differently?

How can you look at the classroom differently?

How can we shift the context?

How can we understand the influences?

How can we understand how one person's behavior changes the environment in the room?

We can do this by setting this as a shared agreement which we'll talk about more shortly.

And we can also do this as we weave into our teaching style a way to develop curiosity.

So one thing you can do is prepare one unanswerable question every day.

Either a question that doesn't have an answer or a question that we don't know the answer or a question that just forces the students to shift perspective,

To learn how to expand their brains and the way they see.

Teens are programmed to learn and to take risks,

To take risks in thinking,

In discovery,

In innovation.

Working with that,

Considering that in a positive way will help engage your students with the material you're teaching them and with the whole process of growing up,

Of being alive.

Anything can be an unanswerable question or a question that could be seen differently.

You can have your students take out their hands.

Ask them,

Well what is this?

Try to see it differently.

So it could be a hand,

It could be fingers attached to a body,

It could be the thing that we use to pick something up.

But we could also look at the space between each finger.

At the relationship between the thumb and the other fingers.

Looking at the space and how it works.

We could look at the atoms,

The protons,

Neutrons and electrons that make up the hand.

We could look at the particles.

We could look at the hand as the expression of a system of human growth and development that went from a sperm and an egg in two different people to this object in space.

There's so many different ways to look at a hand.

None of them are right or wrong.

They're different.

Getting the students to just shake up their minds a little bit is important to helping them feel engaged in the process of learning.

Not just recipients learning and memorizing that which is already known,

But figuring out how to see the common freshly.

A mindful contemplation that you can do with your students is when you have them,

Have them drink some water.

Make sure that they're hydrated.

Hydration is good for the brain.

That's just a short public service announcement.

But make sure they're hydrated.

Keep cold water in your room.

Keep a jug of water so that they can fill their water bottles or keep some small plastic,

Some small paper cups so they can get a little taste of water.

It helps them rejuvenate and helps them calm.

If they're very stressed,

Giving the teen a drink of water can help them calm down,

Have them sip the water.

But a mindful contemplation you can do with them is have all of them take out their water bottle or get a small paper cup of water and notice as they take a sip,

Notice all the micro movements in their mouth on their tongue.

The feel of wetness,

The way the water touches their throat,

What happens on the roof of their mouth.

If the water is cold,

What happens?

How the sensation tingles even up through their nose.

Get them to be mindful of the simple,

Mysterious and beautiful process of hydration.

And that will bring them into the moment.

It will take their attention off the text that they just got,

The post,

The chat they want to send,

The post they want to change,

The hairstyle they want to try.

And just bring them into the moment all together exploring something together.

It only takes a minute and a half to do something like this,

Especially if they're used to carrying water with them.

And you can break a pattern,

Especially when it's hard to control them when,

You know,

It just seems like everyone got up on the wrong side of the bed.

The next foundational building block is care for self and others and cultivating care for self and others.

Practicing kindness and practicing meanness are habits.

We practice kindness and meanness in our thoughts,

Towards ourselves and towards other people.

We practice kindness and meanness in our responses,

What we support,

What we criticize.

And we practice kindness and meanness in our actions.

How aware are we of the space around us?

Do we take care that it's clean,

Orderly,

Taken care of?

Do we appreciate and feel gratitude for the room we're in,

The furnishings,

For the cleaning staff?

All of those things have to do with practicing kindness and meanness.

Closeness,

A sense of belonging or intimacy is cultivated when we ask each other more about the good things that happen than the bad things that happen.

So teaching your students to ask each other when something happened that's good,

How did you feel?

Tell me more about it.

It doesn't take more time to ask one or two questions about the good things that happen.

Not simply praising a student,

You know,

When they say,

I won,

You know,

Our team won the big meet over the weekend.

So we often think support is,

Well,

That's great,

Good for you,

Good job.

That kind of encouragement is important.

But ask them one question.

How did you feel about that?

What did you notice?

What did you do that made you feel like you were going to win?

What was it like?

And when a student feels that interest in their experience around good things,

They feel a deeper sense of connection and belonging.

And that sense of connection and belonging helps them feel open to learning in your classroom and open to learning from each other.

It also helps cultivate the curiosity that we were talking about,

Curiosity and guiding teens to be curious about the good things,

To find out what are the factors that made those good things arise and how do they affect us?

What do they make us feel?

At the beginning of the year or any time during the year,

Thanksgiving is also a good moment to think about gratitude.

Create a commitment mosaic.

Get some beautiful colored paper and everyone chooses one thing they'll do each week to practice kindness.

One thing they'll do that's going to contribute to this culture of care in the classroom.

That beautiful mosaic becomes a touch point.

Keep it visible.

Keep it in a place in the room where they see it when they walk in.

Without positivity and shared commitments,

Fill the room.

They inspire.

They remind us.

So how do we create shared agreements?

What are the classroom rules?

How do we establish them?

We all know the school rules.

You'll have rules around cell phones.

You'll have rules around leaving the class to go to the bathroom.

You'll have rules around eating and drinking.

You'll have school rules.

But we want to create classroom rules.

We want to create shared agreements.

And those shared agreements help engage the students in the culture of the classroom,

The boundaries of the classroom.

And it helps them express those rules in their own words.

Usually all the agreements and rules of the school in one way or another are rules that the students themselves appreciate,

Even if they don't appreciate them for themselves at the moment.

Students need structure.

They need order.

And they need to feel safe.

They need to feel that the classroom is in control.

They don't like it when the classroom gets out of control.

They don't know what their peers are going to be doing.

They want to feel that everyone's working and following the same map.

The way what's good to share to do to create shared agreements is to prepare the areas that you want to cover beforehand.

Know what,

You know,

Know the areas that you want to end up on the shared agreement list that you post in your classroom.

And you'll have them so you can seed the discussion.

But let the students express what's important to them.

Create them together.

Have one student write them on a board.

And then,

Or a poster board if you have them.

You can have the student write it on the board.

And then you can take a snapshot of it.

And then have another student create a graphic of it to put on the wall.

Keep referring to the shared agreements when things are positive and are working.

Reminding the students those shared agreements when they're in place really feel good.

Create order.

Get the students refer to them.

So when a student is out of bounds,

Which of the shared agreements are they not doing?

Which ones are they doing?

How can they align to them?

You can also ask your students to create a hand movement or activity that goes with the key agreements.

This isn't just for the younger kids.

High school students also,

They learn somatically.

When students are following the shared agreements,

When good things are happening,

When they're caring for each other,

Have a hand signal.

Tapping the different fingers.

Shaking the two fingers.

We have some common hand signals now so that there's less disruption but students can express their enthusiasm or support.

Does everybody know what those hand signals are?

Go over them.

Have the students demonstrate.

Create that somatic sense that keeps reinforcing positive behavior,

Positive learning.

Specifically some of the shared agreements that you want to create have to do around participation.

If you have an outgoing class,

You can always talk about one diva,

One mic.

We're not talking over each other.

Everyone wants their moment at the mic.

When there are group discussions,

You can have an agreement that everyone needs to speak at least once.

They can participate with their support of another comment.

They can participate with their question.

And especially when you put your students in small group discussions,

Get them to be responsible for one another.

To invite every student to share,

Every student to participate.

And when you have very talkative students who always answer the questions,

Make them responsible for asking questions to draw out other students.

That way they still get to participate and express themselves and they have a role and a function that connects them with other people around them.

What are your shared agreements around food,

Around water,

Hydration,

Around bathroom breaks?

The school system often doesn't leave quite enough time between classes for students to grab a drink,

Get to the bathroom on time,

Get back to class on time,

Have a little snack.

It's disruptive when students are eating all of the time.

But if students are faint with low blood sugar and need a little snack,

It's much better to have them eat,

Figure out how you're going to help the students take care of their physical needs so that they can learn.

And you can use water breaks as I described before to help relieve tension and restlessness.

It's a positive brain break.

In your shared agreements you want to make sure you cover what are your agreements around disagreement?

How do you foster an interest and curiosity in learning?

How do you help students create the ability and the comfort level with thinking for themselves?

Teaching students to respectfully disagree.

I appreciate your point and my point is different.

I appreciate the way you see that.

I see things differently.

Teach students positive discourse that's going to enrich the classroom.

When disagreement gets heated,

Teach them how to use mindful moments,

Mindful breath,

Mindful pause.

Teach them also in moments of disagreement how to use mindful awareness to step back and say can we see all of this from another angle that we've not neither of us have thought about?

What are your shared agreements around note taking,

Writing,

Presenting,

Drawing?

Kids think in different ways.

Can we allow students who think in different ways to have different avenues to absorb material and to express material,

To express what they've learned or what they're thinking about?

The process of creating shared agreements in classrooms should be fun.

Make it something that is taking the best of everyone and bringing that forward.

Especially those students who traditionally have a hard time participating in class or are restless and agitated and disruptive.

Give them a role in creating the shared agreements.

Even if it's a role in writing things on the board or in making the poster afterwards or in reciting the shared agreements in the morning for a week right after you create them.

Keep them alive and what you'll find is that your classroom will build a foundation and when things go well that foundation will be strengthened.

On those agitated and distracted days students will have touchstones.

It'll be like giving them a walking stick when the path gets a little rocky and tricky.

I firmly believe and I've seen in all of our mindful teen programs that these type of positive agreements help everyone feel a sense of structure and in that sense of structure curiosity and learning can really flower.

So I hope that you'll implement these shared agreements creating calm,

Care,

Curiosity and context and I hope that you have your best year teaching ever and that your students have an experience during this school year that will touch them and be that bright and warm inspiration for the rest of their lives.

Reviews

I am not a classroom teacher in a purely educational setting, but I do teach for the American Red Cross within my company and work with clients of working age who present with a wide range of documented disabilities, including anxiety and inattention. Physical conditions, intellectual disabilities, mental health, substance abuse, and combinations of them all are present uniquely in all my clients. Even working one-on-one with them, I have found it helpful to do a brief moment of silence where I simply look at them with a slight smile. It saddens me to have observed over the years, and been told directly by my clients, that they are not used to people smiling warmly at them without expecting anything from them in return. (Unconditional positive regard seems in short supply these days, alas.) After the first few times I do this when meeting with them, they start adapting quickly and even begin smiling at me as they walk down the hall towards my office door, and I can feel them calming and settling.

I have practiced various forms of meditation much of my life, but have had a more formalized daily practice for the last 4 years or so. Different techniques work best for me under different conditions, and I find this to be true with my clients and the employees I teach. The constant in it all is being mindful of self and place. Not everyone has the demonstrated capacity to utilize theory of mind successfully, but for those individuals I teach the rule of reversal, asking what their reaction would be if this was done or said to them, and then asking them if their response is how they want others to feel because of what they choose to do, essentially. Most of the time this clicks; other times it takes longer or a slightly different approach.

When possible, I like to incorporate a moment of stillness, though not articulated as such; by that time the mirroring reflex has kicked in and the clients tend to follow along without being aware of it, silently waiting. Sometimes I do not get this opportunity, such as when they are short in time or in a heightened emotional state. In the latter case, they know - because I tell them this at intake - that I will be contacting them to follow up on what happened. This seems mostly helpful.

I appreciated this talk a great deal. I actually selected it, not realizing the target audience was teachers (then upon realizing this, thinking my brother and his wife who are teachers might find this interesting). I am in a doctoral program at present, and the new quarter began today. The one class out of all the didactic courses that has provoked the most anxiety has now started. I have severe anxiety relating to math, in no small part to an undiagnosed mathematics learning disability (discrepancy model) that I finally got confirmed shortly before starting my Master's degree back in 2004 because I wanted accommodations for the statistics course I needed to take. My last stats class had been as an undergrad in 1994 and was quite traumatic. My only caution to teachers and professors who may read this - if you are teaching from the course textbook which you wrote yourself, that does not give you a free pass to ignore students who come forward with questions or tell them to "read the book, I explained all that in there. You need to keep up with reading the text. I won't do the work for you." We taught ourselves. We barely made it, and yes, we complained, and yes, action was taken.

But in my Master's degree program, I had much anxiety going into that stats class. It wasn't as bad as I thought, as I remembered important parts. However, today I begin the follow-up class to the intro stats class from 14 years ago - advanced inferential statistics. I have prepared as best I could over the last quarter, attending school Quantitative skills center webinars reviewing basic concepts, reviewing my stats terminology dictionary and test selection criteria, listening to funny stats books on my commute, and pouring over a cartoon guide to statistics which has helped me visualize the concepts. Still, even with accommodations in place, a kind instructor with whom I have spoken, supplemental instruction available twice a week, and more, I have looked at this first week of discussions and the responses already made by co-learners - and am a bit on the verge of panic. Those responses sound so effortless and informative. I doubt they truly were, but I had trouble parsing the discussion question itself, much less forming an opinion on it. I am eager to begin the SPSS portion, as I can do computer work without issue and was the SPSS lab tutor as an undergrad, in fact.

My issue, well known to me, is that I overthink and feel a compulsion to thoroughly understand every nuance of every area within my field. This includes stats, for the purposes of my research. It causes anxiety in a tremendous wave, nearing panic attacks. My long-time therapist is probably happy to have this change if subject, as normally due to HIPAA requirements, I discuss workplace matters with him. And he has suggested looking at how high my standards for myself are. They are indeed high, always have been. In this class, this creates anxiety.

And so it came to be that I decided this morning to search for a meditative way to address this academic anxiety, specific to this one class. (My other class is much easier for me.)

I am able to step back and observe myself, maintain awareness in most cases, and usually calm myself before the anxiety gets out of hand. In listening to this, the thought dawned upon me that I use these techniques, some anyway, with my clients. Why not use them with me when I notice the same signals within myself? "Physician, heal thyself." (Or rather, "Psychology Ph.D. student, heal myself.")

This was a very valuable insight, and I am glad I opted for this talk and continued on even when I realized it wasn't exactly what I had been seeking. Sometimes the most helpful wisdom comes from places we are not looking.

I have bookmarked this and will likely listen again. Thank you so much for sharing so rich of a practice fir teachers, and also fir self-use. I do feel anxious still, but more calm, more centered, in control, and with a deep knowledge that I can and I will successfully complete this course, and that I know already I am not alone - there are multiple ways already known to me within the class itself to help facilitate success by every single person in the course.

Thank you once again. I appreciated and even enjoyed the listen. 😊 I see you and the light within you. Be well. 🤲🏻❤🤲🏻

Excellent suggestions for working with the kids. Thanks for the inspiration!