Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Mindfulness at the PDS conference - an idea whose time has come?

Plus, thoughts on block scheduling

Another session at last month’s PDS conference that I found particularly intriguing was the presentation on “Community Building through Mindfulness” by a ninth-grade English class intern.

What prompted Carissa’s inquiry was her concern about the level of stress that we know exists in our high school student population, evidenced in part by the disturbingly high percentage of our students who have entertained suicidal thoughts at one time or another.

Carissa’s research found that spending a few minutes at the beginning of each class on some simple yoga and mindfulness exercises reduced her students’ level of stress, and increased their ability to focus in class. Perhaps that is not surprising. (But it is useful, thank you!)

What, to me, was somewhat surprising was the degree to which this also created a greater sense of class cohesion and unity.  The ability to develop a sense of community in the classroom will be an increasingly important attribute of the classroom of the future.  (We make a point of this in elementary school – why not high school?)

What also struck me – at least in my view – is how much easier it is to implement this kind of innovation within the new 90-minute class block schedule.

Which lead me to further speculate: if we were designing our school structure from scratch, wouldn’t this be the logical thing to do? Who would design a system of 43-minute classes, at the end of which you jump up and run to the next class?  We now know from decades of brain research that 1) we need time to process the information we just received, and 2) the brain needs time to switch gears to the next task.

Certainly, this is how adults learn. I’ve never been to an educational conference in which the sessions were not at least 75 minutes long, with at least a 15-minute break in between. No adult would stand for the traditional 45-minute class, 5-minute break that is found in the typical high school. Why would we subject our students to that?

No comments:

Post a Comment