Community Training on Mindfulness

Mindfulness Training with Kate Janke

As dedicated readers of this blog already know, the K-5 division has been in the midst of a year-long initiative to implement mindfulness in our classrooms. After six months of meetings designed to help the teachers and staff develop our own personal practices of mindfulness and mindful meditation, last week we spent 15 hours across three days in an in-depth training on how to implement mindfulness in the classrooms.

Kate Janke's Heart-Mind Education curriculum moves through several distinct segments. We're already well on our way to understanding how to teach from presence, which is the first grouping. Next we learned about creating the container that supports children as they enter into mindfulness with physical and psychological safety. Lessons on cultivating connection with self and others mindfully came next, followed by lessons that teach simple regulation and attention skills. The last two clusters of lessons in the curriculum focus on how we treat, speak to, and care for each other, and then a series designed to go deeper into self-awareness and our understanding of perception.

The energy of the faculty at the conclusion of the day on Saturday was incredible -- especially considering it was a Saturday, the third consecutive Saturday working for some faculty, and the first day of February break! While no two classes will be implementing the curriculum in exactly the same way, every teacher has a concrete plan to begin regularly teaching and implementing mindfulness in the K-5 classrooms when we return from break. Be sure to check out your classroom blogs for more info in the upcoming weeks.

Interested in some reading on your own? Check out these resources, but please don't try to pre-teach mindfulness to your children at home -- we want to start with this as a "school activity" before we extend it into the home lives.

The Mindful Child by Susan Kasier Greenland

The Whole Brain Child by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness by Deborah Schoeberlein

The Mindful Brain and Mind Sight by Dan Siegel

mindfulness videos

Yesterday after school we had our fifth hour-long mindfulness training with Kate Jenke. In honor of that important work (check out the article that ran this week on SF Gate about the power of mindfulness in schools), here's a great video about the mindful art of Thich Nhat Hanh. I hope the exhibit comes to the West Coast!

Parents are invited to join our new parent mindfulness circle on Thursday mornings from 8:30-9:00 in the synagoge adjacent to the University Campus.

Mindfulness training in K-5

One of our major initiatives this year in K-5 is the development and implementation of a strong program of mindfulness. A secular practice that has evolved from Buddhist roots, the folks at the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley believe mindfulness can help teachers be better teachers, while the Huffington Post has lots of examples of how mindfulness can help students be more successful at the social, emotional, and intellectual work they face. It's why mindfulness is taught in some of the most progressive schools across the country, from Sidwell Friends School in DC to Gateway School here in California.

As you may have already heard, this year we're working with Kate Janke of the Heart-Mind-Education project to jump-start our mindfulness program (some of our faculty are already teaching mindfulness based on their personal past experience). Kate has been meeting with our faculty once a month since September to help us each develop our individual mindfulness practices, and have a shared vocabulary and experience to discuss mindfulness as practitioners. We also have access to resources on the password-protected portion of her website such as audio files and readings that we can use to assist us between her visits.

Since we love assessment and reflection here at TBS, two weeks ago we asked faculty to complete a simple survey on the training thus far. The thread of the narrative comments can be easily grasped by the following three charts we created based on their qualitative responses: most of the faculty are using mindfulness and find it at least somewhat helpful, AND most folks would like the school to find more ways to support their practice.

In February Kate be leading faculty in an intensive 15 hour training across three days on teaching mindfulness to students, after which she'll support teachers implementing regular mindfulness practice in their classrooms through the remainder of the spring. Stay tuned for news about that, and for a soon-to-be-launched parent mindfulness circle!

Thinking about listening

Learning to listen is an important skill for children, and one of the ways we go about teaching the concept is to investigate the physical, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of listening. We like to provide four models for students: defensive listening, whole-body listening, active listening, and mindful listening.

Defensive listening is a rooted in our biological and evolutionary history: we are always alert to the threat of attack, and it is natural for people to feel like they need to seem smart, be ready with the right answer, or point of the flaws of others that can threaten our success. Specific behaviors can include interrupting others, responding immediately after someone finishes speaking, and using louder volume or stronger language than the original speaker to express disagreement. Think of this as a verbal manifestation of the fight-or-flight instinct. The good news is that these behaviors are sometimes the result of unexamined habit, and that intention and practice can help children learn new ways of engaging as listeners. 

Because it is rooted in the movement of the body, whole-body listening is a great initial alternative to explore with children based on their lived experience. The positive behaviors that students usually identify include eyes looking at the person talking, mouth remaining quiet, hands in lap or by your sides, feet on the floor and keeping still, and body and head facing the speaker. We like to extend the conversation to include two more concepts from Michelle Garcia Winner's social thinking paradigm: using your brain to think about what the speaker is saying, and using your heart to care about what the speaker is saying. 

Active listening is closely related to whole-body listening in keeping eye contact and using non-verbal cues to show you are following the speaker. Importantly, active listening extends into response behaviors, such as giving a short pause after the speaker finishes before responding, and asking questions in a neutral tone. Active listening also includes a meta-cognitive level of intention to the act of listening: Marshall Goldsmith emphasizes the importance of discipline as a core behavior in active listening, while in a recent post, Annie Paul Murphy wrote about three mental strategies for how to be an effective active listener: using higher-order thinking skills such as goal setting and prediction prior to engaging in the act of listening, monitoring and maintaining focus during listening, and then reviewing and evaluating what you hear. 

At the Elementary Division meeting two weeks ago, TBS Student Life Coordinator Kate Klaire led the faculty in a routine called "Listening like a Cow" which has its roots in Mary Rose O'Reilley's wonderful book Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. The idea is to be calm and still in our presentation of listening to the speaker, and provide them the space to speak in a way that doesn't require interaction with the typical signals and cues that we regularly use to communicate our attention such as nodding, "mm-hmm", or cocking our heads. This level of mindful listening is a challenge even for adults who are excellent active listeners!

Interested in more? Check out Julian Treasure's TED talk on Five Ways to Listen Better (thanks to Head of School Mitch Bostian for passing along the link).

Inside today's K-5 division meeting

Sharing the agenda from today's K-5 division meeting.

1. Review ground rules (1 min)

Start & end on time

Be present and engaged

Maintain a sense of humor

Assume good will

2. Mindfulness practice (10 min)

Audio file of body scan from Kate Jenke’s website

3. Kyla and Kate: recess agreements and concerns (15 min)

4. Lisa and Julia: Sharing portfolios from 3^rd grade (10 min)

5. Parent/Teacher conference prep (10 min)

Review goals

Share "collective wisdom"

Steps to take for prep

Exit slip

7. Site expectations cont.: gallery walk (20 min)

Gallery walk thru the rooms, examining the three criteria from last month.

Gather by room to share appreciations and ideas

8. Kate: types of listening (10 min)

TBS Parent Ed event on The Zones of Regulation on Wednesday 11/7

Results of my Division Head assessment

A pair of articles on the Harvard Business Review's blog network have hit home recently. The first was Heidi Grant Halvorson's post  calling for rethinking the common use of reflection alone as a means of gaining insight into the hidden areas of ourselves, based on the thinking of Timothy Wilson as laid out in Strangers to Ourselves - ideas I incorporated into my dissertation research on faculty supervision. The second is Anthony Tjan's post offering a simple recipe for successfully self-aware leaders: know thyself, improve thyself, and complement thyself. The goal of knowing myself was explicitly incorporated into the emotional intelligence work that I did this year, and I am a big fan of self-improvement as well, which is why back in May I asked the elementary faculty to complete a significant assessment about my work, (follow that link to see the entire device). 10 responses were returned (one of which was anonymous), which is a large enough sample to carry validity for the purposes of this project, and I spent some time this summer digesting the results and considering the implications.

I was excited by the areas that faculty identified as strengths in my practice:

Utilizes feedback to enhance effectiveness of the division

Maintains high professional standards and models behavior expected of others

Acts with integrity - Though not directly tied to a specific personalized PD goal, this was the most exciting result of this assessment for me.

Behaves in a manner that is consistent and fair

Listens carefully and with an open mind -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication) and Objective #3 (improve my emotional intelligence).

Effectively plans, organizes, and leads faculty division meetings -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #4 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my leadership of meetings).

Promotes positive, effective relationships with parents -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication).

And I was also excited by the areas that faculty feedback helped me identify as opportunities for growth this year:

Treats others with respect - While this is a decent response, I would like to hold myself to a higher standard and shoot for all respondents to see me as at least effective in this regard. 

Fosters an administrative structure that is responsive to teacher needs.
Teachers identified that while much of our admin structure and many of our institutional issues aren't necessarily my responsibility or authority, they would still like to have more regular meetings and check-ins with me on a 1:1 basis.

Encourages collaboration between and amongst faculty and administration.
Comments in this area ranged from "be more comfortable with executive decision-making" to "too directional to be fully collaborative", and from "I  like the approach of creating faculty task forces" to "delegate more transparently". What I take from these mixed messages is that I have work to do being clearer about when I am deciding, delegating, or being non-directional.

The last two growth areas get bundled together:

Offers appropriate feedback concerning curriculum and instructional issues.

Is able to offer useful feedback in lesson observations.
 While I was called "a master of objective observation", faculty were very clear that they would like me to be more present in their classrooms, do more observations, provide more feedback on instruction, and have more curriculum-design conversations - not to mention which, this would improve my understanding of both our program, and the developmental arc of our students.

Math anxiety and brain function

A fascinating piece of research has just come out of the Stanford School of Medicine that confirms what seemed likely: math-specific fear interferes with the brain's information-processing capacity and its ability to reason through a math problem. In other words, math anxiety leads to decreased mental functioning in areas of problem solving, memory, and numerical reasoning when trying to engage in mathematical thinking!


What are the implications for classroom practice? First, we need to identify when students are experiencing math anxiety. Second, we need to educate students about the neurological impact that anxiety has on their brains (since it actually decreases their ability to successfully solve math problems) - we already know we don't like the experience of anxiety, but we need to understand how it actually affects us. Third, we need to teach students strategies to manage that anxiety.

One strategy I have been utilizing recently in my own practice of mindfulness (drawn from my reading of Fully Present: The art and science of mindfulness) that I think has potential application here is "R.A.I.N." R = recognize the emotion or experience. A = accept the emotion's existence (rather than suppress, repress, or fight it). I = investigate how the emotion makes you feel, on a physical level (not intellectual) - does your jaw get tight, breathing short, foot start to bounce, etc? N = non-identify, or tell yourself that this emotion and accompanying physical sensation is temporary and non-permanent, and that you are not that experience.