Photo by: Keegan Houser on Unsplash
Last day we saw the first Ed-Tech presentation on Mindfulness in the classroom. I thought the group did a great job and I can definitely see how this could be a useful practice in the classroom. Going into it, I had only a vague idea of what mindfulness was but discovered that I have much more experience with it than I realized. Essentially mindfulness is daily meditation, making a practice of focusing inward for a few minutes every day.
During my undergrad in Drama, our acting classes always began with warmups, a large part of which was lying on the ground focusing on our breathing and getting in tune with our bodies. The object was to focus us completely on the task at hand, we were resetting ourselves, removing everything we had carried into the room from outside before we began to work. We were basically practicing mindfulness under another name.
So when I think about spending 3-5 minutes at the beginning of every class to help students relax and focus on themselves I know how valuable that is. It is not something that was present or available during my high school experience but I know I would have benefitted from it. High school is hard enough for students already and anything that I can do as a teacher to help them be successful is something I need to consider.
Great job all!
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