learners greater focus during tests, reduced language anxiety, and, as one study with Thai students of English found, improved presentation skills.
So let’ s find a definition of mindfulness that better fits our profession. Julia Hogan helps by dispelling a few misconceptions: Mindfulness is not meditation; though an important part of meditation, mindfulness can also be achieved in other ways. Nor, as Marc Helgesen will tell us, is it“ mindlessness;” it is not about disengaging from the world, but rather engaging with it in a more effective way. Dan Harris provides a superb working definition:“ Mindfulness is the ability to know what’ s happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it.” And Hogan provides one for“ Psychological mindfulness” from a Northern Arizona University study: Mindfulness is“ maintaining an open, accepting, present focus or attention during day-to-day life.” With a little tweak to make it fit our purpose, it becomes:“ maintaining an open, accepting, present focus during class.”
let’ s find a definition of mindfulness that better fits our profession
Now we have a concept that is meaningful to all of us, even if we have not come to appreciate it through meditation, and one that begs to be included as an educational objective for modern times. Why? Because our learners need to learn how to manage their inner selves in this phrentic world.
If I may speak plainly, it ' s harder for them. The frenzy and chaos we grew up with has greatly increased in their lives. Most of us grew up in a world of movies restricted to television sets and theater screens, computers that let us connect through emails but generally stayed on our desks, and as Heather Van Fleet will inform us, limited access to telephones that once just sat on table tops. But for them, today’ s world is much more“ phrenetic”!
On top of that, pressure from our educational systems has been on the rise. As jobs have shifted from manufacturing to information management, salary and social status have shifted too, becoming even more closely dependent on success in school. In many locations, such as China, test anxiety has gone from being an sporadic problem to a seasonal epidemic.
So, I urge you to be mindful: School is pretty much the same as it has always been, so it is easy to miss that nothing else is. Our world has changed drastically. If your mission as a teacher is to prepare your fragile learners for this stressful world, then help them develop the ability to maintain an open, accepting, present focus during class and life.
“ Wherever you are, be there totally.”