Teachers are turning to the practice as a simple way to restore calm to the classroom, help students find some quiet space, and build self-regulation skills. Some teachers say their personal mindfulness practicehas helped them respond more calmly to students and helps them keep perspective.
“This isn’t about calming down,” said Sam Himelstein, a clinical psychologist, trainer and author who has spent most of his career working with incarcerated youth. “Calming down is great and it is a skill that youth can get better at. But if we’re talking about mindfulness, at its core, we are just talking about being present with whatever it is.”
Larry Rosenberg the dog-mind versus the lion-mind.
Reacting with the mind of a lion allows a person to say, “I’m angry right now,” and that little bit of metacognitive space between the person and the thought allows them to choose how to respond.
TRAUMA SENSITIVE MINDFULNESS
Students don’t take the activity seriously
Students are triggered by silence because it feels like a storm is brewing, so they don’t want to be quiet
Students feel too many requests are made of them without the requisite trust being built up
Students exhibit avoidance behavior
Guidelines for teachers using mindfulness:
Don’t force it
Don’t focus on the logistics like sitting with eyes closed
Somatic awareness, like counting breaths, could be a good place to start. “There’s different types of awareness. Sometimes we’re really aware of what’s going on in the mind and sometimes we’re more aware of what’s going on in the body,” Himelstein said.
Think about the child’s window of tolerance and whether he is already triggered or not. “It’s good to strike when the iron is cold in a lot of these cases,” Himelstein said.
Build relationships
SELF CARE
Cultivating a trauma-informed classroom is much harder when educators themselves are burnt out. Building relationships, not reacting defensively to student behavior and taking time to listen to students can feel nearly impossible if the adult is barely making it through the day.
several categories of self-care, according to Himelstein:
Regular cultivation of relaxation response (3Rs): things like watching TV, going into nature, getting a massage.
Effortful training: These are things like more sustained meditation or exercise where the payoff comes over a longer time period.
Creativity: something that gives purpose and adds vibrancy to life. Writing, reading, painting or other passions are examples.
Advocacy: everything from learning to say “No” (set boundaries), to working at a higher level to impact policy or structural change.
“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full body workout,” says educator Anita Collins in a TED-Ed video on how playing music benefits the brain. Playing music requires the visual, auditory, and motor cortices all at once
According to San Jose State University researcher Ziming Lu, this is typical “screen-based reading behavior,” with more time spent browsing, scanning and skimming than in-depth reading. As reading experiences move online, experts have been exploring how reading from a screen may be changing our brains. Reading expert Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid, has voiced concerns that digital reading will negatively affect the brain’s ability to read deeply for sophisticated understanding, something that Nicholas Carr also explored in his book, The Shallows. Teachers are trying to steer students toward digital reading strategies that practice deep reading, and nine out of ten parents say that having their children read paper books is important to them.
“Digital reading is good in some ways, and bad in others,” he said: in other words, it’s complicated.
According to Julie Coiro, a reading researcher at the University of Rhode Island, moving from digital to paper and back again is only a piece of the attention puzzle: the larger and more pressing issue is how reading online is taxing kids’ attention. Online reading, Coiro noticed, complicates the comprehension process “a million-fold.”
Each time a student reads online content, Coiro said, they are faced with almost limitless input and decisions, including images, video and multiple hyperlinks that lead to even more information. As kids navigate a website, they must constantly ask themselves: is this the information I’m looking for?
Stanford University report found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers didn’t understand that the phrase “sponsored content” meant “advertising.”
Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. [Some places to look: Wikipedia, Snopes, Politifact and NPR’s own Fact Check website.]
Go upstream to the source: Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Is it a reputable scientific journal? Is there an original news media account from a well-known outlet? If that’s not immediately apparent, then move to step 3.
Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends or find yourself going down a rabbit hole, back up and start over.
The overuse of technology has overtaken drugs, sex and bullying as the biggest parental worry, according to the annual Brigham Young and Deseret News American Family Survey.
The American Academy of Pediatrics supports this idea of joint media engagement, basically engaging alongside your kids, as you suggest, whether with games, videos or social media. But isn’t there such a thing as too much screen time?
When people talk about addiction, I think it’s weird we want to blame the digital media because you can form unhealthy relationships with lots of things — food, sex, work, money.
We’re using screens as a babysitter.
There’s an interesting study that recently came out that looked at how parents and young children were interacting around devices. It showed that this joint media engagement is not happening.
I feel like part of the problem is that parents are getting essentially abstinence-only education, like in sex education. The research on that says, if all you hear is, “Just say no,” it has no positive effects.
Nobody actually thinks we’re going to have a world without [tech]. They’re aiming for that healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is you being able to have the autonomy to make good decisions.
A newly published study gives some insight into what may be happening inside young children’s brains
“emergent literacy” — the process of learning to read.
“Goldilocks effect,” here’s what the researchers found:
In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. “There was more evidence the children were straining to understand.”
In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks.
While we often get distracted by the latest device or platform release, video has quietly been riding the wave of all of these advancements, benefiting from broader access to phones, displays, cameras and, most importantly, bandwidth. In fact, 68 percent of teachers are using video in their classrooms, and 74 percent of middle schoolers are watching videos for learning. From social media streams chock-full of video and GIFs to FaceTime with friends to two-hour Twitch broadcasts, video mediates students’ relationships with each other and the world. Video is a key aspect of our always-online attention economy that’s impacting voting behavior, and fueling hate speech and trolling. Put simply: Video is a contested civic space.
We need to move from a conflation of digital citizenship with internet safety and protectionism to a view of digital citizenship that’s pro-active and prioritizes media literacy and savvy. A good digital citizen doesn’t just dodge safety and privacy pitfalls, but works to remake the world, aided by digital technology like video, so it’s more thoughtful, inclusive and just.
1. Help Students Identify the Intent of What They Watch
equip students with some essential questions they can use to unpack the intentions of anything they encounter. One way to facilitate this thinking is by using a tool like EdPuzzle to edit the videos you want students to watch by inserting these questions at particularly relevant points in the video.
2. Be Aware That the Web Is a Unique Beast
Compared to traditional media (like broadcast TV or movies), the web is the Wild West.
Screencastify is a tool that allows students and educators to personalize their learning experience through sharing their voice via a screen recording. The app is a Chrome extension, meaning the tool is always at the ready whenever you want to capture some magic!
Tuesday, October 30 from 9:00am-3:00pm at the System Office, Wells Fargo Place (Saint Paul, MN).
Team 3 is charged with developing a process for prioritizing and selecting collaborative curriculum development and course offering projects that require the use of enterprise instructional design and technology services.
Have expertise in online education that you are willing to share?
The Online Strategy Workgroup needs subject matter experts to participate on one of the three teams below.
Team 1 (Access) – Team 1 is charged with reviewing the existing services provided by the Minnesota State Info Hub and aligning the services they provide with the needs outlined in the corresponding action steps of the Online Strategy report. This team will utilize the existing levels of funding allocated to the Minnesota State Info Hub without seeking additional financial compensation from campuses. See what subject matter experts are needed for this team.
Team 2 (Quality) – Team 2 is charged with reviewing the existing services provided by the Minnesota Online Quality Initiative (MOQI) and aligning these services with the needs outlined in the corresponding action steps of this report. In addition to evaluating faculty development programming options available through MOQI, this team will be responsibility for developing the tools intended to support the quality improvement processes used by campuses. See what subject matter experts are needed for this team.
Team 3 (Collaboration) -Team 3 is charged with developing a process for prioritizing and selecting online collaborative curriculum development and online course offering projects that require the use of enterprise instructional design and technology services. See what subject matter experts are needed for this team.
program level course mapping.
course level modules and learning objectives.
RCE reasonable credit equivalency
IAA inter-agency agreement
RFP request for proposal
Collaborate on Curriculum and Course Offerings (Action A)
Adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) (Action A)
Revenue Sharing Model (Action D) Instructional Design and Technology Services (Action C)
At WMU, the Libraries is partnering with our central OIT to host a VR lab in the main library. My partnering co-director, Kevin, is really the subject matter expert but I’m managing a lot of the day-to-day operations. Kevin is programming and experimenting with all kinds of hardware but we decided to use Oculus Rifts in our lab primarily because of the greater durability of the hand controllers (compared especially to the Vive). We’re getting all of our games through the Oculus store and have plans to expand into Steam or another provider but haven’t done so yet. We currently have 40+ titles available for gaming and educational purposes. We also teach content creation using Unity, Maya, Blender, and a handful of other tools.