Teaching to reach every single student

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind – New York Times

This article in today’s New York Times discusses teaching students “mindfulness:”

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional
sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of
squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places
like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as
they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology
department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

During
a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan,
the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15
minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The
sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each
lesson.

The techniques, among them focused breathing and
concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use
of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression.
Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which
trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls
mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”

I am interested to see what results are accomplished in the (probably large) number of research studies that are tracking effects.

I am also interested in the combination of the quiet of this practice and the collaborative nature of the Read/Write web tools that I believe are so important to our students’ learning.

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