Stories from the Field, Part VII, New Kid on the Block

Stories from the Field are small moments about how mindfulness is impacting the students I am working with, in hopes of capturing what it means to learn and use mindfulness. This story comes from an alternative learning program just outside of Portland, Maine:

After leading a "Smartifier" for the REAL School in December, I came back this month to start working with the students. There is always an adjustment period when you walk into a new room, and I was definitely feeling some new kid feelings. The first day I was in recruitment mode and tried to convince the crowds in 10 minutes or less that it's worth trying this weird thing (the teachers for one of the classrooms ended up volunteering the whole class, so I sold it well enough to hook the staff, anyway). The other group of four or five students literally ran away from me as I approached (the gym is a challenging space to recruit). One refused because I disrespected him when I asked them to sit by not saying please.  I only got to speak to one or two students who stuck around.  

On Day 2, I offended one of the more vocal students by calling him by the wrong name, and the name of his apparent nemesis (big oops). Even though he was disruptive, when I pulled him afterwards to check in, I made sure to make it about my error and asking him for his participation. Downstairs students were in and out of the room as allied staff members coaxed them into trying it out. 

After another week of small blunders, I found myself also making some headway. I started to notice barely perceptible signs of acceptance. Today, when I asked Sam to help me set up the projector screen, though the first request was met with denial, the second was with acquiescence. When we went through the body scan, every student but one had technology away, and not a single student spoke during that time. They even voluntarily read parts of the Portia Nelson poem we use called "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters." The downstairs group, which comes on a voluntary basis, has started to solidify with some regulars who are genuinely interested and curious about the practice. They readily offer their discomforts and comfort as we have gone through sound and breath as anchor. In both groups, the mood of the room perceptibly shifted after sitting together. In that way, we build trust.

Stories from the field, Part VI: When student becomes teacher

Cassie, Hannah, Anca, and Dylan teach mindfulness to a third grade classroom at Longfellow Elementary. 

Stories from the Field are small moments about how mindfulness is impacting the students I am working with, in hopes of capturing what it means to learn and use mindfulness. This story comes from a large high school resource room in Portland, Maine:

Cassie waits for students to raise their hand as the sound diminishes

Today, a group my students had the opportunity to take what they learned about mindfulness and put it into action.  Using their favorite lessons, four of my students walked one building over to Longfellow Elementary, where third grade teacher Megan Markgren invited us into her room.  To calm the nerves before we went next door, we did some grounding exercises, making contact with the desk under our hands and ground under our feet. Cassie, Hannah, Anca, and Dylan expertly taught students how to listen mindfully to a bell and how to pay attention to all of their senses while eating Hershey's kisses. 

Students raise their hand when they can no longer hear the sound of the bell.

When we left the room, everyone was glowing. I could see the pride on their faces, and I radiated it right back to them. Cassie and I talked about how it was disappointing that I would be ending next week, just as she was starting to understand mindfulness better. But that is next week. And today...today was better than I could have hoped. My high school students rose the to the occasion and owned the material.  Wherever they were in their own process, they were able to show confidence and poise while delivering the material. Today, my students became the teachers.

Update: Two more groups of students traveled down the road to Lincoln Middle School to present mindfulness this week.  Both groups did a great job of sharing their learning about mindful listening, breathing, and eating. They also shared their process of finding it, at first, a bit weird, but noticing they ultimately do use it by breathing when stressed out, focusing when playing sports and singing, and in general to savor each moment.

I am savoring these experiences right now and trying to really soak up all the goodness from them. It has been so powerful to watch my students own their learning and brave their own nerves (and the frigid temperatures we had to walk through) to share it with others. I will be sorry to say goodbye on Thursday.

Stories from the Field, Part V: When student first becomes teacher.

Stories from the Field are small moments about how mindfulness is impacting the students I am working with, in hopes of capturing what it means to learn and use mindfulness. This story comes from a large high school resource room in Portland, Maine:

Passing the vibratone

On Tuesday, we came back from break, and I immediately hit the students with script writing.  The capstone project for our 8 weeks together was going to be delivering mindfulness curriculum to students in nearby elementary and middle schools.  After reviewing all the lessons and content we covered, I gave them highly structured script templates to fill in introductions, the definition of mindfulness, an interesting hook, a practice section, debrief questions, and a conclusion. I thought they were ready to go.

The response?  Stonewalling. Students looked straight ahead, looked down at their desks, looked out the window. My questions about their response were met with resounding silence.  I went and sat with one group, as the classroom teacher sat with the other, and we both pushed desperately for what they knew and wanted to add. By the end of an 80 minute period, we had some half written notes to show.  

The classroom teacher and I were, at first, panicked. Why don't they want to do this? Do they really dislike it so much? Should we just roll it back to being voluntary and send only students who step forward to do it?  But we knew there were some students who would opt out who would be successful, if they just carried it through, so we didn't want to deter them.

Throughout the time working with students that day, I also had gathered some insight. When speaking with an eleventh grader, Cassie, about how I was surprised it was so hard to do, she shared: it was one thing to learn, but another to teach. She said she didn't really feel like she fully understood it yet, and that's why it was so hard for them to come up with ideas. 

They weren't being defiant or sullen, they just really didn't feel ready. And that's fair. I went through hundreds of hours of training in order to feel confident generating and delivering this material, and here I was asking them to come up with something on the spot.  I realized the whole point was that we wanted them to share the experience, not necessarily create it, so I ended up taking what they had come up with and putting in the strong curriculum I have access to (and draw upon regularly, I must add). 

When I went in today with scripts in hand, the students were happy to read through them with me and practice. A few even got excited about putting what was there into their own words, and we worked to make them true to their voices. It wasn't that they didn't want to do it, it's just that they needed support to make it happen. 

My students are always my teachers, and as I formally pass the reigns on to them, I want them to be successful in that endeavor. This time, it meant listening to them to hear the root cause of their behavior and responding to that. It meant being mindful of where they were in their learning, and meeting them there, to help them step into their new roles as teachers of mindfulness.

Mindfulness in the Midcoast

Mindfulness to quiet busy brains at West Bath School

BY LORRY FLEMING COASTAL JOURNAL CONTRIBUTOR

While my work so far has kept me within the Portland city limits, I was thrilled to see coverage of mindfulness at West Bath Middle School making local headlines. It's one thing to see it national, and another to see it right in our backyard!  

“...the anecdotal evidence of the practice’s effect on behavior is clear, and perhaps just as important. “Office referrals, behavior issues, all those things are reduced, because this kind of work allows them to look at themselves, gives them the opportunity to assess why they are behaving the way that they are, which means less time out of the classroom.””

— - West Bath Teacher Rob Schultz

There's even a little shout out to wise minds. big hearts. at the bottom!

The REAL School Teacher Presentation

This past Wednesday morning, I had the pleasure of presenting a "Smartifier" to the the staff at The REAL School, an innovative alternative learning program set on the picturesque Mackworth Island, located just north of Portland. Staff here work intensively to help students find their strengths and build on them through service and adventure learning.

I greatly appreciated the feedback some participants offered afterwards: one staff member reported it was the best one they'd had yet! Thanks to Rod for the specific feedback below!

“I came away from the workshop feeling more mindful and relaxed! The information was interesting and relevant to my work. Erica has integrated her work experience with her reading of current research to find a great balance in her presentation. Overall, a fun, informative, and useful presentation!”

— Rod Nadeau, Ph.D. REAL School Adventure-Based Counselor

“I really enjoyed learning a few techniques to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into my every day life. It was encouraging to hear that practicing mindfulness is a cycle of trying and failing, and that becoming aware of your mind wandering and pulling it back to focus on something simple like breath or sound is in fact the exercise for your brain! I look forward to putting what I learned from this workshop to use and realizing how mindfulness can benefit my work and sense of self.

”

— Hannah Mitchell, SySTEM REAL AmeriCorps Member

“Erica’s workshop on mindfulness is highly informative and engaging! Erica incorporates great use of mindfulness practices into her presentation which makes it easy to see how one can easily implement mindfulness into one’s personal daily practice/and or classroom with students. I found the parts of her presentation about the connection between neuroscience and mindfulness to be particularly captivating. I left her workshop wanting to know more and thinking of ways that I could immediately incorporate more mindfulness into my work with students.

”

— Sarah Anderson, Special Education Teacher, AmeriCorps Program Director

We are now working to secure grant funding so that I can return and do some work with the students!

Plainfield Middle School Workshop

I had the pleasure of joining my longtime friend Heidi Magario in Plainfield, NH to facilitate a mindfulness workshop for her eighth graders. They have been working on a unit called "Structure and Function of the Human Body," and specifically asked the question, "What affect does stress have on the human body?"  I came in so they could explore the impact of mindfulness meditation on their own bodies.  We talked about mindfulness as a method for alleviating stress, improving focus, and deactivating the parasympathetic nervous system. We completed a few exercises focusing on the sound of a bell, external sound, and breath. Students noted they thought doing an mindfulness exercise could help them: 

"Right before starting homework."

"Before performing in the school play."

"During hockey."

"Before a big basketball game."

"When trying to sleep at night."

 Thanks for letting me share your classroom today, Ms. Magario! 

Update: Ms. Magario reported that before their big speeches days after my visit, many of her eighth graders spent two minutes focusing on their breath.  I am so glad to there was an immediate practical application!

Stories from the Field, Part V: But is it working?

Stories from the Field are small moments about how mindfulness is impacting the students I am working with, in hopes of capturing what it means to learn and use mindfulness. This story comes from a large high school resource room in Portland, Maine:

I met with a teacher after school today to talk about scheduling and how we will transition our high school students from learning about mindfulness to teaching it to others. When I walked in she said to me, "I just can't tell how much buy in we have. I think some of them like it but are pretending not to." 

This is always a thought that always arises when I am teaching. "Is it working?"  When I was teaching middle school English, I was obsessed with this question. I worked overtime on lesson plans, collected meticulous data in the form of exit tickets, quizzes, and verbal responses, and created new lesson plans based on that information. In that role, I needed to know if my students were learning exactly what I needed them to learn. I believed it was my failure when they didn't understand the material. 

Through my own personal work with mindfulness, I came to see this belief as self-defeating and erroneous. Even more, it took the agency away from my students to suggest that I was solely responsible for making sure they learned.  Tracking student mastery of standards was right on, but to maintain my sanity, I needed to be able to do that without attaching my emotional wellbeing to their achievement. 

I cannot force students to value or appreciate anything; no matter how much I believe in the power of mindfulness, I cannot make students to see it.  I can offer metaphors, personal anecdotes, research, neuroscience, and above all else, experiences, to demonstrate what it can mean to pay attention to our lives.  To give them experiences that perhaps will show them the value. To need them to take something in particular away is to create my own suffering.

We also can never be certain how work that is so internal truly lands. I have heard countless anecdotes, from my peers teaching mindfulness, about the most disengaged-looking student making insightful comments about mindfulness only at the very end of the course. For my own middle schoolers last year, I wouldn't have known it was "working" until the end of the year when they reported using it during times of stress with family, on sleepless nights, to help focus in class, and to help calm themselves down. This was despite some of them occasionally dropping fart noises into our formal practice. 

Finally, perhaps "working" takes many different forms, some visible, and some less visible. Perhaps "working" takes a longer term than we have the opportunity to see. If we expect all kids to immediately take to mindfulness, to be calm and quiet during practice, to engage without question, then we are setting ourselves up for failure. Even more, we are misunderstanding what it means to be mindful. We need to be open to the possibility that "working" may take many different forms, and may take longer than the time we have to see it grow to fruition. 

As luck would have it, one of our students stopped by as we were wrapping up our meeting. "Brandon,*" I asked, "Be honest. Are you doing any mindfulness outside of the classroom?"  Brandon was a quiet gentle kid who often sat in the corner and needed reminders about removing his headphones. "Yeah, I do." he replied, and told us about how he had insomnia, and he focused on his breathing or sound when he couldn't sleep. He talked about how he had been a "bad kid" in middle school with anger issues, and he thought this stuff could have helped to him. He was interested in our project to bring it to younger kids.  

My job is to offer the tools, and then trust that students will take what they need. It is to know that it may not look like it's working, but sometimes we plant a seed that grows differently for each student. My job is to give them the space to explore their own lives, in all its variations and permutations.

*The student's name has been changed for privacy.

Stories from the field, Part IV: Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral

Stories from the Field are small moments about how mindfulness is impacting the students I am working with, in hopes of capturing what it means to learn and use mindfulness. This story comes from a large high school resource room in Portland, Maine:

Today I dragged my students outside for one minute— no time to get jackets— into the frigid Maine temperatures in hopes of triggering their "unpleasant" response.  The second I told them we were heading outside, a number of them immediately started complaining,

"It's too cold!"

"Can I get my jacket?"

"You (their teacher) get to stay inside where it's warm, and we have to go out?"

Perfect. My plan was working.

What I did not anticipate was how many of them would find stepping outside the walls of the building, even for a minute, to be a pleasant experience. The birds were calling, the cars rushing by, and a slight hint of sunshine warmed our backs.  I thought my metaphor was spoiled (though it served as a great reminder of how being outside can be so refreshing, even for just a minute.)

However, I realized as we walked back in the doors that their response provided even better fodder to consider. For many of them, before we even left the building, they wrote a story in their minds about how it was going to be an unpleasant experience (as did I!). Instead of waiting to see what actually happened, they started resisting it. When we actually got out there, it was pleasant for many (though for some, especially the boy in shorts, perhaps less so). So often in our lives we create a story about an experience even before we have it, and create unpleasantness for ourselves.  The first step is just to notice we have a reaction and are actively creating a story.

After that, we have three options when we notice something is unpleasant.

1. WALLOW IN OUR MISERY: Sometimes this is a reasonable response. Maybe the unpleasant thing isn't happening to us right now, but deserves some space to be felt. Can we make space for that? 

2. CHANGE OUR CIRCUMSTANCES: Sometimes, the notion that something is unpleasant is important information. If we are continually running up against a wall that is making a situation unbearable, and we have the power to change it, then we should. We don't have to stay in unhealthy or unsafe life conditions.

3. CHANGE (DROP) THE STORY (what is really true?): But sometimes, it turns out the story is the problem, or the circumstances are outside of our control, or we need to have one experience in order to have the next one, which we really want. In that case, what can we change about our story to neutralize an experience? Can we name it as unpleasant? Can we notice that what is actually happening at any given moment may not be as bad as we make it out to be?

We spent the last 4 minutes noticing what our experience was like to sit for four minutes silently, and checked in at the end: Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral.  

It is in the noticing that we find our freedom to choose. 

Deering High School Teacher Workshop

Deering High School Teacher Workshop

I just spent the afternoon giving teachers from Deering High School a crash course in mindfulness.  We reviewed the history, research, and neuroscience of mindfulness, with plenty of time for our own personal practice interspersed. 

A few things they had to say:

"I really enjoyed the instruction and demonstration of practices."

"The exercises were well implemented, the presentation was well-timed, the presentation was very interesting."

"Excellent scaffolding of the practice. Great use of science vs. practice."

And constructive?

"More time."

"More chocolate."

I hear you! Thanks for your participation!

Mindful Schools Certified Instructor

After the last few years of intensive study, my name and bio are officially in the Mindful Schools Certified Instructor Directory. I am delighted to be among so many experienced, passionate, and creative colleagues who are bringing mindfulness to young people around the country.  I look forward to continuing to grow with and from this professional community.