Mindful Learning

“Mindfulness is a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context. When we are in a state of mindlessness, we act like automatons who have been programmed to act according to the sense our behavior made in the past, rather than the present.” (Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer)

“Experimental research, conducted over 25 years, reveals that the costs of mindlessness, and the benefits of mindfulness, are vast and often profound. Mindfulness results in an increase in competence; a decrease in accidents; an increase in memory, creativity, and positive affect; a decrease in stress; and an increase in health and longevity.” (Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer)

Now, the question is how to foster mindful learning?

Students are constantly told to pay attention, but they have rarely been taught how! It is important that schools incorporate some mindful activities into their curriculum. Some activities such as a short meditation or breathing exercise would help students practice mindfulness on a regular basis.

There’s a school in Dallas, Texas that has been incorporating mindfulness into its daily routine for almost 20 years and tracking their students’ progress. They showed the significant positive effects of practicing mindful activities on education. Their students are learning essential skills for handling stress, plus improving their memory, capacity to plan and organize, and to feel empathy, all the while improving their test scores (http://www.mindful.org).

Mindful Teaching

I really enjoyed the articles and videos from this week’s topic.  There were some great articles and comments on how we can improve both teaching and learning.  One of my favorite comments was from Ellen Langer in the intro to her Mindful Learning book (the one on Canvas).  In discussing myths that inhibit mindful learning, she states, “The ideas offered here to loosen the grip of these debilitating myths are very simple. Their fundamental simplicity points to yet another inhibiting myth: that only a massive overhaul can give us a more effective educational system.”  What a great point.  We have thrown so much money and manpower at our educational system and often the results are minimal improvements (if that) in the quality of our education and student success.  While I do think that increased funding and, particularly, increased parent involvement, as well a host of other activities and actions can help improve learning, it’s often small changes in our mindsets and behaviors that make the most difference.

I thought Langer’s discussion about teaching in conditionals was interesting.  I’d be interested in seeing more studies done, but from the ones presented, it seemed like simply changing the language used in teaching and explaining a concept from an absolute (i.e. – this is how this done) to a conditional (i.e. – it can be done this way), students were better prepared to think creatively and adapt learning.  I think about my experiences and I can see how that could be.  We are often taught and trained to do things the right way to the exclusion of all others, even when there are other ways that are equally suitable or better to accomplishing a task.  When we teach our students in absolutes, we may unknowingly be implying that the methods and concepts we are teaching are the only way to do things, which discourages adaption, innovation, and creativity.  Interesting that something so simple could make such a huge difference.  I think that as teachers, we fall into the same mindset as our students in thinking that there is one right way to do things or one right way to teach things.   Like Langer mentions, we get so ingrained in our teaching routine that we forget about the need to adapt or change what we’re doing to fit a specific class/student/topic.  We end up focusing more on the teaching than on learning to the detriment of our students.  And why is it so easy to do that?  Because it’s a lot easier to recite lesson plans than to actually teach mindfully.  Adaptation is hard and engaging students in a customized way can be difficult.  Beyond that, we just don’t change our mindset to one where we are open to adaptation and change or to adaptation or creativity in our students.

Funny the things that stick with you, but when I thought about mindful learning I was reminded of an experience I had in pre-calculus in high school.  We had a test which involved something like calculating the rate at which water level rose in a pyramidal pool for a given inflow or something thrilling like that.  I remember finishing my test and turning it in to the teacher, apparently a lot faster than she expected us to finish.  She looked over my test and then asked me to redo it.  I asked her why and she explained that I hadn’t done the problem the right way.  I asked if I had found the right answer and she said yes, but not in the right way.  The test hadn’t specified what method to use or anything like that, but since I had found a faster method than what we had been taught in class, I was asked to redo it.  So, I took my test back, redid the problem a different way, and turned it back in after having gotten the same final answer.  She looked it over and AGAIN said I had done it the wrong way and I needed to do it again.  I took back my test and had to figure out what way she wanted me to do it, then redo the problem again (reaching the same, correct final answer), and turn it in.  Thankfully the third time she was okay with what I had done.  The experience wasn’t a big deal and I didn’t hold any hateful grudges against my teacher (haha, except I apparently still remember it 17 years later), but it is illustrative to consider the effect that kind of teaching has on students.  I doubt I was quite as eager to innovate or look for new and better ways to solve problems after that experience.   I do believe that my teacher had good intentions.  She wanted me to learn principles in doing that problem “the right way” that would be foundational for later work in the class, and that’s probably true.  That’s why we teach basic principles and encourage students to learn them down pat.  I think there’s nothing wrong with encouraging students to learn those things because we are teaching basics so we can someday teach more advanced topics.  But maybe the focus should be internalizing basic principles instead of memorizing them.  Teach concepts and ideas instead of methods and we may be surprised at how much more our students learns and how creative they can be.  And, frankly, how much more they might enjoy learning.

 

No one left behind!

There are many points in Ken Robinson talk. I believe that if we are facing some problems with students in today’s world, we have to take step back and look at the issues much deeper first, our responsibilities, our educational system and our “standard/normal” definitions if we truly want to solve the problem.

Two children in the same family are way different let alone the students in the classrooms! so how can we expect from all of them to follow the same path? Current educational system literally forces students to do whatever some people already thought children have to do. Hence, a lot of people ending up being neither happy nor motivated for whatever they are doing. They might find some excuses at the end of the day to compensate for whatever they do but they are not happy.

A true, well-developed and efficient educational system is a system that allows everyone to be flourished one way or another, and ignites the fire of creativity. It would act as mentor not as a punisher. There are number of students that are being judged based on some lame scale that the “punishing” educational system has already set.  How many students we know that they didn’t follow the mandatory educational systems, but shined in their life. So what is the conclusion!?  I am pretty sure all of us know a handful of friends that they did not follow this current educational system and ended up as high quality artists, sport players or musicians. So I would say the educational system is in need of tremendous change. It is important for the leaders of the educational programs to consider students as assets, not financial resources. No wonder that those countries that help the students, and not forcing them, has the highest advancement in various fields of technology, sport, art, etc.

I believe the students are the dormant seeds, waiting for any opportunity to rise as it is well mentioned by Ken Robinson, and one day at the time, I hope, the educational system will be the real rain!

Mindful Learning + Teaching

I found the readings and video for this week to be quite interesting. Particularly I love the concept of providing factual information to students in a way that suggests there is some allowance for differences in interpretation or differentiation based on context (as that is what we scientists are accustomed to (Langer, 2000)). In my experience, especially in dietetics, students have difficulty grasping theory or accepting that what we know within the field is not all ‘black and white.’ Mindful learning may be able to assist in expanding thought processes for those who do struggle in this way.

The ideas provided for inspiring mindful learning I think will be quite helpful to me in future class design. I like the idea of asking students to ‘notice’ a number of things about a topic, rather than prompting them with what should be known. To clarify, I do believe there are core ideas specific to fields that any professional within them should know. Just the process of realizing this is so much more fun if arrived through debate and thoughtfulness.

I much prefer research to teaching. However, the mindful learning concept has inspired me to think outside of the box in class and curriculum design. Teaching does not have to be dreadful and learning does not have to be cumbersome (specifically at the undergraduate level as learning historically has been more structured and dictated). I am interested to hear more examples of how mindful learning has been applied and evaluated in different classroom experiences.

 

Ellen J. Langer. Mindful Learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Dec., 2000), pp. 220-223.

 

Is there really a dark side?

Here is your weekly dose of Star Wars related content for a blog.

It hurts my pride to agree with Langer so much on mindful learning ideas, because I despise her examples so much. I can get around her wad of gum example by saying it depends on who you ask and how they determine what a wads of is. It is to the point that facts are context dependent. One of my favorite subjects as a kid was history, and I was an eager pupil. Many years later, I started reading different perspectives on the history of the United States. It makes me sad to realize how distorted the narrative that I learned was, and probably still is. I know full well that I believed what I read was fact. It was in the textbook, it was on the worksheets, I wrote reports on it, and it was on the tests. I always got those answers right, always. I appreciate having read other perspectives of U.S. history, as it has reengaged me in a topic that I once loved. For me personally, it has helped me realize that other perspectives need to be listened to.

With that said though, I have difficulty in listening to everyone’s perspective. The class I was a TA for in the fall involved a lot of reading papers and having discussions in class. We would be sailing along smoothly then, inevitably, one particular student would say something that could have only made sense to him. We could ask follow-up questions, but I don’t think they helped us better understand where he was coming from. For me, my internal reaction was always why would you say that, and what are we supposed to do with this nonsense now? It was very difficult to ever offer any validity to the things he said, but we couldn’t ignore him. He was making an effort to be part of the conversation, and you can’t be mad at him for trying. We never really figured out what to do in responding to him. We waited out the semester, and were done with it.

Pros and cons of exam-oriented education

I had an experience of the strict exam-oriented education in my high school in China.  The three-year learning, especially the third-year study, was mainly for the college-entrance exam. To improve our exam skills and abilities, the teachers required us to take a mock test every two weeks during our last semester. My whole learning content was subject to the exam scope and paid a lot of effort on improving the exam skills. My experience may not represent all kinds of learning experiences in high schools in China, but I guess many students have experienced different levels of exam-oriented education during their middle school study.

(source:https://homelearn.com.au/public/blog/IMG_0451.JPG)

The exam-oriented education mode does provide a fair environment and equal opportunity for students from different families with distinct backgrounds, and it is feasible in evaluating the education results among various areas (e.g. rural and urban areas). Personally, I benefit from this education system in terms of advanced problem solving skills (since our math class is very difficult), perseverance, hardiness, resilience, self-control and ambition.

However, this system has its flaws apparently. The most obvious one is that exam-oriented education lacks critical-thinking training, because there is always a “correct” answer to an exam question. And the mindset of looking for the right answer is ingrained into students’ mind. As a result, students are not comfortable and are less likely to propose innovative solutions and challenge textbooks or their teachers.

I think that any education system has its two sides. The same is true for the competence-oriented education. If it is so difficult to challenge the education system, as an educator, I will try my best to focus on students’ need and stimulate them to learn with passion and grit.

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