Category: Week 4 – Anti-Teaching / Mindful Learning

If by any chance you are confused about this post’s title, be confident that probably you are not alone. Before reading the next lines, I would be confused too, maybe except for the fact that I chose the title. If you read Langer’s “The Power of Mindful Learning”¹ and “Mindful Learning”², you might be thinking: it seems insane to even ask the question after going through them. If you are in fact thinking this, then respectfully I say to you that perhaps you were mindless while reading about the power of mindfulness. So, why am I asking: “Should Humans be MINDFUL?” The answer is quite simple. No, not to my question, but to why am I asking it: I tried to be mindful while reading.

I truly hope that my introductory paragraph was good enough to encourage you to keep reading. Well, seems the previous sentence was written under the influence of mindlessness. Now that I reflect about it, if you managed to read it, then it means I was successful to engage you, and therefore that sentence is meaningless. On the contrary, had you not read it, then probably I would have failed to gain your attention, or maybe not? But since I kept you interested, which may or may not be measured by you leaving a comment to this post, then travel with me, while I attempt to share with you my answer to the perhaps confusing title of this post.

So, was I mindful while writing the previous two paragraphs? Where you mindful while reading them? Like Langer mentioned, many times we think of being mindful when actually we are not. For instance, an answer to the first question could be that I just wanted to play with your mind, engage you in this reading and then confuse you as much as possible, with the purpose of making you agree with me that I am being mindful about my writing. After all, there is also power in confusing people. But, it is possible that you have another suitable answer to conclude that I was not mindful. And that response, will likely be correct too. Mainly, and this is a fact, because I have no idea of what you think being mindful is, and your definition might be different to mine. Remember, we don’t have the power of reading minds.

Professors must be alert to distinguish if the students are engage and following the topic being discussed, and be open to consider a different approach if needed. Students, will likely maximize their learning experience when their minds are open to process, not just receive, new information. An alert student, will likely be better prepared to apply learned skills under different scenarios, as long as the professor left the door open for such alternate context, in comparison to the student that sits and repeatedly copies what is being told. The previous thoughts that remained with me from Langer’s reflections, probably to some degree, a mere paraphrasing of what being in a mindful state could mean. To continue in the same line of thought, just imagine the infinite possibilities that collaboration between a mindful student and a mindful teacher could potentially bring. A classroom environment where all players are being creative, discovering together, discussing and giving alternatives, rather than, as Langer puts it: taking the facts as the only truth in the absence of context. Certainly, one cannot just 100% agree with the content of Langer’s writing. Otherwise, like I previously expressed, that would mean that we read under a state of mindlessness.

If you have read my previous posts under GEDI F17, I hope you are wondering: where is the personal story? Well, I don’t want to leave you with that uncertainty. Although leaving in uncertainty might be actually better. The post you just read is my personal story about how hard being MINDFUL can be. Writing this post I tried to carefully choose which words to use and what message I wanted to pass. I wanted to try another writing style. I tried to give you options, I tried to transmit a message with confidence, but still leaving you open doors for other possibilities, rather than presenting my thoughts about being MINDFUL as absolute certainties. I tried to explain to you what being MINDFUL is to me, and why humans should be MINDFUL, without directly telling you why. At the end, what I can tell you, as a fact, is that it was not an easy task, but it was an enjoyable one.

Let’s keep learning. Let’s keep educating. Let’s keep moving forward. Let’s keep asking WHY. Let’s start to be more MINDFUL and less mindlessness about who we are, and alternatives to improve our education system.

Carlos F. Mantilla P.

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

Third grade… multiplication tables… timer goes off… and once again, I’m still not done the worksheet. Being an overachiever, (go figure someone willingly pursuing a PhD is a overachiever) the worst part of it all is the chart in the back of the room. Every student who completed the worksheet got a sticker next to their name. Next to my name appallingly fewer stickers than the rest of the class. Endless repetition to teach basic math, endless and fruitless torture for me as a student with a number of learning disabilities.

It wasn’t until much later, senior year of college, working through some system of equations to solve some kind of fluids problem that I realized, I had just gotten through a page of work without grabbing for my calculator. FINALLY! I felt like I could do math like a 3rd grade student… I guess I stand as proof positive that the basics don’t have to be learned to the point of second nature. Basic math still requires active thought and I will still grab for the calculator more often than not just to be sure. Yet I would say I have been successful in my ventures so far.

Similar to the children observed absorbing Harry Potter through some unknown process, some topics just clicked for me. Ask me about how to reconfigure the suspension on a car to suit a style of driving and I can do it no problem. Ask me to calculate the forces in the suspension during a turn and the calculator is going to come back out, but I learned the equations for that.

I wish I could identify the means which I learned these things. I think, some level of interest and engagement factors into the learning with mindful practices. Based on my experiences, if there is no way to foster the engagement and enjoyment for learning no amount of mindful practices will aid in the process. But if you can foster the learning experience to cultivate that engagement, mindful learning has the opportunity to organically develop and follow.

It seems the fashion way of making impacts is to critique the old school and say something new. It is justifiable: things keep changing as time goes, and time keeps going. People destroy the old tools and inventing the new tools and call it a revolution. It’s an iteration. The old tools used to be some great inventions replacing their predecessors, and now it should be understood that they are replaced by the new generations.

The evolution is inevitable.

So is the evolution in education. I see many arguments talk about stopping the standard test. The old schools which look serious and hard on students should be changed into joyful places.No students should be blamed.

Here I want to kindly remind you that most tools can excel other tools for a certain purpose. We should acknowledge that competition always exists when resources are limited. And the truth is that the resources are always limited and certain resources are so limited that people can feel the lack of them. In a market,  a supplier, in most cases, won’t get the chance to tell the clients or customers not to buy sofas but to buy chairs because they can only make chairs. They can survive if there are no other competitors and the chair is needed. However, if the chairs market cannot make any profit, they may not survive. I treat the standard tests as requests from the clients, the education system. Education is important to everyone and the educational resources are limited. The standard tests are part of the approaches to grant the education resourced. It should also be noticed that there are always paths beside the ordinary ways for extraordinary students.

The writings of Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (particularly Chapter 3: Embracing Change) got me thinking quite a lot about cognitive flexibility and adaptation in a constantly changing technological world.  The authors point out the insane rate of change, especially in regards to technology, but I think it’s worth mentioning that our ability to adapt to that change is also increasing at an absurd rate.  I think that the more we’re exposed to the digital world, the more literate in it we become.  When we use technology often enough, and in enough of its various forms, we can eventually reach a gestalt and more readily transfer knowledge and skills from one domain into another.  For example, I have some foundation of basic computational skills and literacy, and I think that allows me to generalize my knowledge beyond simply my laptop, my operating system, my video game console interfaces, etc.  I have enough experience with such a breadth of technological devices that when my phone or computer undergo a massive overhaul in firmware/software updates, I can still rely on context clues and prior knowledge to adapt to those changes.

Obviously this flexibility and adaptability was at a very different stage in their example with color TVs.  When this specific technology was the first of its kind, of course no one knew how to use it or what to expect at the outset.  It takes some time to reach proficiency when you’re using a system to go from zero to full comprehension in any context or domain.  We, as a society, had to learn how to use these systems at this time with no prior knowledge, background, or experience to relate it to.  But as these resources continue to expand, and truly explode, we can transition more easily.  We do have a mental prototype or template now for what we expect technology to look like and what we expect technology to be able to do.  We can adapt our prototype when something is similar enough, and we can piece together a variety of knowledge bases to make sense of something a bit new.

Their statement of “When change comes slowly, adaptation is easy” comes off as somewhat too general for me.  I think it’s more accurate to say that adaptation is easy when the changed product resembles the original product, regardless of how slowly or quickly that happens.  When there is no original product with which to make a comparison, slow is better.  But when we have the progression to trace, that adaptation can happen more readily.  I think it should also be noted that this adaptation is possible only with the accompaniment of a mindful approach, such as that described in Ellen Langer’s Mindful Learning.  To me, this means using prior knowledge and experience in a critical manner to evaluate the current iteration in front of you, and then intentionally incorporating the past (familiar) and present (newer) iterations to derive some kind of context on which to move forward.  To employ this approach when faced with a firmware or software update is one thing, but we can, and should, extrapolate this concept to all areas of learning.

Back to the time when pursuing my Master’s degree, a professor shared a very short-story that will be hardly to forget, this helped me to understand the definition of “Ecological Fallacy”.

The story is about a Ph.D. student that was analyzing data from a project that he was unfamiliar with, he received the data base and the main research question: What factors are involved with morning headaches?. From all the variables that he was analyzing, he found a very strong and statistically significant association (p<0.001) between variable “Z” (shoes) and the outcome (headaches). After the relevant result, he quickly went with his advisor to give him the good news. But what he did not realize were all the factors behind the variable. At the end, he “discovered” that 96% of the participants of the study who had a woke-up headache slept with shoes. So, should we all sleep without shoes to avoid wake-up headaches?

What the student never asked was the Why? And the why had a simple answer: one common characteristic among the participants that fitted with his “discovery”, all of them had more than five glasses of alcohol before going to sleep.

This is a typical example, where following the instructions, in this case protocol and statistical analysis, is not enough. The Ph.D. student was doing his task without motivation, passion and he just found an isolated fact due to his automatic pilot behavior and mindless approach.

“We are poorly served by mindless learning”. Ellen J. Langer

What would have happened with this student with a bit more engagement or curiosity? Perhaps, he would have been aware of more than one perspective to build his conclusion. Well, at least his experience helped me, to be more conscious and to become as mindfulness as I can. Moreover, this story is the how of my understanding of “EcologicalFallacy”.

Practicing mindfulness as students or professors might have positive results such as a decrease in implicit biases (as the student on the story). Educators have a big role to engage students and to facilitate curiosity. Personally, I think that education is not a mechanical system and, as professors we have the challenge and responsibility to create the environment, provide the accurate tools to develop critical thinkers.

The evidence is robust about how environments have the power to change experiences and can influence actions, perceptions and decisions. A theory that have helped to build healthy environments and to design policies is the “Nudge” theory, which can provide a different perspective of how environments are a key factor to influence an outcome.

About the Author

Sofia Rincon Gallardo Patino, is a Mexican dietitian and a public health researcher.

This blog is going to be messy, a conglomeration of scattered thoughts on a topic that I recognized was an issue throughout my entire history of learning. In the “When Practice Makes Imperfect” chapter in The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer mentions  the “inventive transformations of the routine” and follows it up with an example of traditional methods of learning classical piano (24). This example immediately through me back to how I learned pieces for piano recitals. I grew up taking piano lessons. Once a week from elementary school through my junior year of high school, I was at a lesson practicing pieces in front of my teacher that I may or may not have had time to practice during the week before the lesson. I liked playing piano, but I hated piano theory and I hated public performance.

These sentiments mostly stem from how I “mastered” recital pieces and the crash-and-burn experience I had from this method of learning. See, I was a rote memorization learner. I practiced and practiced and practiced until my fingers were on autopilot and my mind had seemingly nothing to do with what was going on with the keys. Rote memorization. It worked at home. It even worked at recitals. Until the one time it didn’t.

One night, while performing in public, my fingers blanked. I simply could not remember the next two lines of music. I sat with my back to audience in utter mortification trying to recall the next notes, but I couldn’t. Though I wanted to get up and flee the room, I was finally able to jump ahead in the piece and finish it, but I had failed. My automaton fingers had failed. My memory had failed. And failure is bad, isn’t it? I had learned the basics of performance and the piece itself in a “rote, unthinking manner” and had become less than mediocre by the end of the process (Langer 14). It took me a long time to even think about performing in public again. I’d still rather not.

I saw this same thing happen to a number of us students in high school. We memorized the facts that needed to be learned, took the test where we may or may not have recalled the memories, and then discarded the memorized facts to make room for new ones. Sometimes, we were successful in this method of learning; sometimes, we crashed and burned. Hard. So while reading the “seven pervasive myths” that Langer lists in the introduction to the book, I saw that I had adhered to at least four of those myths just by how I learned piano alone (2).

I appreciated this section on mindful learning because I think it applies to some of my lessons this week in First-Year Writing. In teaching writing and critical thinking, rote memorization is a little more difficult to come by. Because in many area of the humanities, there are no wrong answers. We don’t necessarily memorize. But when we’re taught writing, we do practice the basics so that “they become second nature” (Langer 2). As my students begin to write their first paper, I want to talk about the difference between high school contexts and college contexts. Example: the five-paragraph essay. It’s taught in high school because of its relative easiness to explain and because of its usefulness in writing the types of essays high schoolers have to write. I mean, a oddly high percentage of my essays in high school were timed. Because that’s real life, right? No. Because that’s the AP Test and the SAT writing section and maybe even the GRE writing section for many of us, if we’re honest.

Though I understand that the difference between college and high school may not be that different for some students, for many it is. Students practice writing this type of essay so often that it becomes second nature. It’s the formula they need to succeed. But writing is so much more messy than that formula. Thinking about how to analyze, organize, and write about new concepts and perspectives takes more time than 45 minutes. Now, in college, the basic five paragraph essay isn’t as useful. It’s actually more confining.The five paragraph essay isn’t wrong; it was appropriate for some people in a certain time. It’s just one way of writing in a certain context.  This college context is different, and it’s time for learning to build on itself and evolve. So now, many students will now have break themselves of the basics that have become second nature and try something new.