Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Workshops!!!
Today the faculty began wrestling with the role of mindfulness in education. How do we define "mindfulness"? Rather than work up a definition right away, let us just start with "intention". A high-school student must have some intention to learn and some awareness of their own mind. Whatever gets in the way of intention and awareness can be considered a problem. Mindfulness is, in this highly limited definition, a clarity of intention and awareness.
Mindfulness is being studied with quite a lot of rigor these days. Our hope is to bring a developmental awareness of mindfulness into every aspect of school life. If the students are given the knowledge and skills to grow into this awareness, and if our school process is transparent and has a great deal of student input, a feedback loop could be created that supports student learning, focuses the teaching, and encourages an ever widening awareness of learning and the learning environment. Granted, this is a little vague. Over the next months, this will come into focus.
Next Wednesday morning students will be attending six very brief seminars on the act and the neurology of learning. The students will divide into three groups and rotate through three seminars. After a break the same groups will rotate through three more. Each will be fifteen to twenty minutes long, with the goal of providing some knowledge to deepen each student's perspective on her own learning.
Here is the schedule:
Part One: The Brain; Teenage Neurological Development; Ideal Learning Environments
Part Two: Strategies in Reading; Strategies in Math; The Role of Nutrition, Health, and Sleep
If our students can understand how they learn and how they are affected by their environments and habits, then they can learn to modify these factors.
Much of our understanding of the developing brain in the teenage years focuses on the pre-frontal cortex. This is where the direction of our focus originates, this is where we check our impulses, and develop and apply abstractions. This is probably a gross simplification, like most assertions about the brain have proven to be. Nevertheless, there is research behind it. The pre-frontal cortex continues to develop well into the twenties. It can be damaged, or its full development delayed. It can be exercised and it can grow. Meditation exercises the PFC and causes structural changes within it. We know that much of the poor judgment, loss of context, and impulsivity of the average teenager is phenomena arising from an as yet underdeveloped PFC.
A couple of weeks after these seminars, students will have a series of facilitated meetings to help them identify what they want and need from our school. All this will be posted on this blog and the bulletin boards at school. Teachers will then, in an open meeting, begin to develop ways of meeting these needs and wants.
So we begin. Hopefully it will be a productive, open, and relatively fun process. In the end, we'll have a school that is more coherent in its educational practice and more encouraging of students asserting their educational needs.
Mindfulness is being studied with quite a lot of rigor these days. Our hope is to bring a developmental awareness of mindfulness into every aspect of school life. If the students are given the knowledge and skills to grow into this awareness, and if our school process is transparent and has a great deal of student input, a feedback loop could be created that supports student learning, focuses the teaching, and encourages an ever widening awareness of learning and the learning environment. Granted, this is a little vague. Over the next months, this will come into focus.
Next Wednesday morning students will be attending six very brief seminars on the act and the neurology of learning. The students will divide into three groups and rotate through three seminars. After a break the same groups will rotate through three more. Each will be fifteen to twenty minutes long, with the goal of providing some knowledge to deepen each student's perspective on her own learning.
Here is the schedule:
Part One: The Brain; Teenage Neurological Development; Ideal Learning Environments
Part Two: Strategies in Reading; Strategies in Math; The Role of Nutrition, Health, and Sleep
If our students can understand how they learn and how they are affected by their environments and habits, then they can learn to modify these factors.
Much of our understanding of the developing brain in the teenage years focuses on the pre-frontal cortex. This is where the direction of our focus originates, this is where we check our impulses, and develop and apply abstractions. This is probably a gross simplification, like most assertions about the brain have proven to be. Nevertheless, there is research behind it. The pre-frontal cortex continues to develop well into the twenties. It can be damaged, or its full development delayed. It can be exercised and it can grow. Meditation exercises the PFC and causes structural changes within it. We know that much of the poor judgment, loss of context, and impulsivity of the average teenager is phenomena arising from an as yet underdeveloped PFC.
A couple of weeks after these seminars, students will have a series of facilitated meetings to help them identify what they want and need from our school. All this will be posted on this blog and the bulletin boards at school. Teachers will then, in an open meeting, begin to develop ways of meeting these needs and wants.
So we begin. Hopefully it will be a productive, open, and relatively fun process. In the end, we'll have a school that is more coherent in its educational practice and more encouraging of students asserting their educational needs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)