“What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

Lately, my five year old daughter and I have been doing the Pebble Meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Planting Seeds:  Practicing Mindfulness with Children.  It consists of four simple meditation instructions and it has picture cards that go with each one.  Children visualize themselves as a flower, a mountain, still water and the big blue sky.  She seems to really enjoy the simple activity and seeing the pictures on the cards.  She can’t read just yet, so we sit together and I read the cards to her.  The whole thing takes about 3 minutes. She often asks for it if I forget.  Then, in times of stress, I remind her to take a minute and breathe and repeat one of the phrases to herself.  I love the idea that she is learning these techniques for self-calming and self-knowing.

I believe that we desperately need to teach students these skills in school starting from a very young age.  The late Fred Rogers knew all about this.  In our house, when anger arises we sing his song ‘What do you do with the mad that you feel?”  For us, it seems essential to be able to name a feeling and acknowledge that this is a normal thing.  Humans get angry sometimes.  No problem.  It’s what you DO with your mad that’s important.

There’s no “should” or “should not” when it comes to having feelings.  They’re part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control.  When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.

–Fred Rogers  The World According to Mr. Rogers

We have to teach children to become familiar with their own emotional landscape and to manage their emotions.  The rewards are many.  Happier children, happier adults, a calmer school environment.  Planting seeds indeed.

And Pebble Meditation is a great idea for adults too.  Often we don’t know what to do with our mad feelings either.  Teaching is hard work and when we’re working with lots of little reactive beings, it is easy for our own anger, anxiety and frustration to get triggered.  Having a way to insert a little space between our emotions and our actions can make all the difference between whether a situation escalates or whether we and our students can calm down and come to a more peaceful resolution.

Benefits of a simple practice

By Susan Dreyer Leon

This weekend, five of us from the Mindfulness for Educators Certificate program presented at the annual conference of The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Conference.  The title of our presentation was “Mindfulness and Reflection: Tools for clarity, creativity and compassion.”  The students in the program did a beautiful job of describing how they have been using the frameworks of the program to deepen their own practice in their classrooms and with their students.  I also had a chance to talk about one of the mindfulness practices were are using here at Antioch New England and I’ve included that here for your perusal!  We are still accepting applications for the Mindfulness for Educators Certificate Program for 2012.  Join us!!

 The benefits of a simple practice

The Integrated Learning Program at Antioch University New England is an M.Ed with Elementary Certification.  We begin our required course sequence with a Human Development course.  This course takes as its text Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self, which leads our students to discoveries about elementary- aged children and themselves.  Three years ago, after some scattered practice of mindfulness meditation in different courses in the program, the faculty agreed that all sections of Human Development would begin their weekly Friday morning class meeting with a simple meditation.  The meditation was developed by AUNE Adjunct Faculty, Besty Taylor and Integrated Learning Program Director and Core Faculty, Jane Miller.  The full text of the meditation below.

Benefit for the course instructors:  Clarity

I’m a better instructor because of our mindfulness time at the beginning of class. Clearing my head before we begin with course material makes me clearer in MY teaching. The jumble of things I want to cover settles out and I find myself being sharper in my focus.         –AUNE instructor

My tendency in class it to talk too much.  The “stop” of this arriving meditation gives me time to connect with my intention to limit my own airtime, listen from my heart and not so much my brain and make that listening my mindfulness practice in class. What emerges is often a much clearer articulation of the course content and a sparkling, surprising incisiveness in my ability to connect that content to students’ lives.                                      –AUNE instructor

Benefit for the students during the class meeting:  Clarity & Compassion

This practice gives students in the Antioch teacher preparation program an opportunity to feel an interruption in a fast paced day. Their future classrooms will be busy, hectic at times. They’ll be making dozens of decisions every hour. Our hope at Antioch is that they’ll remember what it was like to stop the speedy flow and have a time out.                                   –AUNE Instructor

 One student commented that this mindfulness practice that we have “is like a power nap. I feel refreshed afterward.”  Another said, “I came in a snit and now I feel like I love you all.” Refreshed, kind teachers are what our graduates want to be and we need to support them in finding the tools to be that. One tool is mindfulness.                              –AUNE students & their instructor

Transitions cause my mind to race in a million different directions.  This gives me a chance to just be, to clear the chalkboard in my mind.                                                                                                                                    –AUNE Student

It constantly brought me back into awareness of my own humanity in a time of great demand.    –AUNE Student

Benefit for teachers-in-training: Compassion

Mindfulness practice has helped me better understand and attend to behavior issues in the classroom.                                                                                                                                                                                                              –AUNE Student

 

Unhurried, undistracted attentiveness is what teachers need in order to observe their students carefully, to know them well and understand how each one is making sense in the world. We talk about “meeting our children where they are” but, really, we can only do that if we SEE them, are attentive to them. Our five minutes of mindfulness is a time to practice unhurried, undistracted attentive awareness.                                                –AUNE instructor

 

 

 

A meditation for arriving

by Betsy Taylor and Jane Miller, Antioch University New England

There’s something I’d like to do with you in this course that has to do with being present—not thinking of what you’ll be doing later or about what went on earlier but really be in in the moment—It’s an important skill for teachers, and for all people.

I’d like us to spend 5 minutes now practicing being present—to really arrive here—do a simple kind of meditation—no religious connections—purely a way to be here and mindful.

I’ll lead us but if it feels better to you to use this time to think or rest, that’s O.K Either close your eyes or find a soft focus on something.  Begin by focusing your attention on sound. Don’t  try to hard to go out and find sound.Let it come to you (you may notice sounds in the room: chair scraping, coughing.  You may notice sounds in the building around us.  You may notice sounds of your own body as you breathe or swallow)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Silence~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Now, letting the awareness of you body move into the background, be aware of any emotions you’re experiencing—excitement, nervousness, irritation, frustration—just notice without judgment.

Now bring your attention to being aware of the movements of your breath. Soften around the waist. Notice as you breathe in the lungs fill up with air and the diaphragm pushes down notice if there is movement in the abdomenBe aware of breaking in. Be aware of breathing out. Observe the body as it breathes. Use awareness of the breath as a way to be really present in this moment

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Silence~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When you notice your mind wandering, as it will, very gently escort your attention back to the breath

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Silence~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Open your eyes. Look around the room. Notice what you see. (maybe light and shadows, colors, maybe textures). Now look around at each other.

And with this arriving, our class is ready to begin!

Educating for Sustainability: A Mindfulness Practice!

A colleague recently suggested I watch a Youtube video of Ram Dass interviewing  Thich Naht Han.  Both men have made substantial contributions to the American understanding of mindfulness over the past four decades.  It’s a delicious little slice of insight between two beautiful minds.  During the interview, Thich Naht Han says something that cuts to the heart of what I see as the relationship between mindfulness and sustainability.  He says,  “It’s easy to get people to agree that things are impermanent.  They may understand it completely, but they act as if things are permanent.”

In order to experience, truly experience the changing world around and within ourselves, we must cultivate the capacity to know, to intimately see and experience, impermanence and how we relate to the fact of it.  For example, we here in New England  know the seasons change.  Do you have a favorite season?  Are you acquainted with how you relate to its impending arrival? Do you savor each day greedily, be it warm summer swims or frosty ski runs?  Do you mourn the passing of this season with longing, melancholy or outright sadness?   Do you find yourself complaining to yourself or others when the expected weather conditions do not materialize.  We KNOW that seasons come and go, that weather patterns change and yet, we plan and organize and react to these changes with grasping and resistance.  And, we suffer for it in ways large and small.  What would it mean to live our knowing of this impermanence and acting based upon it, unhooked from the cycle of desire, longing, and aversion?  Would we love our “favorite” season less, or would we be more contented with the ever-changing flow of the natural world around us?  I challenge each of us to experiment with this simple idea and see where it takes you.

It puts me in mind of the reasons why I believe so strongly in the development of the field of Educating for Sustainability.  The need for the conscious development of a culture of sustainability is rooted in our default tendency to take as permanent our current conditions.  As a species and as individuals, we do not act as if the health of the earth is urgently essential for our survival.  We do not treat our planet as if every single thing we need to stay alive and every single thing we possess arises from it and it alone.  But this is the case.   Educating for Sustainability is rooted in the idea that we have to increase the capacity of individuals and groups of people to act in ways that will ensure survival for ourselves and the ecosystems on which we depend.  It’s not enough to understand that our lifestyles are unsustainable, we have to do something about it.

In addition, those of us who live in this affluent, abundant culture of plenty, must understand that our situation is intimately connected to lives of others whose basic human needs are not met.  We know this intellectually, but we do not act based on that knowledge.  Or maybe more accurately, we do not change our activities based on that knowledge.  And yet, we must know on some level, like the changing of the seasons, it’s only a matter of time until the affects of global resource degradation confront us at our own door step.  Higher prices for food and fuel, being perhaps just the first small symptoms of much larger changes to come.

So, in developing our mindfulness practices, are we also developing our capacity to take on the challenges of creating a sustainable present and future?  I hope that this post will be the first in a series of explorations of the link between mindfulness and Educating for Sustainability.  Please add your thoughts and comments.  We would also be very interested to know about work happening in the intersection of the  fields of Mindfulness and Educating for Sustainability, so please feel free to send links and share information on resources.  For more information on the Educating for Sustainability program at AUNE, please visit us at http://www.antiochne.edu/ed/exed/ss_edforsustainability.cfm.

To see the full interview between Ram Dass and Thich Naht Han, please follow this link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZKrl5n79hY

Five Reasons To Develop A Mindfulness Practice

Center for Mindful Inquiry senior teacher, Claire Stanley guests for us this month.  Claire and her CMI partner, Jack Millet will be the guiding teachers for the Mindfulness for Educators Certificate Program that will convene its first class at the end of January!  It’s not too late to apply, follow this link for more information. http://www.mindfulinquiry.org/certificate

In addition, Claire will be teaching a Mindfulness Practice for Educators elective here at AUNE this spring.  This course is open to non-AUNE students through our continuing education program.  Follow this link for more information.   http://www.antiochne.edu/academics/ce.cfm

Five reasons to develop a Mindfulness Practice

Educators live at a very busy pace of the current world of education.  Whether you are in the elementary, secondary or post-secondary sector, or whether you are an educational administrator, teacher, professor, school counselor or school principal, you no doubt feel that you do not have enough time in any single day to do what needs to be done in order to do a good job at what you do.  In the graduate school where I teach, we call it the “breathless” syndrome.  Feeling like you are jogging in place, going as fast as you can, and never catching up.  Who has time to develop a mindfulness practice in the midst of all that?  There is too much to be done and no time left to “just be.”

In response to that question, it turns out that a concept that has been around for several decades is actually true.  The idea of “working smarter” rather than “working harder” has been given a lot of lip service.  But there actually is a way to learn how to work smarter and ironically, it has a lot to do with slowing down, stopping or pausing, and taking some time each day for yourself.  Educators who engage with mindfulness practice on a regular basis – not out of guilt or fear – but out of interest and even joy, find that they have more energy and that they end up actually working smarter in the long run.

Here is a rundown of the five reasons to develop a mindfulness practice.  You have number one already, it actually helps you to do your work better and can also help you to work smarter.  How does that happen?  This first reason, at the most basic level, is physical and has to do with reducing stress.  Many studies have proven that a person who is less stressed performs any task or job with great ease at both the physical and mental level.

Second reason has to do with the joy factor that I mentioned earlier.  When there is less stress in the body and the mind, there is more energy and space.  And when there is more space, creativity has the option of entering the mind and capturing the imagination so that new ideas flow more easily so that both pre-work, during-work, and post-work time is filled with more energy and space.

You might say that is quite idealized, so if you are more of a skeptic, let’s just say when you get very stressed and out of balance (in a week, a day or an hour), a consistent meditation practice actually helps you to see more clearly.  When you can see and admit that the stress is there, then mindfulness practices help you to find a way to bring greater balance into whatever aspect of your week, day or hour that needs more support.  That is reason number three.

Reason number four is that when you move away from a place of reactivity and move toward a place of balance, you notice that your mind and body like the fact that there is a sense of choice.  Where there is a sense of choice, there is a sense of agency, and that allows you to feel like you are your own person and not one who is living at the beck and call of other forces in your life.

And the fifth – and final – reason is that a consistent mindfulness practice helps you to wake up in the midst of your life and even in the midst of your work.  When you are awake, you can see things more clearly, and based on that clear seeing, you can make choices to respond in ways that are more wise, compassionate, and in the long run, beneficial to both you and the people in your educational work world and to the people in your family or circle of friends.

As you read this, you might be saying to yourself, “I know this.  It’s nothing new.”  And I would invite you now to do it.  Try for yourself and see what happens.  Mindfulness might just make the difference that is needed for you, your work and your life.

All New!!! Certificate Program in Mindfulness for Educators!

By Susan Dreyer Leon, Ed.D

As many of you know, we have been hoping for some time to be able to bring together a group of educators who are interested in looking together at applications of mindfulness in their teaching practice.  After more than a year of development, we are thrilled to be able to announce a wonderful new collaboration that will allow us to begin this important and exciting journey.  We are looking for a starting group of dedicated educators, who want to explore deeply the connection between mindfulness meditation and their teaching practice.

About the Program

This 8 graduate credit program will begin in January 2011 with a weekend retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts.  Work will continue in our classrooms and on-line through the Spring of 2011 and the group will come together again in Barre in August for a five day retreat.  The Fall will bring more classroom practice and on-line communication topped off with a capstone weekend back in Barre.  We’re so grateful the Studies Center for providing us with this fantastic opportunity to join together in person in such a beautiful location and with access to their wonderful teachers and resources as a support for our own work.

About our Teachers

We have two extraordinary lead faculty, Claire Stanley, PhD and Jack Millet, MAT to guide our work this year.  Claire and Jack are long time teacher educators from the School for International Training in Vermont and more recently have been the founding dharma teachers at Vermont Insight Meditation and the Center for Mindful Inquiry, in Brattleboro, VT.   We know of no other two people who have thought so long and deeply about the connection between daily classroom practice and mindfulness.  We’re thrilled have them anchor this collaboration through CMI.   In addition to Claire and Jack’s leading role,  Judy Coven and I will be providing some instructional support on the Antioch side.   Judy has just recently retired from her full time role on the Integrated Learning faculty at AUNE and has been instrumental in the planning and guidance of this program from the beginning.   I am currently serving as the director of the Experienced Educators program at AUNE and am thrilled to add this collaboration to our available offerings for working teachers through the Antioch Center for School Renewal.  Finally, we’re very lucky to have the opportunity to benefit from the expertise of Andrew Olendzki, the executive director and senior scholar of the Barre Center for Buddhist studies and Mu Soeng, the BCBS program director and resident scholar.   For more information about our faculty, please visit the Center For Mindful Inquiry Website or follow the AUNE and BCBS links on the right side of this blog page.

How to Apply or Get More Information

For more information and program details or to apply, go to http://www.mindfulinquiry.org.  To apply for the Certificate Program, contact Claire Stanley, Ph.D. or Jack Millett, MAT at The Center for Mindful Inquiry, 167 Main St. Brattleboro, VT 05301, 802-451-6514 or at certificate.program@mindfulinquiry.org.

More Details, Dates and Course Titles

The Center for Mindful Inquiry, in collaboration with Antioch University New England Center for School Renewal and Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, announces a new Certificate in Mindfulness for Educators Program beginning in January 2011.  The eight graduate credit Certificate combines opportunities for educators to deepen their own mindfulness and compassion practices and to better understand current theories that connect mindfulness to models of teaching, learning and human development.  Participants attend three study retreats at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) followed up with online coursework. In addition, two completely online courses in the spring and fall strengthen the learning community and focus on the integration of mindfulness practice and theory in the participants’ work as educators and in everyday life.  Graduate credits are given with the successful completion of each course.  The Certificate is earned by the completion of all five components of the program.

Opening Residential Weekend

January 28 – 30 at BCBS

Using Buddhist Frameworks to Understand Teaching and Learning

Online Course

March 28 – May 6 through CMI

Mindfulness and Reflection: Tools for Clarity, Creativity and Compassion in the Classroom

Summer Intensive

July 31 – August 5 at BCBS

Human Development and The Inner Landscape of Teaching and Learning

Online Course

September 26 – November 4 through CMI

Awareness of Body, Mind, Heart and Brain:  Pathways to Change

Capstone Weekend

December 2 – 4 at BCBS

Toward Freedom and Joy in Teaching and Learning

How to Apply or Get More Information

For more information, go to http://www.mindfulinquiry.org.  To apply for the Certificate Program, contact Claire Stanley, Ph.D. or Jack Millett, MAT at The Center for Mindful Inquiry, 167 Main St. Brattleboro, VT 05301, 802-451-6514 or at certificate.program@mindfulinquiry.org.

Starting Anew

While the rest of the working world may find the turn of the calendar year in January to be the “new year,” for those of us who teach, renewal comes in August and September, maybe after a summer vacation or holiday.  While the practice of tying our school year to the rhythms and routines of our agrarian past may be on the wane, we still, for the moment, have a collective sense of starting over at this time of year.

In my early teaching career one of my colleagues pointed out to me that the thing they loved most about teaching was the many ways that we get to start over.  School years end, semesters end, school lessons, days, units, weeks and months all conclude and you get to try again.  We get to start fresh: sometimes with new students, new colleagues, a new building or curriculum.  There is a constant opportunity to reinvent yourself, to get better, to try again, to learn from experience, get more information and try something new.

What better affinity could we find with our meditation practice?  After all, the great grace of mindfulness is that we have the opportunity in any given moment to start over.  In trying again, we can loosen the habitual ties of thinking that bind us to outdated views of our students, our colleagues and community and even (maybe especially) our selves).  We are all beings in motion.  Not the same two days in a row.  Beginning fresh with each encounter can be the basis for a whole school year’s worth of practice.

So, as you settle into your new routines for 2010-2011, set your intention for mindfulness.  Commit or recommit yourself to your personal practice and to the renewal that mindfulness can bring to each day. Find ways to bring your practice to your classroom and your students, if that feels like a logical next step.  Support your intention by reading something new in the field of mindfulness in education. Take a class. Attend a talk or weekend retreat.  Connect with a group of like-minded people to help you process what you are learning and support your efforts.

And let’s not forget our students.  Students too, need a fresh start.  They change so fast.  It is our job to be recruited to their effort, to support their growth, find what is new, encourage the emergent next developmental stage that they are becoming.  So often a student’s return to school represents a literal return that puts them back into a box where they are already labeled, judged and found lacking.  Unlucky little ones cannot escape their reputations from years past and are stuck in a kind of perpetual war to get adults and peers to see that they are actually not the same year to year.  Can we find a way to see them anew, too and to encourage the growth that we see without making them feel bad about their past?  We are called to do this for each and every one of them.  Let’s make this part of our practice this year, to see the child in front of us as they are, uncluttered by our judgments and feelings, changing every moment, hoping for renewal, just like we are.

Spring Update

So much seems to be happening with Mindfulness meditation and education this spring that it’s been all I can do to keep up, let alone blog about everything!

The Mindfulness in Education Conference sponsored by the Mindfulness In Education Network was at the end of March.  There were so many good conversations there.  Here’s a link to some of the videos from the event.  I especially love Amy Saltzman’s talk about working with children.  She has a lovely way of conceptualizing mindfulness in a completely secular form.  As she says,  “It’s an innate human capacity.”  Like learning a language.  Everyone has the ability to do it.  Why not help people develop that ability?  So lovely. http://www.mindfuled.org/2010video/  Amy’s work goes by the name “Still, Quiet Place” and here’s a link to her website as well.  http://www.stillquietplace.com/

Dan Siegal’s talk about his new book,  Mindsight was also wonderful.  It will eventually be posted at this website http://thecenter.mit.edu/about/mission/  which is the home for the new Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.   One of the great things about Dan’s talk was the emerging scientific evidence that we may be able use mindfulness practices and meditation in particular to literally build brain connections in areas that may be underdeveloped in people at genetic risk for things like bi-polar disorder.  They are doing preliminary research to see if kids who might have a predisposition for bi-polar can increase connections in critical areas while they are younger so that when the brain undergoes it’s normal “pruning” in adolescence, there is enough robustness already there to not end up deficient when the process is done.  What a tremendous gift to be able to access.  Also, Dan is doing a lot of thinking about mindfulness, kids and attachment issues, which I know concern a lot of us as educators.  Again, the message is more hopeful than previously thought.  I encourage you to investigate these resources.

Another area that was a big topic of discussion was how we can get more mindfulness practices into public schools and classrooms.  I was especially interested in a meeting of about 50 individuals all of whom had great ideas about mindfulness-based practices for young people, but none of whom had any real money or way to get their work  into the school system.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue.  I think of so many of you who talk to me about how stressed and cramped your days are and how it could be totally antithetical to the practice to try to cram mindfulness in on top of all the non-instructional tasks you all do already.  As valuable as it is,  I think we need to begin to explore how to offer mindfulness work to young people in all kinds of venues.  We can’t do everything in the classroom.  I’d love to hear your ideas about this one.

On the other hand…mindfulness for teachers is ALWAYS welcome in the classroom.  I wonder how much our students gain just by our capacity to hold them in our mindful presence?

Mindfulness, Sustainability & Mathematics

Our guest blogger for this week is Educating for Sustainability M.Ed Student,  Stephen Jamme.  He  talks about developing mindfulness practices for himself and his students at as part of his practicum work at Antioch New England.  Enjoy!!

At the beginning of the Fall one of my practicum goals was related to developing mindfulness.  I wanted to:
1.  To begin to introduce to all my mathematics students the benefits of  self awareness and reflection.
2.  To start a meditation club that provides any interested student in our Upper School the opportunity to experience various meditation methods and their  benefits.
3.  To build a faculty professional development strand into my school’s ongoing
in-service training.  This will help faculty practice mindfulness in their  work.

Upon reflection at this midpoint in the year, I find that my most significant progress in regard to this goal has come in the realm of my personal meditation practice.  As I have studied various texts and attended multiple talks, workshops, conferences and classes my personal practice has grown.  As my personal practice grows I can better model the mindful qualities of self awareness and self reflection for my school community.  I now meditate one full hour each morning using Insight Meditation guidelines.  Sharon Salzberg’s work The Force of Kindness has also provide me many tangible examples of how to practice mindfulness in my classroom.  The very tangible results of my work have been a noticeable increase in calm, respectful, and focused behavior in my students.  .

My meditation experience with Susan Dreyer Leon, a member of the Antioch faculty, during the Summer 2009 ANE session started my thought process toward having meditation as a key component in my school’s curriculum.  Her simple presentation of meditation basics has been the model I’ve followed in the meditation club I co-sponsored this fall.  I further followed her mentoring by attending the Mind and Life Institute two day conference on “Educating World Citizens for the 21st Century.  Scientists, educators, and contemplatives gathered to discuss how educators can help foster inner peace and happiness in children.  The Dali Lama, who presided over this gathering, emphasized the secular nature of this work.  Fostering the skills needed to better manage emotions and live a compassionate life was discussed.  His holiness emphasized that this was secular work to be engaged in by all faiths and agnostics.  Presenters shared many dynamic emerging strategies.

In October I participated in a six week Mindful Parenting course offered through the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville (IMCC).  The focus was on how one might actively employ skills of meditation toward effective child rearing.  In short, Lindsay Diamond, the instructor emphasized pausing, relaxing, opening, accepting, listening deeply and speaking the truth.  This method was reinforced through a variety of class exercises and became the groundwork for the changes I witnessed in my mathematics classroom.   The pause allows one to survey one’s emotional landscape and to consider the long run effects of whatever response might come to mind.  Calm adult responses reinforce calm thoughtful responses in children.

By Stephen Jamme – EFS class of 2011.  Please contact Stephen at sjamme@stab.org if you have questions.

And if YOU are interested in sharing your meditation experiences as a teacher or with your students and would like to be a guest blogger, please contact Susan Dreyer Leon at sdreyerleon@antioch.edu

On being helpful

Lately, I’ve been encountering (or is it noticing) some important messages on theme of helping.  This train of thought sort of started a few weeks ago when I had a chance to here the Buddhist Meditation teacher, Herb Ferris speak on the topic.  He suggested that many of us are interested in meditation and mindfulness precisely because we want to follow the path of what some Buddhist traditions call “bodhichitta.”  One translation of this concept is that it’s the desire to pursue mindfulness in order to be of benefit to other people and maybe even help them to follow the same path.  This goes back to one of my early fall posts on cultivating mindfulness in order to get clear so that we don’t “disturb other people” with all our turmoil.

I think, as teachers, we especially resonate with these ideas.  We want to be helpful to our students, first and foremost, but also to our colleagues, our schools and communities.  It’s the aspect of teaching that is more like a calling than like a job.  And we want to teach with some awareness so that our own issues and moods and all the inevitable peaks and troughs of our personal lives do not create upheavals in our classrooms and for our students.  We look to cultivate some equanimity for their benefit as well as our own.

But, here’s the thing that Herb Ferris said at his talk.  It’s not easy.  It turns out that the seemingly simple intention to help others is very, very hard.  And it’s hard on several levels.  First of all, it’s hard because we don’t always know how to help.  It’s not clear what the right course of action is.  And then, to make matters more complex, it’s virtually impossible to figure out in advance what kind of help will have unintended harmful consequences.  And then, on top of all these logistical questions, there are deeper questions of motivation.  Are we helping because we are seeing clearly how we can be of assistance, or are our motivations clouded by unrealized personal needs on our part?

Sometimes, it’s easy to do a seemingly simple good deed (give food to your local family center or food pantry).  It seems, however, that the kinds of “help” that teaching requires get sticky much more quickly.  How much do we do for our students?  How much do we let them do for themselves, knowing the frustrations and risks down those various roads, maybe better than they do.

I can vividly remember the sort of “soul shock” that hit me when I had been working very hard to “help” a teenage student of mine get out of his family’s house where I believed he was being abused and neglected.  He was finally placed in foster care.  Right away he gained about 20 pounds and I remember feeling so vindicated that he was at least thriving physically in his new setting.  Then he was moved into a substance abuse rehab center.  He didn’t do so well there and ended up in a juvenile detention facility where he had some horrible experiences.  At the end of this three month odyssey, he was placed right back in his house and things returned to the way they had been before he left.  Except he didn’t trust me anymore, and he stopped coming to school.   He sided with his family, who told him that the “system” was trying to put in him jail and break up his family.  Of course he did that.  He needed them to survive and he loved them and needed them to love him back.

It wasn’t until a compassionate counselor and I started talking about this young man’s situation that I really understood what a lot of folks “in the system” had been trying to tell me.  We actually don’t have good options for abused teens.  They’re too old to go into the foster care system.  Long-term residential placements are rare and expensive.  I had been under the delusion that there were spaces and places for kids where they could heal and be nurtured into adulthood free from their dangerous home lives.  But actually, what we mostly do is incarcerate our poorest troubled teens and they grow up in the prison system, where they are often trapped well into their twenties and sometimes beyond.  It’s actually quite lucky this young man was able to get out of the detention center.  If he had had a more serious fight there, they could have charged him with felony assault and kept him for years for that crime.

If I had all this to do over again, I think I would have tried much harder to get family counseling for this young man and his family.  To try to heal at the community level the environment in which he was destined to spend the four remaining years of his youth.  In truth he loved his family, for all their problems, and he didn’t want to be taken away from his home.

I couldn’t see all that at the time.  I wasn’t looking clearly at the situation.  I was just seeing it from inside my own head.  That’s where the value of mindfulness comes in.  It allows you to pause, to seek multiple perspectives.  It doesn’t mean you don’t act.  It just means that you can act with greater clarity and less certainty (which in this case would have been a good thing).  I think the desire to be of use, is still a wonderful motivation for teaching, but I also think that tempering that desire with mindfulness practices can only be good.

At the School Reform Initiative Conference in January we spent some time with Marge Piercy’s poem “To be of use.”  It’s such a wonderful statement of the intention of many of us in the educational world.  The line that really hit me was,

“But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.”

I think we all know this feeling in our hearts when we’ve done it right.  The thing well done “clean and evident.”  This kind of helpfulness comes from that deeper place of insight and understanding.

To read the whole poem, follow this link.

http://www.panhala.net/Archive/To_be_of_Use.html

To read an article by Pema Chodron on the concept of bodhichitta, follow this link.

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1469

To learn more about Herb Ferris’s class on mindfulness and other programs at Time & Space in Springfield, VT,  follow this link
http://www.studiotimeandspace.org/

“Let Us Turn Our Thoughts Today To Martin Luther King”

This opening line from James Taylor’s song Shed a Little Light has been much with me this morning.  This past Saturday,  I joined about 300 colleagues from around the country for the inaugural event for an organization called School Reform Initiative (SRI).  In truth, we have been together, many of us, for more than 20 years, looking for ways to reform education so that our schools really do meet the needs of all our students.  But really, we aim for more than “meet the needs.”  Most of us really want our schools to feed the souls of all of our students.  To empassion them to rise to the challenges of their individual lives and to the challenges of the time and place into which they have been born.  As James Taylor’s song says “We are bound together by our desire to see the world become a place where our children can grow free and strong.”  And in that room in Boston, we were also bound by the deep conviction that each of our children are all of our children– every single one of them.

Our key note speaker was Linda Darling-Hammond from Stanford University.  She’s been with us on this journey too.  Traveling every week from California to Washington D.C. to talk with lawmakers and policy makers about the absolute moral and practical imperative to fund our schools equitably and to guarantee that every classroom is led by an outstanding teacher and that every teacher is given access to outstanding support and professional development throughout their career span.  Her new book, The Flat World and Education:  How America’s commitment to equity will determine our future (2010) presents a cascade of evidence (more like a Niagra Falls of evidence) about how our persistent national refusal to face the appalling inequalities in our education system are strangling our national growth, not just economically, but morally and spiritually as well.  She told us that we must, as a community of educators, stand up.  We must begin speaking out and teaching our own families, friends, communities, parents, voters, policy makers and politicians what we mean by a good quality, equitable education.

As teachers, we often fight for our students certainly, and for our individual schools.  But to argue for changing the system?  That is again a different matter for most of us.  Change it how?  To what end?  According to which agenda?  Darling-Hammond purposes “a new paradigm for national and state education policy” that has five key elements

1.    Meaningful Learning Goals
2.    Intelligent, reciprocal accountability systems
3.    Equitable and Adequate Resources
4.    Strong professional standards and supports
5.    Schools organized for student and teachers learning.

(Darling-Hammond, 2010, pp. 279-280)

There, that’s not so radical, is it?  Oh…but it is.  Just consider number three for a moment.  At least 40 U.S. States have law suits pending regarding equitable funding of education.  You know, in our country we do not all agree on whether it is appropriate or desirable to use one person’s money to educate another person’s children, especially if those children are different from us or appear to pose some threat to our sense of self, our position in society or our economic opportunities.  Number three is still very much a radical idea for many of us.  But you don’t have to start with number three (although surely number three must happen).  I bet most of you could argue passionately for numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 ☺ !

And so, as we turn our thoughts today to Dr. King,  I urge each one of you to pick an item from that list of five.  Educate yourself as best you can on the facts and figures and start talking.  Talk to your friends and families and tell them that you support accountability for teachers, but you also support paid time and resources for teacher collaboration and planning.  Tell your state departments of education that research tells us that massive, proscriptive curricula that are a mile wide and an inch deep do not help children build the depth of understanding that they need for true mastery of concepts critical to their future educational success.  Don’t just let them hand this mess down.  Talk back up to them!  Tell your federal legislator that while you support the notion of leaving no child behind, you decry the assumption that national one-size fits all assessments can do a better job of measuring student learning than locally developed, performance-based measures that serve as a means to improve a students’ understanding of their own learning process and guide them on their next steps.

At the SRI Winter Meeting we read and discussed our feelings about the Langston Hughes poem, Freedom’s plow.  It calls us now just as urgently as it did when it was written. Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund has said that “education is the civil rights movement of the 21st Century.”  Thank you for being on the front lines. “KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW.  HOLD ON.”

To see James Taylor perform Shed a little light, follow this link

To see information about the organization School Reform Initiative, follow this link
http://schoolreforminitiative.org/

To see information about Linda Darling-Hammond’s new book, follow this link
http://store.tcpress.com/0807749621.shtml

To read Freedom’s Plow, follow this link.
http://thepoetryplace.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/freedoms-plow/