After the Christmas holiday and the mock exams, the atmosphere in college was pretty flat. We ran the annual ‘On Your Bike’ campaign again, to encourage good attendance for January by giving commendation awards and entry into the prize draw competition. But the weather, work load and winter fug was conspiring to lower the collective student mood.
Mindfulness is not a cure for depression or anxiety, but increasingly schools are turning to it to help students develop a set of skills that will help them manage their emotional responses to situations that could be stressful. Through my own yoga practice, I am relatively experienced in body scanning, meditation and breathing exercises, and recognise the cognitive benefits in regularly applying these techniques into a daily routine. I was therefore keen to look at how mindfulness techniques could be introduced to our students through tutorials and began researching existing materials that we could adapt to suit our learners.
The resources that I found available on line were largely designed with younger students in mind and there didn’t seem to be that much around for the post-16 age group so I decided to create my own resources (see the mindfulness booklet and power point attached) and an introductory lesson which we trialled at the end of January 2019. The mindfulness tutorial session was definitely a Marmite moment, both for students and tutors! Some tutors enthusiastically delivered the session and had their groups doing seated body scans, square breathing, enjoying mindfully eating sweets and taking bracing mindfulness walks around the college grounds. Other tutors struggled to see the relevance of the session and sent students off for a ‘mindful walk’ while they caught up on student 121’s and target setting.
There is definitely a place in our curriculum for mindfulness, and tutorials is the ideal way to ensure that all students are introduced to it. Consequently, I have been looking at how to improve the engagement of tutors before we deliver the session again next year. We always run a weekly briefing meeting where we go through the resources and lesson plan and make sure that we all understand the intent of the next weeks tutorial sessions. Next time we prepare for the mindfulness tutorials, we will start by focusing on the science and psychology behind mindfulness (which I had previously taken as assumed knowledge) and look at how the tutor can tailor the session to their specific groups. I have increased the differentiation of the session – Public Services students might start by researching how mindfulness is used in the military, Sport Science students can research mindfulness in professional sport etc, and then they can choose a mindfulness practice to focus on for that session. I am also looking into various training opportunities so that I can become properly equipped to offer mindfulness as an ongoing enrichment for students who would like to continue the practice and would like more support and guidance to do so.
Su's blog 