Mindfulness for teachers is not a new concept. It is widely considered to be a useful tool to support mental well-being and enable individuals to cope with everyday stresses. However, here I want to reframe the use of mindfulness and consider how we can use it to develop and improve as practitioners. I consider mindfulness to be a superpower for improving practice because it provides the starting point for honest self-reflection that can be utilised to guide areas for improvement every day.
Before we start, here are the basics, for anyone new to the idea of mindfulness. A quick Google search will yield the following definitions:
1. The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.
2. A mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
The second links the use of mindfulness to improve mental well-being, which is indeed where my interest in mindfulness started. However, in this blog I am going to focus on the first definition: the idea of being conscious or aware. In particular, I will focus on awareness of negative emotions associated with working in an education setting.
For clarity, when referring to negative emotions I mean anything that is experienced that gives us a sense of unease. They can be in anticipation of something (fear or dread), occur retrospectively (guilt or disappointment) or happen in real time (anger or sadness). Whatever the experience the associated negative emotions can range fully in their level of intensity from abject fear to a mild sense of unease. None of us will ever be able to avoid negative emotions they are part of being human and are our mind’s way of telling us something is wrong (or we perceive something to be wrong). However, what we can do is engage with our negative emotions and use them for what they are, a signal. Usually, a signal that there is something we need to consciously deal with.
Throughout a working week negative emotions are common place and often our way to deal with these emotions is to ignore them, suppress them and move on. Although this may help us to feel better in the short term it is unlikely to help us deal with the root cause and if we encounter the same situation again we are likely to revisit the same negative emotions. So how can mindfulness help? As a negative emotion arises, instead of pushing it away, I am suggesting you allow yourself to become fully aware of the emotion, accept it and ask yourself the question “why am I feeling this way?”
An honest and reflective answer to the previous question leads us to our priority areas for development. I would like to call these the sticking points. We will look at how we can become more aware of our sticking points, identify what has triggered them and look at ways we can respond. This is not only empowering, but a professional development game changer!
For the purpose of ease of explanation I will split negative emotions into 3 groups anticipatory (emotions related to something in the future), real time (negative emotions to what is happening now) and retrospective (emotions related to something that has happened). These are not mutually exclusive of course, but it helps to illustrate the ways that mindfulness as an approach can be specifically applied in the teaching profession. I will work through these in reverse order as in my opinion retrospective negative emotions are the best place to start, as often we have more time to be conscious in retrospect. As you become more mindful in your professional practice your ability to be aware of negative emotions in real time and in anticipation of events will become more developed.
Retrospective negative emotions:
This example is an experience I personally had of feeling frustration. The academy I worked in at the time was focusing on praise and we had a fantastic reward system, students loved it, staff were supported to use it and I wanted to play my part in its success. But I just couldn’t consistently remember to give reward points, it was utterly frustrating! I’d teach a lesson and then afterwards be annoyed with myself for again forgetting to issue them. Alternatively, I’d start well and then fizzle out 15 minutes in when student output really warranted praise. I was notably better at praising verbal contributions and was frankly terrible at issuing rewards when touring the class.
I could have ignored the frustration and continued to be inconsistent and skewed when issuing rewards, but instead I engaged with this negative emotion and used it as the signal that it was.
After one particularly frustrating lesson where I had (yet again) totally forgotten to issue any reward points I sat down to grapple with my frustration! My conscious mind knew I wanted to be better but, in the moment, it wasn’t happening. But why? I considered how I recorded rewards and realised I just hadn’t made this easy enough for myself, especially when I toured the class. I had been writing the names of those deserving rewards on the board at the front, which meant I had to remember all the rewards that I had issued on my tour - a near impossible task.
Now that I had found the sticking point it was time to problem solve. I found a clipboard and some mini whiteboards and wrote the code of each of my classes in permanent pen at the top of the mini whiteboards. Next, I found a visible place near the board to display the clipboard and every lesson I placed the class’s reward whiteboard in the clipboard. Suddenly I was able to tour the room, board in hand recording as I went, then placed back on display I could use it when leading from the front, and due to its prominent position it reminded students of their successes so far. Additionally, when class changeover was too hectic to record them directly onto the school system, it didn’t matter, I had a reliable source from which I could log all my rewards at the end of the day.
As I continued to successfully trial my new method, I discovered some additional sticking points. For example, logging at the end of the day became annoying because the names weren’t written alphabetically, and it took too long. I devised a plan to write initials of students in each class in permanent ink on the mini white boards in alphabetical order and used ticks to show who had earned rewards. Reward points were now easy to issue and easy to log. Reward points (or lack of them) was no longer a source of frustration. I had engaged with the emotion, allowed my conscious brain to problem solve, and voila, problem solved.
Real time negative emotions:
Feeling uncomfortable while duty or in school corridors is a common real time emotion. Many of us will have felt that sense of unease when faced with the responsibility of correcting undesirable student behaviours. The prospect of the hassle that can follow may be almost as undesirable! We may be concerned that the student will be rude or disrespectful in response. Our perception of this negative emotion may lead us to ignore or fail to challenge the student. There are numerous other examples I could give of times when we may avoid dealing with things that we know we should. These are not conscious decisions, and this is precisely why mindfulness is helpful. In these situations, mindfulness allows us to identify when a feeling of unease arises and convert the unconscious thought process into a conscious one.
Exercising mindfulness requires us to use our developed awareness of the incidence of these negative emotions, to give the thinking-brain a chance to override our subconscious. In practice this could mean instead of ignoring a student swearing, we are able to consciously say to ourselves “I will tackle this in the way the behaviour policy dictates” and “if the student is rude in response or walks away, I will use the behaviour policy to deal with it after the event”. The easiest option is not always the right one, but I suggest that conscious thought will better enable us to actively choose the actions we know we should take.
Arguably the most important context to acknowledge real time negative emotions is during lessons. Sometimes things simply don’t work which is a probable cause of negative emotions. The reasons why our meticulously planned lesson goes awry are innumerable and many are beyond our control. Therefore, it is essential that we acknowledge from the outset that we can never reach perfection, teaching is messy, complex and constantly changing and that’s why it’s so interesting. However, we do not give up our quest for improvement and when things don’t go to plan, we should focus on the identification of the sticking point and appreciate the opportunity it provides for us to reflect and improve. Frequent small tweaks to our practice are truly the foundation of professional development. Once we have identified the sticking point that’s when the plethora of knowledge that we have acquired from courses, books, blogs, colleagues can be used to find “best bet” solutions. In fact, I would argue that comprehensive professional knowledge greatly increases our awareness of the sticking points in the first place.
An example from my personal practise was my attempts to implement retrieval practice for low ability students. I had read multiple inspirational books on the science of retrieval and its application, and I was keen to use it better to help all of my students. Most of my classes quickly adapted to the increased expectation of mental effort and with some careful explanation of the benefits of retrieval they were quickly on board. All but one group gave my retrieval activities the energy and mental effort that they required. Despite my best efforts and carefully crafted activities (with specifically chosen questions and reduced extraneous load) I still failed to effectively engage this group with retrieval. Consequently, the success of the lessons and my emotional feeling were negatively impacted. I felt failure and frustration simultaneously, but instead of continuing with an approach that was not working, I mindfully acknowledged the sticking point, thus allowing my conscious brain to create a solution.
The solution that worked for me in this case was to develop starters which included a short reading activity which reminded students of prior learning. Students were then required to complete a task which required them to recall from what they had just read along with longer-term retrieval (from prior learning) to build connections with content. Student success with my revised retrieval activities built confidence within the cohort over time and I was gradually able to reduce the amount of reading provided. I then made a conscious effort to build more small retrieval opportunities throughout the lesson which students found much easier to engage with.
In this example a mindfulness approached assisted me in adapting research-based strategies to fit a unique context. It is reckless to assume implementation of a recommended strategy will just work for us at once. Effective practitioners acknowledge and feedback in response to negative emotions and the circumstances that cause them. Every strategy (even those routed in solid, unquestionable evidence) need nuance in their application, so it’s crucial we are alert to find the sticking points as we go, be ready to acknowledge them and adjust our practise accordingly.
Anticipatory negative emotions:
Finally, I want to consider how we can acknowledge negative feelings about future events. There are likely to be events planned that cause us feel unease, such as a scheduled conversation with a colleague which is likely to be challenging or teaching a topic we lack confidence with. It is tempting to suppress these feeling when they arise, however, acknowledging them and their causes can help us to avoid sticking points in the future. Subsequently reducing the frequency and intensity of real time and retrospective negative emotions experienced.
To be clear, feelings of dread before having a difficult conversation are quite normal. Truthfully, if discussing things another person may find upsetting, doesn’t cause us some unease, perhaps we aren’t the best person to have the conversation? However, I maintain that acknowledging these feelings in advance and using them to ensure the conversation is supportive, well evidenced and sensitive will mean that although the conversation may still cause upset, it will have been handled in the best possible way.
The feeling of unease when approaching a new topic is actually a super opportunity to consciously acknowledge the fact we are not fully confident with the material. We should use this sticking point to motivate us to seek advice from a colleague, spend time reading about the subject, observe others teach it or plan resources. All of which will ensure your practice is improved when you eventually come to teach it, and it really focuses our professional development time on our own personal priorities.
What next?
Obviously not all negative emotions are linked to things we have control over. However, when they are associated with the things we do have the power to influence, becoming conscious of their causes can be empowering. Improving teaching and professional practice is all about small changes, that combined, make a big difference. Being conscious of our negative emotions to help us locate these sticking points is a superpower in our professional development journey, allowing us to hone in on what most urgently requires our attention. As you become more mindful in your professional practice your ability to be aware of negative emotions in real time and in anticipation of events will become greater.
The only questions now are: What are your sticking points? And how could you solve them?
By Cat Rushton
@Catherinerusht2