Practices in the Classroom
It can seem like so much of being a teacher is a juggling act. You have to communicate sometimes complex ideas to your students while also keeping them engaged. At the same time, you’re expected to be a key influencer in their personal growth. It’s a challenging balance to maintain. One of the ways you can find these responsibilities to meet in the middle is through mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is being embraced by a growing number of schools, often to handle personal wellness and discipline challenges. But it can also be a valuable component of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) lessons. It might seem as though these two elements exist in conflicting spaces. Yet, there are various ways in which they can complement one another to optimize your students’ learning experience and development. We’re going to look closer at what aspects you can focus on so you and your students get the best of both worlds.
Maintaining Awareness
One consistent element of all STEM subjects is that they require awareness. This isn’t just from the perspective of students being able to focus on the task at hand — although this helps. It’s also about maintaining cognizance of how their application of principles impacts the people, objects, and the world around them. Practising mindfulness can help as it is predicated on students’ ability to be present in the moment.
So how can you combine the two in this regard? Well, a good start is to integrate mindful and contemplative activities into the school day. Some practices fit well into classwork — guided meditation routines, journaling, and simple listening activities among them. However, you can make it a deeper part of your STEM curriculum by starting each session with mindfulness exercises that fit with the learning activity. If you’re about to experiment, have them follow meditation techniques engaging the five senses. If they’re about to take in a lot of technical information, go through some gentle breathing exercises designed to focus their minds and reduce anxiety.
Another positive practice is to keep them conscious of their awareness. Mindfulness shouldn’t be a tool you just use to lead kids into engaging more completely with their STEM classes. Alongside going through exercises, it’s also helpful to talk about how these can impact their learning process. Build this into your methodology for teaching science. When discussing STEM concepts and following activities, invite your students to discuss not just their project observations but also how they arrived at them — what senses did they use, what frame of mind were they in? Discussing this helps students to understand how mindfulness can be a practical tool in their learning.
Balancing Intelligence
STEM subjects too often have a focus on purely intellectual development. While knowledge can be important, its application undoubtedly benefits from being informed by a range of soft skills. Emotional intelligence paired with technical intellect helps students to understand not just how STEM principles work but also to contextualize how to use them positively. Mindfulness is often a route to helping to develop this vital emotional intelligence component among students. One of the most effective ways to capitalize on this is through team STEM projects. Among the reasons mindfulness breeds emotional intelligence is it improves students’ ability to understand their emotions. It also teaches them to recognize the emotional states of people around them and strengthens their ability to manage their emotions. All of these are required in successful team STEM projects like mini-builds that see students collaborating closely through the design process up to construction. Whenever problems arise or tempers flare, talk them through mindfulness practices. Help them to consider their feelings, their team members’ emotions, and how to effectively move forward together.
Another route to balancing the growth of STEM intellect and emotional intelligence is through discussing the potential impact these principles have on people’s lives. Mindfulness tends to aid emotional perception which assists in the development of empathy. Discussions in class about the application of new technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), electric vehicles, or space travel for instance — can be coupled with ethical considerations. Encourage students to be mindful to understand what the human and social implications are. Discuss how they would go about making decisions to use these technologies.
Going Outside
Classroom-based theory and projects are great tools in a curriculum. However, STEM tends to come alive when students can reach out and interact with it in the real world. It’s also important to understand how natural science lessons can benefit from mindfulness principles that help students to understand their place in the environment and their responsibilities toward it. This can be especially effective when taking biology field trips among local natural ecosystems. From an individual perspective, being out in nature has been found to have distinct mental and physical health benefits. Doctors have even started to prescribe gentle outdoor activities among woodland and in parks both for specific challenges like depression and to maintain general wellbeing. Exercising mindfulness when surrounded by nature has an emotionally enriching impact on students while also placing them into the frame of mind that empowers them to make accurate and astute scientific observations about the landscape.
An important aspect of this is encouraging students to discuss these observations together both while in the environment and when they return to the classroom. This not only helps them to recognize the benefits of their mindful inquiry process but also highlights to other students how they can improve their observations. You can keep their mindful practice running by incorporating social queries along with the empirical investigative questions they are seeking answers for out in the wilderness. Have them use scientific methods to establish what might be causing environmental damage to the ecosystem but also the mindful consideration to review how they can improve their own impact now and in the future.
Conclusion
Mindfulness and STEM don’t need to be conflicting elements. When combined through projects, lesson structure, and practical application in the world they can be mutually complementary tools. Take the time to incorporate both into the curriculum and you can help make sure your students’ STEM experiences are as emotionally rewarding as they are intellectually stimulating.
Happy teaching,
Dan Matthews is a freelance writer and content consultant who specializes invaluable insights for a wide variety of audiences. However, he loves to focus on and emphasize the importance of the sciences as to create a better tomorrow through green technologies, sustainability, and environmental preservation.
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