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10 Meditation Apps For The Classroom - TeachThought

From www.teachthought.com - March 3, 2017 11:51 AM

Although it’s difficult to change the way the (school) system operates, it is possible to adjust how you operate within the system. Introducing meditation and mindfulness techniques in the classroom not only allows you to create a calmer environment, the practice has proven to have verifiable benefits on the human brain.

A 2011 Harvard study of MRI images showed a thickening in the cerebral cortex (an area responsible in part for attention and emotional integration) in meditation participants in as little as 8 weeks. So, it’s more than a good habit and some quiet time in the classroom, you may be helping the brains of your students develop even more than you realize.

Where do you even begin teaching meditation when you may not be familiar with the practice yourself? Although it seems like an incongruous match, this is yet another area where technology steps in to make learning convenient, and a variety of apps offer options for every age, ability, and amount of available time. Here are a few to experiment with as you get started.

Via John Evans

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David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity ~ Open Culture

From www.openculture.com - August 22, 2013 8:54 AM

by Colin Marshall

"David Lynch meditates, and he meditates hard. Beginning his practice in earnest after it helped him solve a creative problem during the production of his breakout 1977 film Eraserhead, he has continued meditating assiduously ever since, going so far as to found the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace and publish a pro-meditation book called Catching the Big Fish. It might seem nonsensical to hear an artist of the grotesque like Lynch speak rapturously about voyaging into his own consciousness, let alone in his fractured all-American, askew-Jimmy-Stewart manner, but he does meditate for a practical reason: it gives him ideas. Only by meditating, he says, can he dive down and catch the “big fish” he uses as ingredients in his inimitable film, music, and visual art. You can hear more of his thoughts on meditation, consciousness, and creativity in his nine-minute speech above."

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Contemplative Pedagogy ~ Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University

From cft.vanderbilt.edu - August 25, 2013 11:49 PM

Contemplative pedagogy involves teaching methods designed to cultivate deepened awareness, concentration, and insight. Contemplation fosters additional ways of knowing that complement the rational methods of traditional liberal arts education. As Tobin Hart states, “Inviting the contemplative simply includes the natural human capacity for knowing through silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents of our consciousness…. These approaches cultivate an inner technology of knowing….” This cultivation is the aim of contemplative pedagogy, teaching that includes methods “designed to quiet and shift the habitual chatter of the mind to cultivate a capacity for deepened awareness, concentration, and insight.” Such methods include journals, music, art, poetry, dialogue, questions, and guided meditation.

"In the classroom, these forms of inquiry are not employed as religious practices but as pedagogical techniques for learning through refined attention or mindfulness. Research confirms that these contemplative forms of inquiry can offset the constant distractions of our multi-tasking, multi-media culture. Thus, creative teaching methods that integrate the ancient practice of contemplation innovatively meet the particular needs of today’s students.

"The following video, produced here at the CFT, features interviews with faculty members of Vanderbilt’s contemplative pedagogy group describing the roles these forms of inquiry play in their teaching."

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Social Emotional Learning and Mindfulness-based Contemplative Practices in Education - What Meditation Really Is

From whatmeditationreallyis.com - August 14, 2013 3:43 PM

"Mr. Gray, an educator in his second year of teaching in New York City wrote out his resignation letter and left it on his desk. As a final measure, he chose to attend a Renewal and Restoration Retreat for Educators provided by The Inner Resilience Program – a nonprofit organization started right after September 11, 2001 to help teachers in Lower Manhattan begin to heal and recover from the tragic events of that day. He felt he had nothing to lose. “I was so tired of trying to balance the pressures I was feeling, I wanted to quit. After the retreat I went home and ripped up the resignation letter sitting on my desk. I found that place in me that knows why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place.”

"What allows an educator to stay strong, creative and connected to purpose amidst adversity while another to burn out and leave the field of education altogether? What inner resources do students, teachers and administrators draw upon in order to respond to moments of profound crisis and uncertainty in schools? Are schools preparing our children for a life of tests or the tests of life? For more than a decade, these are the questions the Inner Resilience Program has been grappling with. Mr. Gray, one of many educators in this country was teetering on the edge of burnout and happened to attend one of our retreats at the right time for him. But every day several gifted teachers leave the field of education due to the immense stresses they face. In fact, the modal year of experience in the American teaching force today is only one year – and the average years of experience have dropped by over 30% in the last decade."

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