Staying Present. Finding Joy in Presence

What do we know but that we face
One another in this place.
                                                 -W.B. Yeats   'Man and the Echo'

Pressed for time and often hungry for nourishment, teachers are, in the best sense of the phrase, 'giving out' all day long. Like health workers, our profession is intensely human with myriad daily interactions. How do we prepare for that moment when we step into the room and launch our lesson onto the waves, with the wind in our sails and all hands on deck? How do we sustain through the day, the week, and the year? How do we keep freshness and positivity as we share the space of four walls and lighting that, all too often, is of a flickering flourescent sort devised by the US navy to grow plants many leagues under the sea.

Preparation, as all good teachers know is more than half the job. Students will pick up quickly our mood, our intention, and the level of clarity and enthusiasm we bring. Hopefully, each time we meet we begin anew. How do we do this? How do we practice presence so that we are awake to the possibilities in the dialogue with our students and have the courage to let the surprise elements of a lesson delight and expand the learning for all of us?

Touchstones and Talismans

A single Touchstone, or a pocket full of them, can serve to remind us what personally nourishes us, gives us strength and enjoyment, reminds us why we chose this profession and what we love about it. These can be as mundane as the mid morning latte or as profound as meditation, a quiet moment before and after the class, becoming aware of my breath in the midst of it all, reciting Saint Patrick's Breast Plate every morning on arising, or listening to music on the way to work.

Core things to hold close to our hearts begin with the teacher being nourished in order to pass on the cycle of nourishment to our growing young. By being in touch with our own being we can be present to who is in front of us and appreciate what is needed to light the fire. Observation and reflection are key faculties in helping us become more present, more intuitive and accurate in gaining the measure and moment of what makes for excellent lessons.

If we can find also a forum for sharing our touchstones with our colleagues we can humanise the community of teachers, and avoid a climate that can all too easily mechanise and deaden. We all already know we can set the tone for deeper work that sustains our core themes and the ethos of our schools if we allow for humour, individual voices, and a recognition of each other. But sustaining it is the key.

Deepening our Craft as Teachers: Big Picture Thinking

Over the next month we will examine more deeply how the conceptual tool of the EIGHT PHASES for an ACTIVE LESSON can work in practice. Either a spiral or a mandala diagram can help us envisage how to implement a lesson.

The spiral offers an overview and sense of dynamic movement for an active lesson. At a glance you can check if you have included the essential elements and how thy fit together.

The mandala offers an eight division of the same lesson that is more detailed. As a tool it gives us room for annotations and additions that personalise and enliven our lesson content and its sequencing. The phases that overlap and lay foundations for each other can be seen in terms of a dynamic unfolding where what is implicit gradually becomes more explicit. Our task is to recognise when and how we are helping each phase become more explicit so that part of a lesson folds into one another in complementary relation like the swell and fall of chords of music.

If we doodle and diagram these in our own journal they can become very efficient tools for the busy teacher. At a glance, we not only conceptualise the significant aspects of a creative, active lesson that strives to meet all kinds of learners but later we can use the same tool to evaluate and reflect on what we might have missed, what we can improve on, and what miracles may have occurred! These are planning tools that can be easily shared with colleagues and sometimes, students. Over time as we practice with this tool we will discover its value for working with many related functions: envisioning and evaluating, planning and co-ordinating, crafting and assessing, observing and reflecting.

Working step by step with the Eight Phase Lesson:

The spiral image is limited to five phases to make it accessible all at once, for envisioning the dynamic of a lesson. The mandala covers the same elements expanded to eight, with a layout that enables planning and evaluation. Here I will describe the first three stages. They lay the foundation for the heart of the lesson, and engage the spatial sense and other... registered most strongly by our right hemisphere. Our goal is to call forth whole brain learning as richly as possible through the course of a lesson.

1. Meeting

How do we enter the room in which we are to teach? What kind of gaze or encounter do we have with the whole group and each individual? Is everyone met? How is our breathing rhythm? Can we feel our feet on the ground and the air all around us? Are we aware of our backs as well as our fronts? What does our body language and expression signal? What will be the first thing that we read in each other?

2. Moving and Motivating

How do we activate our group and get underway? Beginnings and transitions often require a clearing: litter moved from the floor, desks cleared, and any residues of inner torpor dissolved. The first step is based on the principle of warming us up like a musical instrument. How do we enable that? Singing, stretching, playing a game, a drama game, poetry recitation, introducing lateralisation exercises, brain gym, simple moves; there are a lot of resources out there and a few are sampled below.

To clue into the whole context is a function of our right hemisphere which gains a great deal of subliminal information before anything else takes place. A teacher who jumps right into lists, demands, and interrogations before making real contact will already have made everyone's working and especially their own, much harder. A whole brain approach allows for us to read the space, offer gestures and movement, and then more effectively move with greater vitality towards the sequence and swirl, questions and answers, of our actual lesson content. Simple movement not only warms everyone up, reminding us we share a space and work together, but also engages a deeper flowing of our breath which naturally connects us to ourselves as the diaphragm expands. As well, movements and games can evoke both playfulness and clarity of intention. Active transitions signal that we are shifting gear, clearing the way for the next step, inwardly and outwardly. Recognition and reading our students well naturally leads to gratitude and good will and therefore an increased readiness to learn.

3. Multi-sensory

Our movement will activate the kinaesthetic for all our learners whether or not they are predominantly a kinaesthetic, visual, or aural learner. The latter two get plenty of air time in a typical classroom but movement is too often relegated, like Cinderella, to a cold hearth, seen as the domain of early childhood, PE, or drama. Bring these subjects into the heart of our learning and help them stoke the fire instead. We need to recover the joyful spirit of early play, the repertoire of movement that P.E can offer, and the games, expression, and social skill that drama cultivates. Even a few minutes at the beginning will engage more of our learners for more of the time and make them smarter. They will be with us because they know we are with them.

Tapping and stretching are invaluable because these open up the body, stimulate the nervous system and get things moving and therefore more connected, inwardly and outwardly. Sensory motor activities can be found along with other revitalising activities in the Resource Section below. But here are a few ideas. Some would take 3 minutes and others would be close to 15 minutes and might be a practice of skills coming out of a fuller lesson where they had learned fencing, juggling or capoeira.

• simple standing and stretching: yoga moves, tai chi moves
• stretching and bending
• rotating and circling
• weight shifting from foot to foot with the breath
• shaking and rotating joint areas such as ankles, wrists and shoulders
• tapping and stroking
• tapping each others backs (this requires very clear protocols for safety and trust to grow)
• balancing exercises
• back to back exercises
• ball and beanbag throwing games (throwing underarm inside)
• spinal roll
• juggling
• fencing
• capoiera
• folk/set dancing
• obstacle courses

Resources:

Chrissie Poulter Playing the Game
Caral Hannaford Smart Moves: why learning is not all in your head
Nell Smyth The Breathing Circle: learning through the movement of the breath
www. braingym.org
www.edutopia .org

Journals: thinking spatially, thinking in pictures

Here are some pictures from journals kept by captains, naturalists, artists and scientists. We can find lots of these kinds of images on the net and they can inspire our students and prove Real Men Do Keep Journals. Some great individuals have kept a very cohesive thread of doodling, designing, and note taking going on in their notebooks as they sketched, annotated, wrote lists, and made sure they left a trace of significant thoughts. They valued their thoughts. Their records can inspire students to see their own work in a different way. How a journal is developed and made our own can bring satisfaction, and help with the habit of throwing things away too soon.

Extracts from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Klee, a scout, and two naturalists. The remaining pages are from students' journals showing: costume design for a play, story boarding for a film and a map devised through group work relating to a project on designing an ideal society. 

Planning Integrated Courses

In an integrated curriculum, tools for planning, to enable the creation, envisioning and subsequent evaluation of courses, are crucial. Below I show a template for developing and integrating your goal, your theme(s), the key skills, and an overview of your activities over the duration of the course. The template lets you work as a group as well as individually, and it is also a tool for evaluation.

Here are some suggestions for securing a coordinated and well thought through course that can also help colleagues work together. If we can integrate our pedagogy and our overall course themes, the students will find that the integration facilitates their learning. They will meet a woven whole and not disjointed segments that they must either integrate or compartmentalise, often creating stress and limiting how they can use what they learn outside the classroom. If we can find themes that have a developmental drumbeat and heartbeat for the age we are teaching, our courses will open doors and kindle the students' engagement with clarion relevance.

For example, courses could adopt an overarching metaphorical theme for the year. Alternatively, six week courses with titles such as The Turning Point, Discovery, Adventure, or Challenge, could serve well for each of the first three years of secondary education. If we attune our teaching with key archetypal questions, and themes that are developmentally appropriate for each year, all our other subjects can easily cluster around these. I would suggest that the topics offer a scope so as to neither box yourself in nor drift away on a wide, wide sea with no wind in the offing.

A TOOL for ENVISIONING and EVALUATING

Interactive Chart Showing the Pathway for Gaining Perspective: Envisioning and Evaluating Courses 

This shows your aim, theme(s), the six comprehensive skill areas identified by the NCCA for the new Junior Cycle, and how to integrate them into a plan that includes your content and activities. First of all, it lets you plan and set these up visually as a whole. Later it can work as a reflective tool, letting you evaluate and make changes as you assess the strengths and challenges of your unfolding lessons. I train teachers to use this tool in a context of turning points, vanishing points, the Renaissance, and the modern age so we appreciate that perspectives change and that this is an age in which education and its metaphors must reflect nets, holography, quantum perspectives, and global connection.

To activate using this tool I have teachers first doodle the schema in their journals in order to feel comfortable with making quick rapid sketches. This gets synapses firing for mapping conceptual frameworks. Then we work it more carefully on a large scale. Images are core to how we think and help us to learn more deeply. Colour delights the senses, warms the soul and heightens learning. If we plan not just with lists and linear schema but also with doodles and images, mandalas and maps, we may find that greater creativity and connection of ideas and themes will come to us.

The process is best taught over two days and then used in teachers' meetings subsequently for small or large group reflection.