By their nature, schools are busy places. Learning is not a passive activity, and therefore, at any given moment, there is usually a great deal happening within the walls of a school. Add to that the fact that throughout the day many students and many teachers will be walking the halls, going to lunch, heading to meetings, and preparing for dismissal, a near constant buzz can be felt the moment you step foot into a school.
To be at their sharpest, our brains need occasional breaks from this mental beehive. Numerous research studies have shown how reflection and “brain breaks” benefit our productivity and health. Yet this can often feel at odds with what seems like a need to go, go, go during a school day in order to fit everything in.
As a colleague of mine often says, “you give time to what you value”, and at ANCS, we value the benefits that moments of rest for our brains can bring, both for students and for teachers. Each Monday at our elementary campus this year will bring a focus on mindfulness, with some sort of practice to help slow things down and bring attention to what we are thinking and feeling. Every day at our middle campus there is now a five-minute period of quiet time when every person in the building stops all else they are doing and can sit quietly, meditate, journal, or draw. And at both campuses, teachers aim to incorporate short brain breaks—quick activities designed to refocus the mind–into their classes throughout the day. All of these are steps taken towards helping our students’ stay mentally fresh so that they may do their best learning. And, building on our work as a school with Conscious Discipline, by doing activities that keep students’ minds in their “executive states“, these types of activities minimize the disruptions that come when we operate out of our “safety state” or “emotional state”.
Slowing down and making time to reflect is a habit that we hope to develop in students in other ways too. Within most class periods and certainly as a part of each project students complete, students are asked–verbally or in written form, collectively or by themselves–to think about their thinking. What did you have to do to complete this project? What did you learn from it that you could apply elsewhere? How might you approach a similar task differently next time? And when a student engages in a behavior that violates one of our Guiding Principles the first thing we ask that student to do is to reflect upon the incident, a step which often serves to slow the student’s breathing and to calm emotions to a point where the situation can be better handled and the student can recognize his or her role in the conflict.
Of course, adults need opportunity for reflection and mental reboots just as much as young people. As a part of our recent faculty/staff retreat, we broke up the learning and thinking with moments of organized brain breaks and time to process our work (the lip sync contest we had also helped, but we won’t get into the details of that here!). Back at school, most meetings begin with some form of “connections”, a practice that allows us to create the head space needed to do our best thinking in the meeting ahead. In our collaborative work as a faculty, we often use protocols from the School Reform Initiative that are designed in part to give us room to think and reflect so we can do better, more thoughtful work. Additionally, several members of our school leadership team are participating in mindfulness courses through the Emory-Tibet Partnership this fall so that we may be better leaders of our school community.
So the next time you visit ANCS, if you are struck by a period of quiet or see students and adults involved in a active, goofy-looking brain break, you’ll know that it’s just as important to their learning and development as working on a math problem or writing an essay.