During the summer holidays I had the pleasure of visiting the amazing learning space of @sherratsam and his colleague Chad.
If you ever get the chance to visit either of these educators, please do. However for those whose PD budget doesn’t quite stretch to a visit to international classroom visits, you can visit their blog Time Space education.
For me this day gave me a chance to see theories and hunches about student learning in action. Their classrooms were calm, purposeful and creative hives of learning.
One idea that really intrigued me was the use of yoga and meditation in class.
I’m a regular at my body balance class at my local gym and enjoy the calm and contented feeling I have at the end of class.
Yet as an adult I often struggle with the meditation session at the end of class. Sometimes I am able to relax entirely but I often have trouble clearing my mind. There’s just too much buzzing around in my head.
If I was having trouble how would my highly active class respond to meditation?
Was it going to end in giggles, eyeball rolling and pre-teen goofiness?
To be honest I was highly sceptical that meditation would easily translate from the worldly and sophisticated kids in an international school to a public classroom in suburban Wellington.
But I have been proved wrong.
For the most part my class has responded really well to purposeful downtime and have been requesting it before I even get a chance to unlock the door from lunch.
Our curtains are drawn and I put on some relaxing music. At the moment the students are learning to focus on their breathing and posture.
What was really surprising for me was that the children whose home lives are complex and sometimes chaotic have responded so positively to this idea of purposeful downtime. On further reflection, this makes a lot of sense for some kids school represents a safe, calm and caring space.
For this reason alone I will persevere with meditation once the novelty wears off.
As teachers we expect concentration in our classrooms but assume kids have the tools to focus.
We want our classrooms to be calm but school schedules sometimes run at break-neck speed.
We want our kids to be mindful of the effect of their actions on others. Yet time out for reflection often comes after the negative behaviour occurs.
What if in sacrificing 5-10 minutes of class time to calming students bodies and minds we gain more engagement?
Is that 10 minutes really a waste of time?
Teaching the Teacher 
I have been using kids yoga and meditation/breathing exercises for several years now in Early Childhood classes and the impact on learning, behaviour, concentration etc. is great!
Highly recommended!
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Hi Stephanie,
We were lucky enough to have Sam and Chad spend 5 days at our school and team teach our kids. They took different classes in different year levels through some simple but incredibly powerful provacation experiences and began each session with mindful/ intentional mediation.
I learned so much in those four days from observing and the debriefing sessions which followed. I also used to assume that students had the tools to focus until listening to Sam and Chad.
Charlie and I have since felt better equipped to apply our understanding and team teach and have been using meditation to get our kids ready for thinking. The results demonstrate that setting aside the 5 or 10 minutes for mindful meditation is very worthwhile.
Other teachers at our school have also tried mindful mediation and have set their doubts at its effectiveness aside because they have seen how focused kids are afterwards.
Enjoy.
Hailey
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