Mindful Teaching Distinctions

Mindful teaching is similar. Mindful teaching is rooted in many elements of effective teaching. Mindful teachers bring excellent professional preparation including deep content knowledge, and skills in a range of pedagogical practices that honor their students’ developmental stages and diversity. My perspective is that teaching is complex work with a long history and evolving understandings of evidence-based practices. Quality university programs in teacher preparation offer in-depth study and guided practice in skills for pedagogy and dispositions to maximize conditions for students’ content and skill development. Effective teachers remain engaged with continually growing their professional foundation in content and practices.

A solid and growing professional foundation is essential for mindful teaching. And, I now believe that deep content and pedagogical knowledge alone is is incomplete professional preparation for mindful teaching. A teacher who has insufficient preparation, knowledge and skills but engages in or shares mindfulness practices cannot be a mindful teacher. Mindful decision-making is rooted in clarity regarding of one’s role and responsibilities (e.g., mathematics teacher, elementary school teacher, reading specialist, special educator, TESOL teacher, university professor). To fulfill one’s role in serving their students, mindful teachers must bring foundational and growing professional knowledge and skills in content, pedagogy and learners. Mindful teaching is also more.

Mindful teaching is different. The fundamental difference between mindful teaching and my traditional preparation is this: mindful teaching is self-focused. Traditional preparation for teaching tends to be other-focused. Mindful teaching is grounded in the teacher’s awareness of and connection to one’s own inner experience as well as outer conditions, including students. My preparation, like most who serve children, emphasized a focus on observing and responding to the learner and on curricula. Some preparation for older learners, including adults, concentrates primarily or only on content and skills. Both are appropriate elements of good teaching and learning. Now I believe that both are incomplete without continual awareness of my inner experience. When I am mindful, grounded in, and connected to my inner self, I can anticipate, see and respond to learners more clearly. I am in touch with my content knowledge and pedagogical and other teaching/relational skills. While it may not be possible to be mindful all of the time, being connected to myself more moments each day can have a significant impact, for me, and for my students.

The teacher’s capacity to be self -focused is rooted in daily mindfulness practice outside of teaching contexts. It includes cultivating mindful touchstones throughout the day. Daily practice, even ten minutes, is where one can learn to stop and quiet down inside and learn to be present to their inner experience. This foundation helps me to more often be aware of my inner experience (e.g., body sensations, thoughts, feelings) and more tuned in to those around me in complex situations where a lot is going on outside of me. Over time, cultivating practices to reconnect briefly with mindfulness “in real time” is also part of mindful teaching. This might be pausing to look out the window at the sky for five seconds at the beginning of my planning time before jumping in, taking three mindful breaths between classes, before a meeting, or eating my lunch slowly in silence for the first five minutes, or identifying a teaching or collegial moment that went well and replaying it in my mind.

Mindful teaching includes many elements of effective teaching. My experience is that mindfulness makes my teaching complete, as it supports me to make my offering from a place of more awareness and wholeness.