Finley – Two Seriously Simple and Disruptive Practices

By Todd Finley

“That is why you fail.” -Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Education is buried under the superabundant remains of “new” ideas that slipped into disregard. Remember Ebonics? Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty? Whole Language? All Kinds of Minds? Instructional Theory Into Practice, and the Common Core State Standards?

Many teachers have justifiably lost faith in new ideas. Furthermore, they no longer trust how classroom innovations are evaluated by mega-corporations like Pearson in an untenable bubble-sheet assessment model (essentially evaluating the effectiveness of their own materials).

Losing faith in new ideas causes institutional dysthymia—a long term and low-grade lethargy that has kept instructional practices stalled in the 1950s. What’s more, we ignore simple practices that enhance student thinking.

Simple practices that enhance student thinking, however, are exactly what will disrupt traditional education in the next decade. The next sections describe two such practices: daily mindfulness training and strenuous individualized exercise.

Mindfulness

The Holy Grail of brain development is neural integration—linking parts of the brain so that more sophisticated processes manifest. A key strategy for achieving integration is mindfulness training. For tips on guiding mindfulness, see Daniel Siegel’s resources and The Guardian’s tips on guiding mindfulness. Meditation-styled focus for just twelve minutes a day, according to Siegel, makes neural networks more effective. Such practice also improves mental clarity, empathy, reading comprehension, the ability to adapt, and resilience.

When students at Visitation Valley Middle School meditated twice during the school day, suspensions dropped 50%, truancy reduced 65%, and grade point averages increased .5%. Tina Barseghian, in Why Teaching Mindfulness Benefits Students’ Learning, writes that mindful awareness supports “fully engaged learning and well-being”—a fact that should be instructive for states that spend millions on curriculum packages. Academic improvement starts with a child’s ability to focus.

Strenuous Physical Exercise

Jacob Sattelmair and John Ratey’s review of physical education (PE) research, published in Physically Active Play and Cognition, finds that “learning, memory, concentration, and mood all have a significant bearing on a student’s academic performance, and there is increasing evidence that physical activity enhances each.”

The norm in the pre-millennial PE model was for kids to stand on the sidelines watching top school athletes compete. In the new PE model, described in Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, students wear heart monitors to stay aware of their optimal aerobic zone as they choose from an array of strenuous activities, such as Dance Dance Revolution and rock climbing. After implementing this model, a Pennsylvania school’s “standardized test scores [went] from below the state average to 17 and 18 percent above average in reading and math.”

Neither mindfulness training nor new PE practices currently enjoy widespread K-12 adoption. But they will. After all, helping students develop physical and mental expertise—like Yoda mentoring Luke Skywalker in the Dagobah swamp—enables the learner to develop lifelong mastery of her most formidable resources—her body and brain.