Food for Thought: our Wandering Minds

Dear all,

Thanks to everyone involved in the Grade 4 Mini X, MRISA Arts and STEAM Festival, and all the other school activities this last week and this weekend. I know it is a very busy time and thank you all for making it a good one for our students and their learning.

This week’s Food for Thought provides further evidence from neuroscience that our desire to empower our students by giving them the skills to control their lives is spot on, and very important. As you know one set of these skills is what we do through mindfulness. This Ted talk by the neuroscientist Amishi Jha, How to tame the wandering Mind, has much relevance to us in education. The research focuses on the importance of attention in framing our minds perceptions. The results clearly indicate that when a person is bored, this can be through repetitious activity as well as other things, our minds start to wander. It is also clear that attention is reduced by stress. We have known for years about our students attention span varies between 8 and 20 minutes, although a much debated recent articles implies that today due to social media and modern media and lifestyle trends it may be shorter than a goldfish’s at 8 secs.  Whatever the exact figure is we should be thinking about it when we plan our lessons and how we pace lessons and phase lessons to ensure that students remain engaged with their learning. There are obvious implications for preparing students for examinations. The talk concludes with research findings about the impact of deliberate mindfulness activities in increasing attention and assisting students and ourselves in taking control of our minds.  Doing a quick internet search on strategies to maintain attention it was interesting to see that the majority had mindfulness at or near the top of their list. This article on paying attention is just one example.

This type of research supports our mindfulness programme by providing scientific evidence of its importance in providing students with the skills that they will need to control their lives in the future. It is clear that mindfulness should be a daily exercise and even beyond that a technique that is used during class to help students control their wandering minds.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

PS Just received my weekly post from Barking up the Wrong Tree and it is about 
How To Increase Your Attention Span: 5 Secrets From Neuroscience. Guess what meditation is there in the list.