Skip to main content

Teaching and meditating...what's the difference?

The other day, I was talking to a colleague about a post I had seen on Facebook. It was about how we need to be in the now as opposed to thinking about the past or fearing what's to come. She commented laughing, on how difficult it is to be in the present. I think she's absolutely right!

The funny thing is, the only time we are in the NOW is when we enter the classroom. All our baggage, our fears are left by the door the moment we walk into the room. The students envelop us with their warmth, joy, and laughter. Their needs take precedence over anything else during those moments in the class. We are constantly looking around us, listening to what they have to say. I feel this is the closest to meditation I have ever been!

Comments

  1. NainiJanuary 29, 2013 at 10:16 AM

    Hate it when I make mistakes and spot them later....!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...
Post a Comment
Read more

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...
Post a Comment
Read more

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...
Post a Comment
Read more