CI and Mindfulness

2 thoughts on “CI and Mindfulness”

1. Ben Slavic

   May 11, 2014 at 1:38 pm

   It is not true that you may have rambled off track by bringing this up, jen. The fact is that, whether Blaine or Susie or any of the experts are aware of it or not, mindfulness is the driving force behind comprehension based instruction, and so it can be accurately said that by pointing the instructor to the concept of being mindful, you point their struggling CI train to the way back onto the tracks. To say again: without a strong presence of mindfulness in the CI classroom, acquisition cannot occur.

   Even the term mindfulness reveals itself to be an amazingly accurate term, because we want to to fill our students’ minds with actual language and then, once that is done, leave the rest to the part of the mind that learns languages to do with our input what it does so magically – build fluency in the whole brain.

   By our students being aware of how they learn, they learn. Ours is not a results-oriented pedagogy, thus our complete rejection of competitive exams in assessing gains. Ours is a process-oriented pedagogy. We don’t try to measure what was learned because we can’t, because all of it is done unconsciously. Thus jGR works for us, whereas assessing and measuring gains numerically in the old way by comparing kids (competition) doesn’t work for us.

   One need not think much to compete – one need merely crush mindlessly. If one is to rise above the urge to compete and crush, one must be mindful. Thus we teach our students to work together, not against each other. We see these changes occurring in the world at large. We are privileged to be part of this bigger-than-we-think current change from intellectual process to intuition, to mindfulness.

   It is not so much our students being aware of what they learn – again, that is far too complex for the conscious mind to even handle – but their being aware of how they learn. This is what we must do to be successful in CI instruction, and that requires mindfulness. This thread started about two years ago. You and your jGR were a part of it. We were even then connecting their mindfulness to their grades, and it’s not just you and me and Robert now – there are a lot of us using that rubric now and it is helping them.

   Any work we do here on this topic, since none is being done anywhere else in the TPRS world that I know of, will be gravy. This is another area we can just keep exploring around in.

   There is one book that works in this direction that I have used now for almost four decades. The current edition is:

   Engaging All by Creating High School Learning Communities, Jean Gibbs and Teri Ushijima, Center Source Systems, ISBN 978-0-932762-60-3, 2008. Jen I can send you my copy plus an earlier edition that is totally tattered with age and use (like me d’ailleurs). They may be helpful. If you want them send me your regular mail address and I will send them to you. I am starting to unload the few books I have left since I won’t need them anymore.

   We also have our self-reflection rubrics addressing metacognition from a year ago that connect to this topic:

   https://benslavic.com/Posters/metacognition-poster.pdf
   https://benslavic.com/Posters/student-reflection-checklist.pdf
   https://benslavic.com/Posters/teacher-reflection-checklist.pdf

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2. Laurie

   May 11, 2014 at 1:54 pm

   Many years ago in Vermont, Brian Barabe outlined his insights on the parallels between yoga and TPRS. He said many wonderful things, but the one that has stuck with me all these years is this: ‘You are where you are supposed to be.” He said that once we accepted this, everything could come into focus.

   His point was that every moment was a learning moment and a gift. Even if the reality was that where we are is NOT where we should stay, there was a power in the giving in to the moment and working with where it takes us.

   with love,
   Laurie

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