Mary+Berle

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I'm enjoying The Power of Mindful Learning very much... great timing to read this as the frenzy of the school year subside and we enter that summer space where mindfulness is more accessible. What would it take to keep that grounded, calm, mindful, headspace all day long in school?

July 1 Have read the first three chapters only. Some what has stood out for me:

Langer's characteristics of a mindful approach:

continuous creation of new categories openness to new information implicit awareness of more than one perspective

The value of uncertainty. This is the joy is for me in teaching... in recent math experiments in my classroom as students make claims and test them across classes of numbers, and also analyzing different versions of fairy tales. (Patty and I worked on some of this together.) And chucking out our social studies text as gospel to review multiple sources... This work of recognizing and becoming comfortable with uncertainty seems absolutely central to supporting student thinking and learning and possibility.

the value of rebelliousness

Constant novelty Like the idea, but am left wondering what constant novelty would actually look like in school. Need images. Would love to talk about this. See my sons getting better at unicycling every day... as they create novel situations.. constantly and naturally for themselves... and then acquire the next that I hadn't thought of....

Loved the research on asking people to draw distinctions, and how previously undesirable activities became palatable/desirable in the context of this invitation.

Thinking about all my students who are distracted easily... it does seem like the key is to become distracted with the material. The few holdouts who can't seem to distract away from the door closing, the voice in the hall... still present a tremendous challenge. Will be thinking about this.