Gen C: Learning & Focus in the age of Coronavirus

In the age of coronavirus, everything has changed. Usually at this time, students would be focusing on testing skills. Now they are needing to cultivate many new habits, some good, some not so good. How do we support them to learn in a relaxed way? How do we help them to bypass self-consciousness and drop into their authenticity and creativity? Join Amy Edelstein for insight and experiential tools to develop relaxed and alert focus. For more, visit www.InnerStrength.Education

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Welcome to the conscious classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive, and enriching learning. I'm your host Amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking the themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your joy and fulfilment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share.

Let's get on with this next episode.

Welcome to the conscious classroom. We're gonna speak about sharpening focus. This is a subject that makes sense when we're talking about preparing for testing and during. The era that we're living in the coronavirus era. I don't know if they're, they're starting to call the students from this generation C because of the great impact that the coronavirus is having on all of our lives and especially on learning for students, their whole learning experience, the classroom experience, the peer experience is completely changing and many.

Parents and teachers and educators like myself were encouraging students to not spend time online, but to spend time in real engaged interactions with their peers, their teachers, their mentors, their parents, with their families, with each other. And now they're only able to do that for the most part online, their learning is online, not through a direct relationship.

their preparations are online. They're educational markers of testing or study. I've all completely changed. And students who need young people need structure, they need freedom, but they also need structure. They thrive when boundaries are clear and well described and well defined. They know where they're going.

And then within that, they have the freedom to explore and create and innovate and choose. But those boundaries, those handrails, those guardrails are things that they need. They need to be able to feel like they're in a safe world and they're in a world that, is guiding them towards growth and accom.

So we're in very upended times and we're only gonna see as the decades go on. How are students fare? What kind of effect is this is gonna have? And it's my intention, as well as my hope to provide students with a depth of familiarity, with all kinds of, self-care contemplative. Integrative, tools that they'll be able to use in their own life from this year and moving forward, if there was it's ever a time for integrative supports, body, mind, connection wellbeing, this is the time.

This is the time to share these, these ways of thinking these perspectives and these, Tools, these, these, habits with students and build them into their lives and let this inner contemplation and this inner support provide structure for them in the way that their outer support has been upended.

I'm sure many students are happy that the standardized tests and the SATs are postponed because they create a tremendous amount of stress, but no testing can also leave them unsure of where they stand, and how they're gonna know how well they're doing, what colleges to apply to. If they can apply to colleges.

How they're gonna be accepted, how they're gonna be judged, what they need to study for. I received an email, very much critical of testing and standardized testing and was surprised that I was doing a webinar about, sharpening focus about testing. Now I'm not a huge fan of large-scale standardized tests, but they are, they are part of our education world at this point.

And whether students take these tests or do more independent study, they're still going to need to develop the skills, to be able to relax and think clearly and drop into their authentic understanding and knowledge and curiosity, as best as they can. So I believe that these. Tools and ways of thinking are equally important, whether they're gonna be taking tests or whether they're not gonna be taking tests, this year or in the future, we want to enable our students to develop that sense of their own trusting their understanding.

And trusting their way of relating to knowledge so that they gain stability from what they've learned, what they're interested in, what they've internalized, and then the questions that they may have about a subject matter too often. The way that we expect students to engage with information is by writing by memorization rather than by learning to digest, and then internalizing the information that they're learning so that it enriches them as beings, as young people, and especially with teenagers as young adults.

This way of being able to access one's information one's understanding is what's gonna enable students to exceed their expectations on testing. And it's also, what's gonna enable them to feel that sense of accomplishment and pride to have responded with the fullness of the. When we're looking at focus and focus on demand, what you see in students is you usually see they're on some kind of continuum with the negative extremes being low energy.

Resignation and dullness and hyperactivity, high strung over tense, performance anxiety. And I wanna unpack those two extremes a little bit before we talk about what mindful awareness allows you to do and what I've seen happen. The miracle stories I've seen happen with students. And the more they practised and the more they reach into themselves to use the mindfulness exercises and the contextual thinking exercises that they've discovered and practised really under times of stress.

And when you see the results, it's moving and exciting and life-changing for students. But let's look at the two extremes first. So you have students who, when they're faced with needing to perform or pull out information on demand in a testing environment, in a project presentation, even in need to just stand up in front of a class and deliver, there are those students who will.

Decide that they have failed before they start. And what you'll see in them is you'll see in their body language itself, you'll see a resignation. You'll see the kind of curl back in themselves. You'll see them fall back into a state of one. Think it was relaxation at first, cuz they seem their muscles seem so soft.

They seem so, at ease or not tense, not nervous, but really what they're, what they've fallen into is not a sense of relaxation. Because this is a moment that demands, focus and alertness. What they'll have fallen back into is the state of, low energy futility. So the. Positives that they may gain from this low energy of not, not over clamping down on themselves so that they're not so wound up that they can't think, but they'll have the opposite.

They'll have such resignation, such low energy, such, fatigue set in that their minds go dull. There, the energy pumping to their brains, slows down. That they're really in a state of hypo arousal, where they're, they're fallen into, a sense of futility. You see it on their face, you'll see there, the muscles of their face lose, lose,  that slack, that tightness.

So they lose their tone and there's a slackness in the muscles. You'll see it in a, you know, a pallet, complexion colour. You'll see them just their eyes will be dull. And that state of resignation, whether it's subtle or more pronounced is not gonna help them do their best. It's a, it's a state that is,  it, it makes them dull to their capacity, to their potential, to their love of subject matter.

And when you see your students who are used to responding that way, preparing themselves for the worst by opting out before it happens, you'll want to work with them over time before those high-pressure situations to get them to discover this point relaxation. That is rooted in self-confidence and inner strength.

So that inner strength, that inner backbone, that sense of self, that sense of solid ground, those muscles of the inner self, that confidence that they have in themselves, that is very important.

So those are, that's the one extreme. The other extreme that we see in students is that we see them get into this hyped state and many overachievers, very competitive students, and students with a lot of family pressure. Often first-generation college students can get very, very high, strong. Around testing or those environments where they need to focus.

And when they get high, strong in that way, what happens in terms of the physical body language is you see the opposite. You see their muscles get very, very tight. Their, complexion can be,  red, their breath can be fast. They can have a slight sweat, a sheen on their face and their eyes can be over.

And when you see that in the student, what you're, what's going on internally is that they're so pumped up. They're so panicked about what they're going to respond to. That they'll be pulling from what's at the surface of their minds. They're what they've been able to memorize. What's there in their short-term recall you won't be pulling on the same depth of authenticity, originality, and complexity of

thinking those students who get very hyped up and high strung, they can try. They often try to rope their friends into getting equally high-strung. There becomes, I'm sure you've seen it in a classroom. Be there becomes this shared experience where everyone gets riled up over tests and they all think that they're, they're gonna do their best because they're pumping themselves up.

And in a way that gets them over high strung. This again is not, it's not the this, this beautiful place between both opposites that we can help students access. Through, teaching them mind, different mind mindfulness practices, the beautiful place where we want students to go to is we want them to be able to, uh, have the sense of wherewithal and confidence and, the knowledge of exercises and practices that will bring them into this state where they're very alert.

They're very focused. They're not distracted by their mind with, any messages that are coming their way. And they're also not, falling into a state of apathy or lethargy that state of relaxed focus gives them. It's like the experience of flow. But it's, it's not as serendipitous. They can, they can practice their way into this state of relaxed focus.

And what they discover in this place of relaxed focus is they discover,  a quality of self where they feel surprisingly a lack of self conscious. They feel like they are invincible because they're just standing in what they know. They're not daunted by what they don't know. They're not frightened by a curve ball that might come their way.

They're standing in what they know, and they're willing to work with that and express themselves, take risks with their understanding and their ingenuity and their unique ideas while staying on topic. That free expression and free thinking come from groundedness. It's not free-thinking that goes off-topic, and that is distracted and random.

It's free-thinking that enables them to pull out, connections and expressions and ways of articulating that is highly original. And, unique to their understanding of what happens when students access it. This is when they come out of a situation where they've had to present or they've, been under pressure too, Respond to an oral exam or a te or a written test.

They know they've done their best. They know that what they've articulated has been truly their knowledge and that gives them confidence. And assured that if they don't do as well as they need to, to meet certain benchmarks, they can build on what they've learned and move forward.

Because what they've established is solid ground. When they're in that hyper state of too tight focus and too wound up, they're not on solid ground. And if they discover that they need to learn more and do more, they feel like they don't have any more room to grow because they've been so kind of deeply clenched that there's just no more room to grow.

What you need is you need like relaxation, so you can open up and allow more in more knowledge, more learning, more information, and more complexity. When very hyper students don't do well, they often feel incredibly defeated. They feel like there's just not one more cell in their brains that can open up because they've closed off access.

And for the students who go dull. Lethargic. They feel like they can't do better because they have no juice. They have no energy. They have no, they have nothing in them. That's reaching forward. This relaxed state of authenticity that comes from mindfulness practice and contemplative thinking and self-care, and self-love gives students that solid ground.

Which has a lot of nutrients and a lot of self-support where they can grow from, it's quite extraordinary. There's one student who I had, who was in a very challenging, international baccalaureate program. And I had him both his junior year and his senior year. He was a Latino and was aspiring to go to college.

He would be the first in his family to go to college. And he had a lot of support at home, but he was striving for a professional degree where he was really on his own. And he had a tremendous amount of insecurity. He was, he was quiet. And shy, you know, well-liked by his peers, but in a classroom of 32 people, he would rarely raise his hand, but he did all the work.

And with the mindfulness exercises, he practised diligently. He's also a good athlete and often used the,  tools to help him with sports events. So it was the end of the year. And for English international baccalaureate, English, I guess it must have been English four. They have to do oral exams with and present and respond to questions from three different teachers.

And this was on Shakespeare. He told me after his exams, he was so nervous. He said he stood outside the door. Where he was waiting for the previous student, to leave. And it was his turn. And he said he was shaking and sweating so much. He felt like he was gonna be sick and he wouldn't be able to go into the room.

He said his knees were weak and he, you know, he, he literally could feel the shaking all through his body. So what he did first is he did some mindful breathing. He felt his feet on the floor. He followed his breath going in and his breath going out. He allowed the tension in himself to settle down. He allowed all the flutter airiness to just calm down.

As he just watched the rhythm of his breath going in and the rhythm of his breath going out, he gained some composure, but he was still dead nervous. He had a few more minutes. And before he went in, he started practising some love and kindness. He was sending himself good wishes and that act of sending himself good wishes reminded him of all the times that he had done that practice in class and at home.

And he kept telling himself, you've got this, you know, you've got this and he. Said he, when something happened when he was sending himself the good wishes that he felt like all of a sudden, he kind of came into his body that he let go of. The voice in his head that was telling him that he's not good enough, that he'll never make it, that he doesn't have any, he shouldn't be there in the first place that it was a mistake all these years that he's been doing this program and that he doesn't belong.

He's not smart. Like the other kids that voice in his head just kind of switched and he was just himself. And he said, when he was doing the love and kindness, he just felt like he was there and he was waiting and he was gonna go in and he was going to be himself. So he walked in and he answered all the questions and he felt.

Passionate excited. Sometimes he didn't know. Sometimes he didn't know. He was able to think on the spot and creatively develop his answers responses. And when he left, he didn't know what he had done, but he felt really happy. He felt really like himself, the teacher. Told me independently when I saw her the following week, without me telling her that he had told me about his experience.

She said that in her 25 years of teaching and testing, she had never seen a student respond with such confidence, authenticity, and creativity. She said his level of engagement was several years beyond his maturity. He was a senior in high school. She said it was like a junior in college response in terms of complexity and authenticity and integration and analysis of the com complex,, characters and character development.

That of course is. Part of Shakespearean work and she had tears in her eyes. She said I'd really, I've never seen anything like it. And then I told her what he told me about how he had done his mindfulness practices and that he dropped into himself. And she said, that's exactly it, it was, he was more himself than I've ever seen him.

He was exactly himself, but much more. So., I was able to see him, after his first year of college and after his second year of college and he was continuing to develop, his mindfulness practice. He was also working with other types of, different motivational books that inspired him. And he was in business school and he was doing well.

He wasn't acing everything, but he was handling the challenges of going to college, still living at home, making the shift. And he said it was hard, but he was having the time of his life because he felt like he was opening up from the inside out. He felt like he was. Opening, himself to a way of learning that was giving him so much joy and confidence and satisfaction.

He attributed that shift to the mindfulness, to the short practices that we did in class using breath, to calm. To use awareness and self-knowledge to realize that he was out of his depth, that he was getting himself tied up in knots, that he was not going to, live from the best of his ability that he was,  in a situation where he was gonna be listening to those undermining voices in his head that said that he didn't belong there.

And wasn't good. So his self-knowledge through the various social-emotional practices, through the various contemplative practices, through contextual thinking, he was able to see, of course, I feel this way. I've always felt this way. This is a high-pressure situation, but I can do something about it. It's not the end of the story for me.

What mindfulness practice gives teenagers is a sense that they can do something about the feelings they have. During this time of coronavirus have a sense of choice and optimism and positivity, in the sense that we can do something about the challenges that we have tools in our own hands to help us calm.

So we don't have to be, pulled in different directions based on the news we hear, or the environment around. That we can support ourselves. We can give ourselves the self-care and the self-love that's needed to allow ourselves to live life at its fullest, whether it's in, you know, an incredibly upended time like now, or whether it's, you know, when things are going very smoothly and everything's, flowing in ours.

Mindful awareness is there regardless of the external situations. So when it comes to sharpening focus, the approach that I have for the students is to use the quality of their attention to using their mindfulness practice. To let them drop into themselves. And from that sense of stability and groundedness and interest, then they engage with whatever they need to engage with.

So that's how with inner strength, that's how we work with the students. Well, this student I told you about, he was one, a very moving example, and I feel a lot of pride and affection for him, but I've seen it in many different ways. And then when you see students drop into themselves and, and it's almost like their, their whole voice and their being sits back.

And at the same time they sit back, they stand up tall and they have that sense of I'm here. I'm focused. I'm ready to do what's in front of me. I have something to say, I have something to give and I'm gonna give it all. I'm not gonna hold back out of fear. I'm not gonna second guess myself. I'm not gonna try to think about what I learned in the test, or taking a seminar.

I'm gonna pull from the best of myself and my strength. And that's what I'm gonna give. I've lived. Maybe it's 15 years, 16 years, or 17 years. Not that long for many of us, but. You know, I'm gonna bring the total of all of what I've learned and how I've learned. That's what's gonna give me that sharpness of focus.

That's what's gonna give me the flexibility of thinking. That's what's gonna give me the creativity to engage. It's very easy to underestimate the power of contemplative tools. It's very easy to assume they're only there for stress or they're only there for sleep, or they're only there for, compassion.

But what we see is that they are the foundational tools for self-development, foundational tools for being this for, for self-care. Ultimately the realization of our higher human potentials, because if a student can drop into themselves and access that kind of curiosity of thinking and that kind of freedom of expression and that lack of second-guessing that lack of under that undermining voice, not try to get it right, but try to give what they know.

That's where incredibly innovative thinking is gonna come from. That's where they are going to be able to put their attention to whatever they're doing, whether it's in a human, a social services context, a technology context, an engineering context or a relational context, and bring the best of themselves.

When we see a generation of students who can bring the best of themselves in this kind of authentic way, we are arming and empowering our society to make huge leaps and changes for the better, because we'll be accessing that inner drive. And that inner drive is also a drive towards good.

You'll see students, lose a, a negative competitive streak where they wanna put others down. You'll see students, be able to extend a helping hand to others because they're not gonna lose by doing that. They have resources to give, they have space and their awareness to care. They're not just focused on themselves.

What are the qualities that we want to bring into our cultures? We move forward.

Let's do a short practice to give you a sense of how to work with your students. And we'll run through a couple of different practices in one. The session is just to show you how flexible you can be with the mindfulness guides and how you can work with your students. And we'll do a five-minute practice to finish.

So let yourself, the best way to learn is, is to do the practice yourself. So just follow along, let yourself come into a comfortable seated position. Allow yourself to rise tall in your seat while you feel the rootedness and solidity beneath you

and all sound a bell, which you can use to focus your attention and let your attention practice that. Sharpened focus. So really put your attention on the bell and the sound of the bell. Noticing all the nuance you can, the texture, the tone, the waves, and letting your attention be free of distraction.

And as the sound of the bell fades, allow your attention to be very soft and easy, but also very alert. And imagine that you were listening for a sound far away. Almost like you were listening to sounds at the edges of the horizon. So you're not strained. You're just as still and quiet and relaxed as you can be with your attention focused on as if you could hear sounds that are far, far away.

As you bring your attention back, notice your body and how it feels as you practice listening.

And now bring awareness into your whole

body, noticing any sensations from head to foot, allowing your attention to sweeping from the top of your body. Down to your toes, keeping that relaxed and alert, focus without strain. Just simply notice what's there as you let your attention sweep through your body without distraction. And

when you come to your toes, Start again. We'll do this three times. If you notice tingling or tightness or pressure, just keep your attention moving. We're just scanning to see what's there. It's like when you put a piece of paper in a scanner and you watch the light go through it, doesn't stop anywhere in particular on the page.

It scans through the whole evenly, just noticing what's there

without judgment.

And now this third time that we'll scan through our body. This time take a deep inhalation and exhale. And as you scan through your body, imagine where you were this time. Sending breath, sending freshly oxygenated air through your body from your head down to your feet. Evenly and slowly imagining that you were oxygenating your whole body with freshly oxygenated air from the top of your body down to your feet.

And

now notice the difference between scanning your body and seeing what's there and using your breath. To oxygenate your body from head to foot. See if you felt any more energy,

vitality,

wellness, and relaxation. And when you hear the bell, we can finish

this way of using the breath to relax. The body is something that you can teach your students to do, helping them. Really, feel a sense of agency and a sense of stability and a sense that they can focus their minds without needing anything else. Starting with sound can be easier, especially if a student is anxious.

So letting them pay attention to sounds, they can't hear that are far away, can build, a sense of relaxation and focus,  even tranquillity and then having them notice what's happening in the body, head to foot without trying to, resolve. Tension or fear or, Flute, but just noticing, and then using the breath, using the breath to wash through the body, doing it several times, oxygenating the body down, breathing in, oxygenating the body down.

So there, they're aware of what's happening in the body. They're aware of how they're feeling, and then they're able to attend to themselves. They're able to. Nourish themselves using their breath. Of course, we're always breathing and our blood is always pumping oxygen to our cells. But when we do this, simple visualization, we have the sense of agency and we have the sense of self-support.

We have the sense that we. Can calm our bodies. We can nourish our bodies without trying to make anything go away. We're not trying to force the stomach to stop fluttering. We're not trying to force the heart to beat more slowly. We're not trying to force the palms to stop sweating. Or if the student is very passive, we're not trying to force the body awake.

Yes. Sometimes ache, you know, sometimes kids will pinch themselves hard or push their nails into their hands to feel something when they get into that passive state. So we're not trying to force the body. We're just simply loving the body through this oxygenation, this process of oxygenating the brain, sending the breath all through the body and you'll find that it, it'll, it can give students that sense that they have something in their hands.

They can do something about how they feel. And it's easy. They don't have to be anywhere. They can be standing outside of a testing classroom, waiting to go in. They could be at home, taking a test online, teaching your students, or your children, and how to work these tools. It doesn't take much. You, you can, introduce.

Without pressure, introduce it as a fun activity, and introduce it under low-pressure situations. Introduce it just as a habit-forming activity to do before you go online for a class after you finish being online before you move to your next event, X event, give them a way to work with the body, to scan the body using sound and using breath.

Fantastic. So thank you very much. Always great to speak about how to better support our students and our entire culture with mindful awareness, self-knowledge, and this relaxed and caring, an easeful approach to learning. And learning is not just in school. We're, we're learning all the time. We're learning about ourselves and we're learning about our interaction with the world around us.

This, all these tools apply to all of us and we can certainly use them ourselves. So I encourage you as well to experiment with this one. If you watch the news and you feel riled up, riled up practice, this focused attention. On the self on the body and this type of self-care using breath and see what difference it makes.

We all need to strengthen our immune systems. We can strengthen our immune systems by lowering stress by lowering reactivity and by self-knowledge, by understanding what we're responding to and how we're responding to it. Thank you very much and have been well, stay well, stay healthy, wash your hands, have a dance party at home, and we will get through to the other side.

And when we get through to the other side, let's all have developed, much better habits of self-love self-care and support for our younger people.

Thank you for listening to the conscious classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on inner strength, and foundation.net for links and more information. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on see you next time.