Earlier this week I had a chance to work with year 7 students at a school in Selby. The wonderful folk at nybep had arranged for me to deliver workshops on two themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). Both themes elicited some interesting and unexpected reactions from students and I will cover them in separate blog-posts.
Delivering the self-awareness session was a challenge simply because these students had never been in a situation before where they had to reflect on their physical/emotional state and that too in the presence of their peers. Whilst I was glad that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the various tasks, it was quite a challenge to keep them engaged. And to be honest, when the entire class had to work as a group I was certain the session would descend into chaos. Fortunately my little repertoire of breath-games kept them interested.
Going by the usual benchmarks it seemed that the session hadn’t been all that effective. It was only when we sat down for a question answer session did I get a sense of the impact the various activities had made.
No one laughed when some students admitted to crying when they are upset. There was a moment of shared empathy.
Quite spontaneously, students began to mention incidents/situations which had upset them in the past. They were surprisingly forthright. No one passed a judgement when someone admitted to hitting a friend, nor did anyone laugh when a few said they cry when they are upset. There was a moment of shared empathy. This was followed by questions such as – why do I fight with my best friend, what do I do when I feel angry, and how do I control myself when someone wants to start a fight with me? When asked what they usually do I was dismayed to hear that amongst other things they had been advised to punch pillows to calm down. Quite unsurprisingly many of them admitted that this didn’t make them feel any better and ended up making them feel confused and upset.
Pillows are only meant for sleeping and fun stuff like jumping when no one’s looking! So we tried out some more breath-games to see how easy it is to control the mind and body. By this time the students were more receptive and occasionally someone would shout ‘It works!’ Mind you, there were a few who weren’t quite convinced. At this point, the class-teacher and nybep representative chipped in and encouraged them to keep trying.
In conclusion, I am happy with the way things went. I am also encouraged by the class-teacher’s reaction. She was very surprised (and quite pleased) at how the students opened up and shared their experiences in a way they had never done before. This suggests that the workshops can also facilitate a more meaningful dialogue between students and with their teachers.
At a personal level, this experience shows that I need to put a bit more effort into making the workshop more accessible, especially to those who have never done something like this before. Needless to say, I can hardly wait to work with another batch of students and try out some new ideas in the process.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 11:28 pm and is filed under commentary.
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Pillows are for sleeping…
Earlier this week I had a chance to work with year 7 students at a school in Selby. The wonderful folk at nybep had arranged for me to deliver workshops on two themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). Both themes elicited some interesting and unexpected reactions from students and I will cover them in separate blog-posts.
Delivering the self-awareness session was a challenge simply because these students had never been in a situation before where they had to reflect on their physical/emotional state and that too in the presence of their peers. Whilst I was glad that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the various tasks, it was quite a challenge to keep them engaged. And to be honest, when the entire class had to work as a group I was certain the session would descend into chaos. Fortunately my little repertoire of breath-games kept them interested.
Going by the usual benchmarks it seemed that the session hadn’t been all that effective. It was only when we sat down for a question answer session did I get a sense of the impact the various activities had made.
Quite spontaneously, students began to mention incidents/situations which had upset them in the past. They were surprisingly forthright. No one passed a judgement when someone admitted to hitting a friend, nor did anyone laugh when a few said they cry when they are upset. There was a moment of shared empathy. This was followed by questions such as – why do I fight with my best friend, what do I do when I feel angry, and how do I control myself when someone wants to start a fight with me? When asked what they usually do I was dismayed to hear that amongst other things they had been advised to punch pillows to calm down. Quite unsurprisingly many of them admitted that this didn’t make them feel any better and ended up making them feel confused and upset.
Pillows are only meant for sleeping and fun stuff like jumping when no one’s looking! So we tried out some more breath-games to see how easy it is to control the mind and body. By this time the students were more receptive and occasionally someone would shout ‘It works!’ Mind you, there were a few who weren’t quite convinced. At this point, the class-teacher and nybep representative chipped in and encouraged them to keep trying.
In conclusion, I am happy with the way things went. I am also encouraged by the class-teacher’s reaction. She was very surprised (and quite pleased) at how the students opened up and shared their experiences in a way they had never done before. This suggests that the workshops can also facilitate a more meaningful dialogue between students and with their teachers.
At a personal level, this experience shows that I need to put a bit more effort into making the workshop more accessible, especially to those who have never done something like this before. Needless to say, I can hardly wait to work with another batch of students and try out some new ideas in the process.
Tags: nybep, SEAL, self-awareness
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 11:28 pm and is filed under commentary. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.