Chapter 10- Mindful Teaching, Leadership, and Reflection Practices

Feeling confident and excelling personally or professionally may come off as a challenge for educators and students who do not have stress-reducing skills to fall back on. Negative academic or professional stress could then have effects on many aspects of an individual’s life, such as mental health, substance use, sleep, physical health, lackluster achievement in academics and/or personal success, and even school dropout or professional burnout (Proctor, Guttman-Lapin, & Kendrick-Dunn, 2020). How can we engage our students in pedagogical practices focused on how to support mindfulness-based learning, leadership strategies, and reflection practices within higher education settings? How can educators integrate social, emotional, and academic development and learning in courses? How can instructors engage in mindful teaching, leading, and reflecting in our classes? The primary objective of this chapter is to empower educational leaders with tools, strategies, and skills to facilitate systemic change in a positive, healthy, and sustainable way through the integration of mindfulness-based teaching, leadership, and reflection practices

Habits of Mind: Designing Courses for Student Success

Although content knowledge remains at the heart of college teaching and learning, forward-thinking instructors recognize that we must also provide 21st-century college students with transferable skills (sometimes called portable intellectual abilities) to prepare them for their futures (Vazquez, 2020; Ritchhart, 2015; Venezia & Jaeger, 2013; Hazard, 2012). To “grow their capacity as efficacious thinkers to navigate and thrive in the face of unprecedented change” (Costa et al., 2023), students must learn and improve important study skills and academic dispositions throughout their educational careers. If we do not focus on skills-building in college courses, students will not be prepared for the challenges that await them after they leave institutions of higher education. If students are not prepared for these postsecondary education challenges, then it is fair to say that college faculty have failed them

Power Tools: Start Students Strong This Semester With Easy-to-Apply Learning Activities

How many of your students cram the night before an exam? How much of your content sticks with your students beyond your class? One study found that while students predicted they\u27d remember 71% of a passage after re-reading it three times, students only remembered 51% one week later (Agarwal et al., 2008). Successful students use power tools to challenge and retain learning. During an ETE Learning Circle, faculty read Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. Four powerful strategies based on the science of learning were introduced: retrieval practices, spaced practice, interleaving, and feedback-driven metacognition. This workshop will introduce these power tools, what they are, why they work, and how students can use them to be successful. Implementation examples that support online, hybrid, or face-to-face modalities will be shared so attendees can jumpstart retention and learning in their course(s) this semester. Attendees will leave with at least one power-up they can implement in their Fall course to support either undergraduate or graduate-level students. Agarwal, P.K., Karpicke, J.D., Kang, S.H. K., et al. (2008). Examining the testing effect with open- and closed- book tests. Applied Cognitive Psychology 22:861-876

Hitting Pause: Strategies for Effective Classroom Delivery

In this workshop, we explore a teaching strategy of Hitting Pause during classroom instruction. Hitting pause is a method of incorporating student introspection, contemplation and scrutiny of educational material during a class. As a learning circle we explore these methods and share our experiences and insights with fellow educators. Our goal is threefold. First, we will introduce the idea of breaking a traditional classes with pauses and present the scientific evidence supporting the usefulness of this strategy for student self-reflection. Second, we will share pausing strategies that we have gleaned from the book Hitting Pause by Gail Taylor Rice, as well as from our own experiences in diverse classroom environments, including hybrid, online, Asynchronous session online, and face-to-face. Finally, we will implement several pauses into our presentation to demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies in a practical way. Our hope is that our audience will be able to leave our workshop with a better understanding of how pausing a class can enhance classroom delivery and improve student learning outcomes