IT'S THE FINAL COUNT DOWN!!!!

Foley and Willis both make some very good points about mindfulness within the classroom.

I find Foley's concept of Pastoral Care particularly relevant within the classroom environment. I am reminded of an incident in my gr.9 Accounting class where a learner was actually expelled for asking the teacher (a VERY old school unmarried woman close to, if not past retirement age) to show him a little compassion (granted he did shout at her).

A teacher is supposed to nurture the well-being of their learners in order to create an environment of open communication in which the concerns and worries of these learners can be heard. Most importantly, a teacher needs to have EMPATHY and UNDERSTANDING (yes we're talking to you maám).

Within my own classroom, I would like to make use of a birthday calendar of sorts, not those weird ones that we had in primary school where each month was a balloon, but a proper "grown up" calendar. I think that doing this would promote pro-social bonding in my classroom.

I would also make it a priority to aid learners in their academics by prioritizing learning objectives by highlighting key areas and by making sure that learners are actively engaged in the learning process in a time efficient way, before providing meaningful feedback.

Positive home and school relationships are obviously highly important. The idea of a whatsapp group was brought up in class yesterday, and I think that it's an awesome idea for enabling communication between school and home.

Willis has some great ideas for keeping order in an otherwise chaotic class (something which I think the people presenting the last glaskas lesson yesterday may have appreciated). By assigning particular desks or tasks to her learners, she helped establish participation. She was able to take an otherwise mundane task and transform  it into an exercise of mindful movement and peer cooperation.

I would like to think that I could incorporate some of these ideas into my own classroom one day, but right now it's definitely time for breakfast :)