Tag: attention
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Homing In
My post-semester sabbatical from blogging lasted a bit longer than I’d anticipated. Nothing bad happened: I simply devoted 100% of my writing efforts to a few manuscripts I wanted to get off of my desktop. There are more–there are always more–but I finished the third yesterday, so I feel caught up enough that I can…
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Doodling & Knitting
Last week, I had a great conversation about class participation with SoTL Scholar Hasina Mohyuddin and my Graduate-Teaching-Fellow partner in teaching the SoTL Scholars Program Andrew Greer (both PhD candidates in the Department of Human & Organizational Development). I also serendipitously asked my students to work together to create a class rubric for assessing participation. …
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Reading Like Bruce Lee
I teach literature. My students read a lot, and I want them to read well—closely, carefully, attentively. I’ve always heard that the best readers were read to when they were young and then read voraciously when they were growing up. This makes great sense to me, but it also suggests that those who don’t fit…
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How It Works, IV
This is the fourth and final post about how mindfulness works, or the documented effects and how they occur. The first was about attention regulation, the second body awareness, the third emotional regulation, and now a different perspective of the self. There are few silver bullets in teaching and learning, but a handful of strategies…
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How It Works, I
My recent posts have been focused on issues of stress, mostly because I’ve seen the effects on my own life and worry about colleagues, students, and friends. Some of you have asked me to clarify how mindfulness works: what it actually does, how that happens, and what it looks like. With these great questions in…
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Being Fully Present in the Classroom
A recent study on students’ laptop use in the classroom has brought a lot of attention to the issue of, well, attention in the classroom. As their title indicates, Sana, Weston, and Cepeda (2013) found that “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers.” In a 45-minute lecture, half the students were…
Nancy L. Chick 