Does mindfulness really work? Can it help your students?

Amy Malloy
Amy Malloy
A young girl meditating outside in a green space

What is mindfulness?

The term mindfulness refers to a state of awareness. This is arrived at by paying conscious attention to the present moment and observing it without judgment, with curiosity and compassion.

It is often confused with meditation, but really they¡¯re not the same thing at all. Meditating and focusing on the breath is just one of the ways we can consciously pay attention and become more aware of ourselves and the present moment.?

You might be conscious that mindfulness has over the last decade. As with anything trendy, it can be easy to build preconceptions and dismiss it before trying it yourself. So let¡¯s break it down together and start with the basics.

Why is mindfulness important?

Have you ever been driving somewhere in the car and noticed that you¡¯ve arrived at your destination without really noticing the journey at all? All your thoughts on the way were elsewhere.

This is called being on automatic pilot. It¡¯s a symptom of our mind and body¡¯s brilliant way of turning our everyday processes into a routine. It means we don¡¯t need to think about it every time we need our body to move, speak or function.

Just as the scenery can pass us by on a journey, so too can our thoughts and reactions to the things happening around us. They happen in our minds and bodies without us noticing. Our conscious mind is focused on something in the future, the past, or in our imaginations instead.

Being on automatic pilot is often very helpful. But it also comes with a significant downside. Without us even realizing, negative thought cycles can build up under the surface. They can make us feel stressed and anxious.

When this happens our minds conclude that there is a threat and sounds the alarm. This stress , ability to process new information, and ability to learn.

This is where mindfulness comes in.

Mindfulness helps us catch these in their tracks, allowing us to consciously notice negative thoughts. Rather than panicking, we become aware of how we are feeling ¨C and why. We can therefore shift our relationship with our thoughts and emotions so that they don¡¯t seem so challenging anymore.

In a school setting, this can help students regulate the stress surrounding exam pressure. Students can also learn to sit more comfortably with the impermanent emotions of adolescence, which seemed all-consuming and everlasting at the time.

What can our students learn from mindfulness?

Over the past decade, neuroscientific research has discovered that our brains are immensely malleable. Every interaction we have in our day-to-day lives builds connections that affect how our brains and thoughts function. Just like building muscle through exercise, our brain forms new matter in the areas we use most.

In short, we can either continue to cement the habits we¡¯ve already formed or build brain matter in areas that encourage healthier, more positive functioning.

Studies have demonstrated in many contexts that the brains of those who regularly practice mindfulness use different pathways to those who don¡¯t: pathways which allow self-regulation of adrenaline and the stress responses and make it easier to experience external events without the accompanying narrative of critical thought.

Even ten minutes of practicing mindful awareness a day has been . Mindfulness has also been shown to improve concentration and focus, resilience, emotional regulation and sleep quality in children, teens and adults alike.

How can we begin to practice mindfulness?

We start by learning to focus attention on a physical anchor. This may be focusing on the body, the breath, or even using the senses to observe sounds, sights, tastes, touch etc. in our external environment. We then build the length of time we can focus, and grow accustomed to the mind wandering and returning to the point of focus.

Then we learn to be curious about what we notice in the present moment and that we can observe without judging or forming an opinion.

In time, it can be possible to learn to observe our relationship with the thoughts that come in and out of our minds. We can then find ways to accept difficult feelings and allow them to pass over without panicking or instinctively reacting.

Want to learn more about mindfulness and wellbeing? Check out our blog posts on the subject here.?

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  • A young woman sat in a library with headphones around her neck reading a book

    Does progress in English slow as you get more advanced?

    By Ian Wood
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Why does progression seem to slow down as an English learner moves from beginner to more advanced skills?

    The journey of learning English

    When presenting at ELT conferences, I often ask the audience ¨C typically teachers and school administrators ¨C ¡°When you left home today, to start your journey here, did you know where you were going?¡± The audience invariably responds with a laugh and says yes, of course. I then ask, ¡°Did you know roughly when you would arrive at your destination?¡± Again the answer is, of course, yes. ¡°But what about your students on their English learning journey? Can they say the same?¡± At this point, the laughter stops.

    All too often English learners find themselves without a clear picture of the journey they are embarking on and the steps they will need to take to achieve their goals. We all share a fundamental need for orientation, and in a world of mobile phone GPS we take it for granted. Questions such as: Where am I? Where am I going? When will I get there? are answered instantly at the touch of a screen. If you¡¯re driving along a motorway, you get a mileage sign every three miles.

    When they stop appearing regularly we soon feel uneasy. How often do English language learners see mileage signs counting down to their learning goal? Do they even have a specific goal?

    Am I there yet?

    The key thing about GPS is that it¡¯s very precise. You can see your start point, where you are heading and tell, to the mile or kilometer, how long your journey will be. You can also get an estimated time of arrival to the minute. As Mike Mayor mentioned in his post about what it means to be fluent, the same can¡¯t be said for understanding and measuring English proficiency. For several decades, the ELL industry got by with the terms ¡®beginner¡¯, ¡®elementary¡¯, ¡®pre-intermediate¡¯ and ¡®advanced¡¯ ¨C even though there was no definition of what they meant, where they started and where they ended.

    The CEFR has become widely accepted as a measure of English proficiency, bringing an element of shared understanding of what it means to be at a particular level in English. However, the wide bands that make up the CEFR can result in a situation where learners start a course of study as B1 and, when they end the course, they are still within the B1 band. That doesn¡¯t necessarily mean that their English skills haven¡¯t improved ¨C they might have developed substantially ¨C but it¡¯s just that the measurement system isn¡¯t granular enough to pick up these improvements in proficiency.

    So here¡¯s the first weakness in our English language GPS and one that¡¯s well on the way to being remedied with the Global Scale of English (GSE). Because the GSE measures proficiency on a 10-90 scale across each of the four skills, students using assessment tools reporting on the GSE are able to see incremental progress in their skills even within a CEFR level. So we have the map for an English language GPS to be able to track location and plot the journey to the end goal.

    ¡®The intermediate plateau¡¯

    When it comes to pinpointing how long it¡¯s going to take to reach that goal, we need to factor in the fact that the amount of effort it takes to improve your English increases as you become more proficient. Although the bands in the CEFR are approximately the same width, the law of diminishing returns means that the better your English is to begin with, the harder it is to make further progress ¨C and the harder it is to feel that progress is being made.

    That¡¯s why many an English language-learning journey gets abandoned on the intermediate plateau. With no sense of progression or a tangible, achievable goal on the horizon, the learner can become disoriented and demoralised.

    To draw another travel analogy, when you climb 100 meters up a mountain at 5,000 meters above sea level the effort required is greater than when you climb 100 meters of gentle slope down in the foothills. It¡¯s exactly the same 100 meter distance, it¡¯s just that those hundred 100 meters require progressively more effort the higher up you are, and the steeper the slope. So, how do we keep learners motivated as they pass through the intermediate plateau?

    Education, effort and motivation

    We have a number of tools available to keep learners on track as they start to experience the law of diminishing returns. We can show every bit of progress they are making using tools that capture incremental improvements in ability. We can also provide new content that challenges the learner in a way that¡¯s realistic.

    Setting unrealistic expectations and promising outcomes that aren¡¯t deliverable is hugely demotivating for the learner. It also has a negative impact on teachers ¨C it¡¯s hard to feel job satisfaction when your students are feeling increasingly frustrated by their apparent lack of progress.

    Big data is providing a growing bank of information. In the long term this will deliver a much more precise estimate of effort required to reach higher levels of proficiency, even down to a recommendation of the hours required to go from A to B and how those hours are best invested. That way, learners and teachers alike would be able to see where they are now, where they want to be and a path to get there. It¡¯s a fully functioning English language learning GPS system, if you like.