Mindfulness in the classroom: Autopilot and paying attention

Amy Malloy
Amy Malloy
students sat at desks looking at their workbooks

The challenge: the lure of automatic pilot

Have you ever got to the bottom of the page in your favorite book and then realized you have no idea what you just read? This is due to being in a semi-conscious mental state called 'automatic pilot'. In automatic pilot mode, we are only partially aware of what we are doing and responding to in the present moment. If left to its own devices, it can end up masking all our thought patterns, emotions and interactions with those around us. Humans are habitual creatures, building functional 'speed-dials' to allow us to survive in the present while the mind is elsewhere planning for the future or ruminating in thought. The challenge here is that we are responding to the present moment based solely on habits learned from previous experience rather than making conscious choices based on the nuances of the moment itself. Luckily, mindfulness can help.

The solution: the importance of paying attention on purpose

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is often credited with bringing mindfulness into the secular mainstream. He defines the practice as: "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally."

Paying attention on purpose is the skill needed to move out of automatic pilot. As such, practicing mindfulness starts with learning how to pay attention. The more we focus, the more the brain builds strength in the areas involved in this type of concentration - and the easier it becomes to do it automatically. In other words, it becomes a habit to be present.

In the early years of primary school, a child's brain is developing more quickly than it ever will again. Young minds are in the process of forming their very first habits, and so learning to pay attention on purpose will have a .

The why: why is this particularly important in schools?

If you're a teacher wondering why this is important, mindfulness has many benefits in the classroom. Perhaps the most notable is its facility for improving children's attention span during English lessons and elsewhere in life. This is increasingly important as children are immersed in a world of digital screens and social media. Learning to focus can help to counteract the constant demands on their attention and develop greater patience and staying power for any one activity.

, experts agree that our attention span varies depending on what we are doing. The more experience we have of how much attention a certain situation needs, the more the brain will adapt and make it easier for us to focus on those situations.

The brains of school-age children develop rapidly. So, the more we can do to demonstrate to them what it feels like to pay attention for a prolonged period, the more likely they are to be able to produce that level of attention in similar situations.

For teenagers it is even more important. During adolescence, our brains undergo a unique period of neural development. The brain rapidly streamlines our neural connections to make the brain function as efficiently as possible in adulthood. Like a tree shedding branches, it will get rid of any pathways that are not being used and strengthen up the areas that are being used: use it or lose it. So if teenagers are not actively using their ability to pay conscious attention and spending too much time in automatic pilot mode, through screen use and in periods of high exam stress, the brain won't just not strengthen their capacity to focus; it may make it harder for them to access the ability to pay attention in future.

The how: three exercises to teach your students mindfulness

These three mindfulness exercises will help your language students integrate awareness into everyday activities in their school and home lives.

1. Mindful use of screens and technology

Screen use is a major culprit of setting the brain into automatic pilot. This is an activity you canpractice in school during computer-based lessons or even ask the students to practise at home.

  • Close your eyes and notice how you feel before you've started
  • Consciously decide on one task you need to do on the device
  • Consciously think about the steps you need to do to achieve that task and visualize yourself doing them
  • Then turn on the device and complete the task. When you have finished, put the device down, walk away, or do something different
  • Notice if you wanted to carry on using the device (this doesn't mean we need to)

2. Mindful snacking

We eat so habitually that we rarely notice the huge range of sensory stimulation going onunder the surface of this process. This is a great activity to practise with your students during breaks or lunch.

  • Hold the snack in your hand and notice five things you can see about it
  • Close your eyes and notice five things about the way it feels in your hand or to touch
  • Keep the eyes closed and notice five things you can smell about the snack
  • Bring the snack slowly to your mouth and taste it – notice five different subtle tastes

3. Counting the breath

A brilliantly simple exercise to teach the brain to focus attention on one thing for a longerperiod of time. It can be done anywhere and can also have the helpful side effect ofreducing stress through passively slowing down the breath.

  • Close your eyes or take a soft gaze in front of you
  • Focus your attention on the breath going in and out at the nostrils
  • Notice the breath temperature on the way into the nose compared to its temperature on the way out
  • Count 10 breaths to yourself – in 1, out 1; in 2, out 2; and so on
  • If the mind wanders, gently guide it back to the breath
  • When you get to 10 you can either stop there or go back to 1 and start again
  • In time, it will become easier to stay focused for the full 10 breaths and for even longer

If a part of you is still wondering where to start with mindfulness, then paying conscious attention to anything that draws our senses to the present moment: the breath, physical sensations in the body, sounds, smells or tastes - these are all brilliant places to start. Remember that mindfulness is simply a state of mind, a way of interacting with the world around us. How we access that state of mind can vary depending on the school, the language lesson and the students - there are many possibilities. As an English teacher, it's important to encourage and help students academically and in regards to their wellbeing.

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    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 – typically teachers and school administrators – “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’ – 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 – they might have developed substantially – 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 – 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 – 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.