3 creative routines to help foster a safe learning environment

Laura Vazquez
Group of Young Children sat on the floor, laughing with a teacher

“The world is undergoing revolutionary changes, we need a revolution in education too.” -Creative Schools, Ken Robinson

In February 2006, the late Sir Ken Robinson delivered a talk at TED titled: . This was some years ago and time seems to have stood still in education since then.

Creativity is a key 21st century skill. Our young students need to harness it in order to be successful in further education and the workplace, especially now that technology is advancing at such a rapid rate.

So what can we do to encourage creativity and create a safe learning environment? I’ll take you through three activities that I use with my own students to help them flourish.

Clear and structured objectives

To nurture and encourage creativity in the classroom, it is important to have clear, well-structured objectives and routines that give students a safe learning environment. Here’s a breakdown of a few you can try in your classroom.

1. Monday activity

As part of your routine, do something different every Monday and have your students guess what it is. For example, you could change your earrings or only wear one. You could shave your mustache, wear a hat, or do something less obvious.

Students should participate too, so have them do something different every week. Select a student in the class and everyone must guess what has changed that Monday.

This activity is designed to encourage students to pay attention to each student in the class and notice things about them during the week. At the same time, it will encourage them to be creative and think about how to do things differently and mix up their own routines.

2. Friday team building challenge

Every Friday, my class play a team building challenge activity which helps them set and follow rules, be respectful to one another, and work and play with students from different circles.

Here’s a simple, energetic team building activity you could try:

  • Have students call out all the new vocabulary words they learned during the week. Write them on the board as they do so.
  • Split the class into teams of four or five students.
  • Tell them they have to use their bodies to spell each word (if there are lots of words, pick the top three). Wipe the word off the board and explain that they can stand up, lie down, and use their arms and legs – but they should work together to form the shapes of the letters. The first team that correctly spells the word you dictate wins a point!

3. "Hurray, I failed” activity

The final activity is all about celebrating failure. Start by putting students in a circle or a line, and have them each name a color out loud. If someone repeats a color or takes longer than five seconds to answer, they must stand up, dance, and shout “hurray, I failed!” as loudly as possible.

You can select any topic – such as nouns, countries, or, even better, your students’ interests. The intention is to create a safe learning environment for your class, where students feel supported and being wrong is fun and okay. This will enable students to participate in class without fear of judgment or criticism.

Try it out until your students become comfortable with dancing and 'hurraying' in front of everyone in the group.

This activity has yielded fantastic results with groups of people I’ve worked with, regardless of their age group (young, old, junior high). Participants may feel silly or shy, until one participant starts doing it for fun, and then the rest of the group will start feeling comfortable with being wrong. They will realize it’s okay, and the exercise will start to flow with greater ease.

If your group is shyer or your students are more introverted, you can ask the person who makes a mistake to wear a silly hat – until the next person fails.

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    Mindfulness in the classroom: Autopilot and paying attention

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    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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    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.

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    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 – 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.

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