Mindfulness for teachers: managing expectations over the holidays

Amy Malloy
Amy Malloy
A teacher holding books in a classroom

Mindfulness and your routine

In the run-up to the holidays, it is common to feel like your routine has completely broken down, especially when you’re not giving classes or working at school. The holidays also often bring with them lots of people, family, and excitement. That sometimes means we also experience fluctuating emotions, stress and the feeling that everything should be perfect.

On top of this, shops and social media are filled with advertising – and there’s definitely more ‘stuff’ to buy. In addition, we can see messages telling us we need to feel ‘merry’ and ‘bright’ wherever we look. Even the popular greeting, ‘Merry Christmas’, can sometimes feel less of a greeting and more of an instruction.

Sometimes it feels like the people around us expect us to always feel happy and joyful over the holiday season. This is fine if we do feel merry, but we will always have ups and downs. If you don’t feel happy, for whatever reason, it can feel even harder than it might at times where there is less expectation all around us.

Overcoming the challenge

Finding a way to introduce mindfulness into the holiday season can be a wonderful way for us to understand our emotions at this time of year. It will help you think about your expectations and let you find a moment to pause to accept whatever the reality actually is.

Here are some quick and easy ways to find some ‘you’ time and keep checking in with how you’re feeling. These are also tips you can try with children in the classroom and for yourself at home to keep yourself on track.

3-minute body scan

Find a quiet moment. This may be in the few minutes after you wake up or go to bed, during break time, or even at the start of a lesson.

  • Notice the contact of your feet with the floor. Notice the sounds around you in the room.
  • Take three deep breaths and notice how they feel.
  • Scan down the body in your mind from the top of your head all the way down to your toes. Observe what you notice about your body with an air of curiosity – look for any tension, discomfort or comfort. Also, notice if there are any expectations you have of that day or moment. See if you can simply notice them and set them aside. This curiosity helps us stay detached from what we notice so we can just observe.
  • Take three more deep breaths, and carry on.

2-minute notebook

Writing something down can be a wonderfully mindful exercise. Have a stack of post-its or a little notebook on your desk or bedside table. You could encourage your students to do the same.

1. Pick a point in your day. It could be at the start of each day, the start of each lesson, or just before bed. Each day, at that time, take a moment to write down three:

  • good things that have happened in your day
  • things that felt challenging
  • things you feel grateful and thankful for.

2. Review your notes every now and again during the holiday period. This will give you a sense of your shifts of mood and energy that might have occurred.

Noticing something you feel grateful for has been shown to .

1-minute cupboard pause

When things feel over-stimulating, find a quiet space just for a minute. Even if it’s in a cupboard!

STOP: notice the contact of your feet with the floor.
BREATHE: take ten deep breaths, breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of six.
WATCH: watch each breath coming and going from the nose or chest or belly. Observe what your thoughts and feelings are doing. Allow them to sit without needing to respond.

Then head back into the area you were in.

I hope these tips help you to navigate the festive season without expectation and with curiosity for what each moment holds along the way.

Remember that the holiday days you celebrate are really just normal days. It’s simply that expectations have changed, and what’s more, everyone’s expectations will be different.

Simply taking time to notice this can make a massive difference to the pressure we put on ourselves. Releasing this pressure can even lead to more enjoyment overall – so why don’t you try it and see?

Read our posts 'Understanding and managing technostress' and 'How to reduce anxiety using to-do lists'.

Check out our GSE teaching resources

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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?

    Por 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.