Schools to Infuse Heart and Mind Training

Editorials

Schools to Infuse Heart and Mind Training

Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver

Volume 28  Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 29, 2014

VANCOUVER – Tuesday morning, October 21st was a day students and teachers of Vancouver’s John Oliver Secondary School won’t soon forget. When one of the world’s great spiritual leaders arrived with his entourage of RCMP bodyguards, the excitement in this working class neighbourhood school grew palpable. 
    His Holiness the Dalai Lama had come to take part in a series of face-to-face chats with six current and two former students. And they weren’t the only ones in attendance. In what was billed as ‘The Heart-Mind Youth Dialogue’, hundreds of other students witnessed the proceedings live in the gym where the event unfolded, while thousands more watched a live stream feed webcast in schools across the province.

VANCOUVER – Tuesday morning, October 21st was a day students and teachers of Vancouver’s John Oliver Secondary School won’t soon forget. When one of the world’s great spiritual leaders arrived with his entourage of RCMP bodyguards, the excitement in this working class neighbourhood school grew palpable. 
    His Holiness the Dalai Lama had come to take part in a series of face-to-face chats with six current and two former students. And they weren’t the only ones in attendance. In what was billed as ‘The Heart-Mind Youth Dialogue’, hundreds of other students witnessed the proceedings live in the gym where the event unfolded, while thousands more watched a live stream feed webcast in schools across the province.
    Yet none of the exchanges between students and their guest succumbed to the deferential pleasantries that so often accompany the presence of such a world celebrity. The reason was simple. Teen suicide, depression and stress, to say nothing of the bullying and violence that so often triggers it, aren’t subjects that invite frivolity.
    That much was clear after spoken word artist Shane Koyczan recited his youth anthem “Instructions for a Bad Day” (see: www.shanekoyczan.com/videos/). Here he reminded us all to: “Say how you feel without remorse or complexity…[and to know] that the long and heavy breaths of despair have at times been felt by everyone” [and that] “love and hate are beasts and the one that grows is the one you feed.”
     So it was that the youth on stage spoke from their hearts, sharing their difficult stories, and describing their own inspirational accounts of how they began to turn things around with the help of the heart-awareness techniques they had learned and practiced at school. 
     Nor was the Dalai Lama’s presence some hollow PR exercise either, as was evident in his own opening remarks, commenting on the preponderance of violence that remains in our world and what needed to be done to reduce it. 
     Though media and religious teachings have helped remediate the problems to some extent, the ongoing state of our world suggested they weren't fully effective. “So how [to deal with the problem]?” – he asked. “Through enhancing our awareness.” Then pointing to his own heart, he continued: “Real beauty is from here.”
     No, that morning put on offer more than trivialities. It offered unabashed glimpses into the challenged human heart designed to show just how critical this dimension is to a healthy, happy life, yet an all too often ignored part of who we are owing to the day-to-day weekday hurry to attend classes, to learn the three R’s, and to get the grades while looking fashionably good in front of one's peers. 
     But here too we need a cartography to our emotions, one that reveals to us the psychology of occasional hot-headed pitfalls, and to learn how to remain their sensitive keeper, though not their mindless slave.
     Still, as the most enduring lessons of life are etched into us early on, as the Jesuit aphorism “give me a child until the age of seven, and I will show you the man” would suggest, the need to keep our early connections to the heart alive and present seems to find little of that nourishing ground in the very place we are meant to learn – school. But in BC, all that may be about to change. 
     As of school year 2013/14, 90 per cent of BC’s 60 school districts are involved in teaching some form of social and emotional learning, and self-regulation to children. In 2010/11, only 37 per cent did so. In addition, 1,000 teachers have now been trained in the Mind-Up curriculum, which provides brain-focused strategies for learning and living to create greater emotional resilience in students. The program is designed to help them “live smarter, healthier, and happier lives”, as actress Goldie Hawn, the program’s founder once wrote. 
     Though Vancouver’s Dalai Lama Center played an integral catalytic role in getting this program initiative started in 2009, the Mind-Up program was no backdoor Buddhist infiltration of BC’s school system. 
     In fact, commenting on how the program was developed, one primary school teacher who took part in the pilot told me that the curriculum development team were extremely sensitive in ensuring the techniques being taught to children were acceptable to every major faith tradition, and that they were grounded in sound pedagogical science.
     According to UBC researcher’s Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, the Mind-Up program alone has shown to increase children’s pro-social behaviors by 25 per cent as compared to control groups who didn’t receive any comparable instruction. While that may sound like a fairly modest gain, it’s important to understand this process has only just begun. After an entire generation of the young has learned how to cultivate and integrate compassionate practices into their lives as matter of course, it could make all the difference in how we manage our world going forward. 
 
Mind-Up Program Benefits
 
  • The core practice: 3 times per day, children are given time to mindfully pause, listen and breathe. The goal is to learn how to focus which has spill-over into improved learning skills and improve pro-social behaviours. To achieve this, children also learn some basics about their brains and how their thoughts and feelings can affect their behaviours.
  • Knowing children’s social and emotional competence over five years before grade 8 is a better predictor of academic achievement than knowing academic performance scores in grade 3.
  • Mind-Up focuses on five core competency areas: Social Awareness, Relationships Skills, Responsible Decision-Making, Self-Awareness and Self-Management.
  • Benefits noted: 9 per cent decrease in conduct problems, 9 per cent improvement in attitudes about self, others and the school, 9 per cent improvement in school and classroom behaviour, 10 per cent decrease in emotional distress, 11 per cent improvement in test scores, 23 per cent improvement in social and emotional skills.
  • Physiological benefits: Mind-Up Program allowed children to stayin their normal high cortisol condition in the morning and to down-regulate through the day. Control group saw a dysregulation of their cortisol levels over the course of the day to a statistically-significant level.

   

Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver