Breathing is an autonomic body function and is essential for human life. A healthy person breathes without thinking about it. When teaching children, knowing when to pause and take another breath to let learning unfold is a conscious act of breath control. Effective teachers know the art of breathing.
What do we know?
As a child, I was told to pinch my nose, jump into the deep end of the pool and swim. “Take a deep breath, hold it, and jump!” “Oh, and do not open your mouth to breath until you must. You will know when!”
As a student teacher, I learned to prepare an objectives-based lesson with a Madeline Hunter lesson design. When all students were seated and I had their attention, I took a deep breath and jumped into the lesson. Once I had connected the day’s lesson to yesterday’s lesson, I taught/swam hard moving through my lesson plan. My college supervised advised, “Once you have children’s attention, do not lose that connection until the lesson is finished. It is easier to keep them with you than it is to regain the attention of children you lost.” That mantra served me well until I looked up and around. Like a swimmer who has held his breath and come up for air, I was teacher in the middle of a lesson without knowing much about the children I was teaching. Their learning was secondary to my teaching.
Experience can teach us, and informed experience teaches us to create better experiences. I learned that I did not need to pinch my nostrils and hold my breath like a balloon under water. Diving headfirst was both more efficient and more exhilarating. I learned shallow racing dives and to hold a for four flutter kicks then to begin my stroke count and breath as planned. Informed practices created better experiences.
So, it is with teaching. Breathing may be autonomic, but effective teachers know how to pause, breathe, and let learning catch up with their teaching.
Intellectual breathing.
Hunter taught us to check for cognitive understanding. Checking is taking a breath from teaching finding the extent to which children are learning from your teaching.
Strategies for intellectual breathing include the following:
- Cold calling. Do not ask for volunteers, but call in your “bell weather” students, the students who if they understand then most other students also will understand.
- Think-pair-share. Students write quick responses to your question, share their response with another student, discuss and modify their mutual response, and report orally to the class.
- Roll a question around. Ask a question requiring more than recall, one that causes a child to connect new learning with prior learning or provide a new context. Then ask another child to either agree, disagree, or add to the response. Continue with five or six students to push their thinking.
- Quick quiz/ticket. Ask students to respond in writing to name the main points of the lesson so far, or to explain a concept in the first instruction, or formulate questions they have about what they have learned.
- Use a visual fist to five. This strategy checks each child’s security with what they have learned. A five-finger wave says the child believes she has a high level of understanding, and a fist says, “I am confused.”
These are formative strategies that tell a teacher “Success. Keep teaching.” Or “Whoa, you need to reteach, correct, clarify, and reinforce what children know before going on,”
Emotional breathing.
Teaching usually is focused on what children think and know. Take a breath and pause to allow children to consider how they feel about what they have learned. “Aw, this is soft. Feelings do not help students on their statewide assessments.” Wrong!
Unlike the factual nature of checking for cognitive understanding, taking an emotional breath is observational and attitudinal. As children progress through a lesson or unit, their executive skills, social awareness, relationship skills, and ethical well-being are equal to their cognitive understanding.
Can or are all students able to –
- Initiate and use a new skill independently? Can they self-start or are they dependent on their teacher?
- Aware of the social context of what they have learned? Do they know that different economic, socio-political, cultural, or linguistic groups have a different take on the topic? Can they accept such diverse thinking? How do they feel about this?
- Work with all other children in the class to extend their new learning. What groupings will help understanding? What needs to be done to improve child-to-child relationships?
- See ethical and responsible decision-making issues in what they are learning? Can children self-regulate based on their ethical integrity?
Emotional breath taking relies on a teacher’s observational and perceptional acuity. First, a teacher must be self-aware of each of these. Second, a teacher needs to be aware of indicators of SEL indicators that children give off in their classroom experiences. Third, a teacher needs to be prepared to convert observation into planned instructions. If children are lacking in executive functions, teach them. If students are socially unaware, teach them. If children do not see ethical issues, teach them.
Taking a breath of emotional checking assures that teaching and learning are not mechanical but also humane.
Self-awareness.
Breathe also for yourself. Like the swimmer coming up for air, take a pause to help yourself adjust within the lesson. Stop teaching. Take a sip of water. Look around and breathe. Take time to see where you are in the classroom. As a mentor told me, “Pull your socks back up. You have been going at it strong.” I have seen teachers so “into their teaching” they are not aware that they have walked themselves into a corner of the room where the whiteboard hits the wall. One or two kept on teaching through the passing bell and when they turned around a new class of children was seated in their classroom wondering what they should do.
With experience, most teachers know when lessons are working successfully and when they are not. Perceptive teachers know when a lesson that is faltering lies in their preparation and when it is with them in the moment. They can take a breath and adjust themselves and their teaching.
At the same time, ineffective teachers do know how to breathe. They plow ahead in their ineffective lessons with ineffective practices.
The Big Duh!
Teaching is a human endeavor exercising the art and science of causing children to learn. Because we are human, we need to use our natural instincts to inform our uses of the arts and sciences. Effective teachers know how to stop teaching, take a breath, use the pause to monitor and adjust themselves and their instruction, and with new insights go forward.
Lastly, and most importantly, while you pause for breath look around at children engaged in learning. It is a most wonderful sight. And know that your pause for breath also is instruction and reinforcement to children that they also need to pause and breathe.