In challenging times, it is very easy for educators to be distracted from what we value most in our work. In this episode, Roberta Schnorr joins us to discuss how mindfulness practice can help us bring our authentic selves to our classrooms.
Roberta was, until her retirement, one of our colleagues at SUNY Oswego. Her professional career spanned 40 years, including nearly a decade in public schools, over 25 years directing a graduate program in SUNY Oswego’s School of Education, and she has been a mindfulness practitioner for 20 years. She has taught and facilitated mindfulness in community settings, including a prison and a public library.
Show Notes
- Schnorr, Roberta (2026). Inside Mindful Teaching. Mantra Books
- Roberta Schnorr’s website
- Apps/websites recommended by Roberta:
- Insight Timer – many choices, with an option to save favorites. Use the search tool to see topics in the library. Perhaps search for types, like Breath or Body Scan or Anxiety. A few to search for and try out: Relaxing your Mind (9 minute guided breath practice), Getting Grounded (15 min) by Kaira Jewel Lingo, A Pause for Presence (11 minutes) by Tara Brach, Basic Body Scan and Breath practice (11 minutes) by Tara Brach, Safe Place Imagery (10 min) by Dan Roberts.
- Plum Village App – (Offered by Plum VIllage, Buddhist community, but most practices are focused on Mindfulness with secular language). Suggestions to explore: Meditations→Deep Relaxation→15 minute offering from Sr True Dedication, Meditations→Guided Meditations→Short Meditations→Mindfulness of the body by Br Phap Dung, Meditations→Guided Meditations→scroll down to More Guided Meditations→ Learning to be a Human Being by Br. Phap Dung or What’s Not Going Wrong? by Kaira Hewel Lingo
- Tara Brach’s Website – free web-based guided practice
- Happier Meditation (formerly known as 10% Happier) – Dan Harris – paid app
- Calm – paid app
- Sean Fargo’s Top Guided Meditations
Transcript
John: In challenging times, it is very easy for educators to be distracted from what we value most in our work. In this episode, we discuss how mindfulness practice can help us bring our authentic selves to our classrooms.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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John: Our guest today is Roberta Schnorr. Roberta was, until her retirement, one of our colleagues at SUNY Oswego. Her professional career spanned 40 years, including nearly a decade in public schools, over 25 years directing a graduate program in SUNY Oswego’s School of Education, and she has been a mindfulness practitioner for 20 years. She has taught and facilitated mindfulness in community settings, including a prison and a public library. Welcome, Roberta.
Roberta: Thank you so much for having me, John and Rebecca. I’m just delighted to be here.
John: We’re happy to talk to you. It’s been a while. We’re glad to reconnect.
Roberta: Yeah, it’s great to catch up.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Roberta, are you drinking tea with us today?
Roberta: You bet. Yogi ginger tea, my favorite, in my favorite tea mug with the reminder from Lennon and McCartney to let it be.
Rebecca: Love it.
John: Very nice.
Rebecca: How about you, John?
John: I am drinking a ginger peach green tea today.
Rebecca: I am drinking an Awake tea right now.
John: …which is probably good. [LAUGHTER] It’s been a long day for you.
Rebecca: It has been.
John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Inside Mindful Teaching, which will be available around the time when the podcast is released. What do you mean by mindfulness, to set the stage for the discussion?
Roberta: Thanks for asking. It’s a term that’s become quite common this day and age, and I think it has many meanings. By mindfulness, I mean that I want to cultivate both my attention, to be attentive to my actual life and my intention of how I want to be in this life, it really is a way of seeing and being in life. Mindfulness practices help me to grow my presence and to notice when I’m present or when I’m maybe stuck in a story about the past, whether it was 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago, reliving a meeting I just came from, or planning too much and getting caught in worries about the future, and bring myself back to the direct experience of this moment right now. So that’s kind of my working definition.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the origin story of your book and how your own mindful practice maybe has led to or influenced your book.
Roberta: Yeah, so let me start with my own practice, because that was the piece that came first. Like many people that choose to pursue a mindfulness practice, mine was prompted by a period of deep suffering and confusion. Who was Bobbi before mindfulness, who was Roberta? I was fast paced. I was an over functioner. I was productive and rewarded for it. I was over scheduled. I focused on doing, doing, doing and to hold that all up, I was really focused on being in control of a lot of pieces. When I was nearly 50, something happened, and something came up that disrupted that, and I fell apart. It was really an emotional falling apart, and I couldn’t operate from that anymore, and I felt helpless, I felt terrified, I felt very ungrounded. So I did the wise thing and I went to therapy. And during that period, I began meditating on my own based on some reading I was doing, and within just a couple of weeks, I was experiencing benefits of the practice. I wasn’t cured by any means, but I would experience after a mindfulness setting, when, for me, there were no apps, I was just like trying to learn to sit with my breath for five minutes, and then 10, and then 15, and I would get some relief. So I kept doing it, and then I began having some experiences of shared mindfulness practice in yoga classes at that time. And I co-started, co-began a local mindfulness group that meets weekly. We still meet weekly, and had benefit from that kind of shared energy of mindfulness with others as well, and went on some retreats. So those were the beginnings of my mindfulness practice, birthed during this time of deep confusion and suffering. It’s interesting, when that question comes up, I realize now that the seeds of this book were also being watered during that period, that very early period, although I had no intention of writing a book. I was surviving my experience, and one element was my therapy. While my therapist used different language, he didn’t talk about mindfulness, essentially, he was inviting me to be more mindful in my life. He was inviting me to carry out what he called experiments in different spheres of my life, which were primarily my family life and my teaching, and asking me to see what happens if I just showed up without trying to be so in control. Could I just trust and show up and respond and see how that goes, see how people respond to that. That felt pretty vulnerable, but I really trusted this guy. He was a very skillful person, and he was helping me, so I was taking baby steps into these experiments, and interestingly, they went well sometimes. [LAUGHTER] So those were some of my very first explorations of mindfulness in my teaching. I hadn’t labeled it as that. At the same time, I was just beginning as part of a writing group. These were eight women, all professors in the School of Education. We still meet. We meet monthly to share writing, to respond to one another’s writing. And because I was in that writing group, I began processing my experience through writing. I’d never been a person who journaled, but I started to write short pieces, personal pieces, and journal type pieces about experiences I was having. And then I eventually became brave and floated one to writing group, and it was received so beautifully and so tenderly, and I felt so supported. That writing group became another place for me to share more of my authentic self and practice with this direction. And then, as I really made a commitment to focusing on mindfulness in my teaching, as I had done more healing, I continued to write about those experiences for myself. It was a way for me to pay attention to what was happening in my teaching and to document it. In a way, they were like field notes… I’m a qualitative researcher, just for me. And I would share those with writing group from time to time. And they were all teaching. They’re all professors, and they resonated with them, and they really encouraged me to keep going and just write and get it down, and eventually, really encouraged me to share it with a broader audience. So I would say you can blame writing group for the book. [LAUGHTER]
John: Writing groups can be very powerful experiences, very productive experiences in keeping people moving forward in their projects. So, as you adopted mindfulness practices, how did that begin to affect your teaching and your interaction with students and classes?
Roberta: This is going to be a long answer. There’s a lot to this, and I really want to share some details in a bigger picture with our listeners. So first of all, there were observable ways that my teaching changed. I was slowed down in my body, my speech. There were more pauses in our class, still within a decent pace and flow as I facilitated. Our transitions were less rushed. We tried to do one thing at a time and then have some closure. There was more space for student interaction, for student sharing. But the biggest change is that mindfulness really reoriented my relationship to my teaching, and out of this long process of writing and reflection and experimentation, three insights emerged for me that I understand are essential for my mindful teaching. One is my professional knowledge, pedagogy skills that I bring to this teaching world, this teaching life. The second is this mindfulness of my inner experience. This is about the body sensations I experience, and the feelings and thoughts that can emerge from those. And the third is something I call intention, and intention is kind of a compass that helps me to stay on track with making my teaching offering a wholesome one. So I’d like to take a couple of minutes and unpack each of those for you and our listeners. So let me just begin with professional knowledge and skills. Like many professors, teachers, this was in the forefront. This was my identity. This was what I was bringing to my teaching. It dominated my relationship with my teaching in some good ways, but now I realize also with some limitations, I was pretty attached to people getting [LAUGHTER] my stuff. I was preparing special educators. It’s a complex professional role, and my question about what I was offering for myself was, what do special educators need to know, understand and be able to do to fulfill this complex role? There’s an overwhelming amount of stuff that good special educators need to know and be able to do. Mindfulness helped me to distill that, to figure out what are the essential elements for beginning special educators. On a practical level, I really cut back on how much we were doing each semester and in each class session. I cut down on the number of assessments that were required of students. These actions created more space and lessened the anxiety for myself and for my students. So that’s the first one. Professional knowledge and skills, still a piece of my framework, still important, my relationship to it has changed. The second element is mindfulness of my inner experience. Well, this was new territory that began emerging in therapy. This is about me first recognizing, just being aware of this feeling in my gut or my chest or whatever, this tension in my neck that’s arising, and be conscious of whatever feelings or thoughts might be rising out of that. Be able to recognize it, allow it to some degree, not push it down, run away from it, and then grow the ability to be able to be with it, to work with it without being overwhelmed, distracted, or to have my decision making derailed and be pulled around by my anxiety and operate out of more reactivity than thoughtful responses. These emotions still visit me regularly, I’m sorry to say, [LAUGHTER] but I can now be with them, and I have a different way of relating to them, and I have practices. So one thing is, I learned they come up in the flow of your teaching. I can’t stop and go sit on the cushion and take care of them for 10 minutes. So it’s just a matter of naming that anger and letting it know I’ll come back to you, but we’re going to move on with class. It’s not a cure. Sometimes I have to tolerate there’s still some discomfort as I continue to teach, but I’m not going to let that take over and then later on in the evening, or the next time I get some time to sit and practice, I can get curious about that maybe, and say, “Whoa. Where did that anger come from? What was that about?” I’m not sure it was about that student’s remark. What was that about? And try to have a deeper understanding. I’ll tell you one of the ways I talked about this. In 2013 I was diagnosed with cancer. My daughters were then college students, and one of the things I said to them, as we were all kind of experiencing fear, was: ‘Your job is not to control fear. Fear is going to be on the bus. You don’t have to try to kick fear off the bus or prevent fear from being on the bus, it’s going to be on the bus. Your job is, do not let fear drive the bus.” And that became our way of talking about allowing and managing this thing that was part of our experience. So this ability to be connected to my inner experience and grow some skillfulness with it is really foundational to my mindful teaching. The third element that I call intention, was the last thing to fully emerge in this process. The first part was there, and that is about this question, how do I want to impact my students, learning both now and in the future? And I had a pretty good idea about that, and that’s a broad question. That’s a broad intention. It’s more than graduating and getting a college degree. It’s more than getting a teaching certificate. It’s more than passing an exam. My response to that in my teaching work was, I want to prepare teachers who bring both the will and the skills to help all students maximize their capacities in inclusive learning environments. That’s a high order. Special educators serve a wide range of kids with a lot of learning characteristics, but that was the vision and intention, the aspiration and the vision I saw for my students as they were teaching in their teaching careers. Over time, part two emerged, and it was a different kind of question. That question was, “Who do I aspire to be as a teacher?” The first question was about, what I know when all the professional content and pedagogy and skills. This question was about being, so my response to that question, as I reflected on it and worked on it in this mindful teaching journey, became, “As a mindful educator, I want to make my best offering to all of my students from a place of presence and connection.” I think each educator has to sit with those questions themselves and figure out what they are specific to their teaching role and their aspiration. But for me, if I stay in touch with those questions, they become more internalized and they kind of serve as a compass. When I reflect before in my preparation, or during or after class or a meeting, an interaction, I know right away when things feel right, when I’ve mostly met my intention, and I know right away when I was not able to meet my intention, it feels wrong. So the question is, can I still bring some kindness to that, especially for myself, so that I can reflect and have some curiosity and maybe learn something from that? Were there conditions that I could have worked with better to be better prepared, or was my capacity low that day, whatever, and the very least, can I then also kind of let it go and move forward and not get stuck in it, so that I can begin anew. So those are the three elements of what I think are my real reorientation to my relationship with teaching as a result of bringing mindfulness, making it central to my teaching.
Rebecca: Can you talk about taking time to reflect on your practice and digest those feelings that you were having, and then intentionally making choices about reducing the content that you’re covering, thinking more about the essentials and having more room in a class, and then also thinking about all the things that you’ve identified. How did that really change your relationship with students? What does that look like? How is that different than it was before?
Roberta: Well, I think the first word that comes to mind is it’s more authentic. It’s more human. Our relationship has to be framed also about this professional journey they’re on, and the standards and things about that, but it’s not defined only by that. I think we can see each other’s humanity, and I can allow more of my humanity to be seen and to be felt in this relationship. I can be more open to seeing them as people and hearing what’s going on in their life. It doesn’t change the criteria for what we need to accomplish on this path professionally, but I think it can create a more nurturing and supportive relationship for teaching and learning, but just as people on a path together, on a journey together. It’s really helped me be a better mentor.
Rebecca: How does that differ from the relationship many faculty have with students that are not doing mindful teaching.
Roberta: Well, I can only speak for myself, because there was a long period I wasn’t doing mindful teaching. I’ll give you some examples of what it was like before. And before, I think that many students were nervous about how I might respond. Some students could go with this energy I was bringing, and they were comfortable, quite a few, really, but some students probably found me scary and unapproachable, I think maybe rigid. And I think those things probably were true, and they were really the experience of some students. I don’t think most, but I think some, and each student’s experience matters. As I began to practice intentionally with mindfulness, my perception is students felt safer. They could take more risks. They’re teachers, and now they’re going to be special ed teachers, and they were in our program in real teaching situations every semester, part time and then full time, and what I saw as I was bringing more mindfulness, is my candidates could bring more flexibility and more intentional decision making to their planning, to their teaching, to their reflection and adjustments to their teaching. There was less focus on what they thought I wanted and more trust in their growing professional capacities to make decisions and try them out and notice and shift, whether they worked perfectly or not.
John: Now you’ve talked a bit about how this has affected your teaching and interaction with students. How did the adoption of mindfulness practices affect the rest of your life?
Roberta: That’s another great question, because this isn’t something you do in one sphere, which is what happened to me. I was practicing mindfulness, and then there was like, “Oh, I think I need to bring this into my teaching.” [LAUGHTER] Like, that’s part of my life. And a funny thing was, I was writing in this chapter, and I told one of my daughters about that, she said, here’s a title for your chapter, “Damn it, now I have to change my teaching.” [LAUGHTER] To have integrity, I needed to make a shift. But how has it changed me overall? For me, mindfulness practice has been deeply transformative, deeply transformative in every sphere of my life. Physically, I experience much more settled energy. My nervous system is regulated more of the time. I realize now I was like living in a pretty activated state most of the time, I think from the time I was a child, and that meant that I was always on the edge of my window and easily, kind of triggered into reactivity. So that physical calmness was really new to me, and it’s really quite pleasant. I mentioned being more authentic, and that’s absolutely been a gift of my mindfulness practice that comes more naturally to me. It comes naturally to me. I can allow more vulnerability, more tenderness with myself, first of all, which allows me to allow that with others, including students and colleagues. I experience a lot more stability, especially noticeable when life gets difficult, when the unexpected happens, when you get that information like, “Oh damn, the cancer’s back.” With my mindfulness practice that doesn’t have to be a total crisis. This, too is life. I can choose how to respond and participate as I go forward. So there’s also been a shift in how I view both my teaching and whatever it is I’m doing. It’s not always called formal work at this stage, and that is that I learned first in my teaching to shift and view it as an offering, an offering where I could let go, really practice letting go of how I might be perceived, how my offering might be judged or perceived, and just focus on it as an offering and the conditions that I could bring to make my best offering. So today’s an example where I’m practicing with offering. You two have done a lot of podcasts. I don’t do podcasts. This is my first, so I was experiencing some anxiety as this date came closer, and I got myself back to like, “Oh, it’s like my class.” Like, what’s my intention? My intention today is just like my class. I want to make my best offering to our listeners and to you from a place of presence and connection. I know what I need to do to prepare for that, the conditions I have control over. So I made some extra space yesterday and today. You were very helpful to me in preparing for the expectations, for the conversation and the context, but it was really my job to take care of myself and do more mindfulness practice, and to prepare with both the content and my energies, and to use some resources to get ready to take care of the things that might make this the best offering I could make today. It’s very freeing to me to have this shift of operating from offering, really freeing.
Rebecca: We have frequent conversations with faculty, and we’ve had conversations on the podcast about people feeling overworked or overwhelmed or kind of a lot of things on their plate, many of the things that maybe you were describing earlier [LAUGHTER] and sometimes adopting a new practice or thinking about something new like mindfulness can seem overwhelming, or that it’s going to take time or effort from other things. Do you find that you’re spending less time on other activities so that you can focus on these efforts? Or can you talk a little bit about time?
Roberta: Yeah, time rules all [LAUGHTER] of us, doesn’t it? So first I will say that I think I am spending less time on some things, and I was even still in my teaching life, because mindfulness helped me get clearer on how to spend my time, and I didn’t have to overbook and say yes to everything. I could choose where I was going to be able to make the greatest impact with my offering, and I could see where sometimes I was spending time on things that took a lot of time but were unlikely to make much of an impact. I don’t mean in my classroom, but I mean extra things. There’s still never enough time. Life’s very full. But initially I did think of mindfulness kind of in that way, like real mindfulness meant I had to have time to, like, sit for 20 minutes every morning and do this formal practice, or 30 minutes, and I had to make time for these very formal ways of thinking about practicing mindfulness. But as I have grown in my practice, I understand it now as an orientation, a way of life for me, that’s become much more integrated. And there’s a lot of ways I was practicing even early on, and you mentioned some of these before we got started, Rebecca, about your trip over here to start this conversation. So when I would arrive at the school where I was teaching, it was a public school, and my candidates were going to be tutoring a student, and we stayed right on for a grad class. I would pull in, and I would try to stay in my car for just a minute and take a breath or two, no formal practice. And then when I got out of my car and gathered my bag of materials, I was pretty good at this. I tried to just take mindful steps from the car to the entrance to the school, they weren’t super slow, but to be aware of my feet on the ground, to drop out of my head, to look at the sky, to feel the temperature, to feel if there was a breeze, to notice if there was sunshine… once in a while. And just kind of get in my body for that transition from the last meeting, or whatever, to this teaching context, and try to stay out of going through the list of things in my head that we were going to do in class. So that’s one example. I’ve got to walk from the car to the building anyway. It can be a mindful three minute walk, and that’s practice. Another thing I do every morning is I get to have one cup of coffee a day, and I love my coffee, so that’s become part of my mindfulness practice. These days, I sometimes only have 5 or 10 minutes in the morning for formal practice, but I make my coffee as mindfully as I can. I pay attention to making my coffee. It’s the only cup of the day I want it to be, just right. [LAUGHTER] And I sit in my favorite chair with my coffee, and I do not open my phone, and I hold that cup with two hands, and I feel the warmth of the mug. I inhale the scent of the coffee. There’s a little cinnamon in it in this season. I take sips, I hold it in my mouth, and I really taste it and experience it. I sometimes congratulate myself on I’ve made a really fine cup of coffee today, and I drink my coffee as much as possible without reliving something that’s happened before or starting to go into my to do list for today. It’s a real practice, because my mind wants to go there. But if I can give myself five minutes just me and my coffee, that’s a little mini retreat. That’s part of my practice, even if I only get five minutes for a more formal, guided sit or walking. Yeah, often midday, during what’s kind of my lunch break, I have maybe a half hour to an hour and I put on an app with a 15 minute body scan. And I do not usually go to sleep, but I get in a comfy chair, recliner, and I listen to this body scan take me to attend the different parts of my body. It’s very relaxing, and when I’m finished, I feel like I’ve had a nap sometimes. So there are little things that I can do through my day that are not about scheduling extra time. Those are a few examples.
Rebecca: I mean, you should have maybe drank tea in the morning, but… [LAUGHTER]
Roberta: Maybe. I switch to tea for the rest of the day.
Rebecca: Ok.
Roberta: I drink a lot of tea.[LAUGHTER] If this was a morning recording, there would have been coffee. [LAUGHTER]
John: …and that’s not uncommon on the podcast.
Rebecca: I know that’s why I had to tease. [LAUGHTER]
John: Now, you mentioned your work with your pre-service graduate students, and in your book, you share a bit about how you introduced some mindfulness practices to them. Could you talk a little bit about what you shared with them and how they reacted?
Roberta: Yeah, I’d love to talk about that. So first of all, slowly. I shared nothing with my students in terms of introducing them to practices, until I had cultivated a personal practice and I had really been exploring bringing it into my teaching for several years. I was a teacher. They were becoming teachers. The more I saw the benefits of it in my teaching, the more I felt compelled that this should be part of their preparation. The first reason was I wanted to support their well being. These are grad students that were, for the most part, doing daily subbing. They were getting up and teaching from seven or eight in the morning till three or four, and then they were coming to grad class from 3:30 to 7:30 or something, with their tutoring to seven. It was a long haul. They were stressed. They were tired. They were anxious. There’s a lot of anxiety anyway in life, but being a grad student for me was also kind of a peak time. So I knew that mindfulness was a way that I could support some of their well being and maybe relieve some of that stress. I also did share a little tiny bit about how they might explore it in their teaching, because they were actively teaching. And mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. And the thing we shared was about teaching. So here’s what it looked like in the last few years, and this evolved over five, six years, from me sharing a little bit to then getting clearer on how I could be more structured and share a bit more. So as I mentioned, the context was graduate class in this public school, they arrive, there’s an hour of tutoring a student that they stay with for the whole semester. I’m on site, supervising and supporting. Then we come back together as a class and have our graduate class in the same space. So the tutoring program did not start our first week of classes. So the second graduate class, I spent most of that class as kind of a mindfulness workshop with them. I facilitated and guided them through a number of experiences with mindfulness practices, but we did body practice, we did breath practice, we did mindful walking, we did mindful eating, we did mindful listening, give them tastes of different things and process a little bit, and sort of giving them a menu or two for like, where were their preferences and what was working for them. And then I invited them at the end of that class to practice 10 minutes a day, five days if they could, in the coming week. And we were using Blackboard at the time for course management, and I asked them to write just a little bit about their 10 minute practice each day, so I could tell if they wrote that wrote that day on Blackboard, and I intentionally didn’t respond to their daily postings about their experience. I wanted it to be their experience, so I waited and read them at the end of the week, and then we got back together on Monday for our next grad class, and we spent probably 20 minutes sharing and talking about their experiences, which were overall quite insightful and positive for them. This was all ungraded. It was very clear in the syllabus. All ungraded. Everybody did it. Then we got on with the business of the next day we had kids coming. We got on with the business the rest of that class of like, all right, what assessments are we doing tomorrow? What are you going to learn about this student as a reader so you can start teaching? And then the next day, when they started tutoring, eventually it became our practice every single time to first meet as a group for five minutes of guided mindfulness practice, which I facilitated. And then it was like, have a great tutoring session, see you in an hour. That was what we did. And then I asked them twice during the semester to write me like just two pages maybe, something about your mindfulness and your teaching. What are you noticing? The other thing I did do the first few weeks was I shared a few examples of my experience of bringing it into my teaching with some school age learners I worked with, and really inviting them to notice their inner experience. When does the anxiety come up? What does it feel like in your body? Can you be more in tune to noticing the anxiety coming up before you’re feeling overwhelmed or frozen, and then giving them a few go to practices that they could use in the moment. So you’re in the flow of a lesson with a seven year old, the lesson isn’t going as you planned, or the kid refuses to engage, the kid’s stuck and doesn’t know how to keep reading. You can’t remember what to do. So those strategies were like, take two or three breaths or look out the window. What’s the sky look like in this moment. Look back at your kid. Start again. One student I remember wrote about using self talk. I remembered Bobbi saying, like, “if I couldn’t remember what to do, just give them the word and nobody was going to die.” So these little things, but it tuned them in and in their reflections, I was just so so surprised that every single student could identify something that was relevant to mindfulness, and many of them wrote really rich examples of how they were kind of working it in their teaching and in their lives. The biggest and best surprise was a full year after I had them in the fall, this group of students went out for their full-time internship, and they didn’t have any more support around mindfulness from any other faculty member, and I wasn’t with them in the spring, and yet, in their journals that were required as part of their internship seminar, many of them were able to cite examples of how they were bringing mindfulness to their teaching in this very Intense, full-time placement. So, responses were overwhelmingly wonderful. And not every single student, but everybody kind of got what it was and tried it out, and many had these really wonderful responses. I just learned a lot from my students and their mindfulness journeys and the courage they brought to trying these things on in this kind of high-stakes graduate teaching and learning situation, it was very affirming for me, also, that the experiences I was having with some mindfulness in my teaching were supported by their efforts. It was also striking that they were getting this much preparation in mindfulness, and they were brand new teachers, and they could bring these brand new things together and do something with them, like, wow.
Rebecca: In some ways, you’re describing big changes in people’s lives where this intervention is occurring. Grad school is a big change for people, or being in the classroom for the first time with their students can be a big change. There’s a lot of changes and challenges that all teachers are facing currently. We’re thinking about, like changes in AI, thinking about political attacks on education. The list goes on, like a laundry list of things that are on all of our minds today. And I can imagine that like in that setting, adopting a mindful practice could help alleviate some of that challenge, if we can move in with this attention. Can you talk a little bit about the first steps someone might take if they want to adopt a practice like this?
Roberta: Yeah, so first of all, I’ll agree, we are indeed in very challenging times, and what I always kind of share with people now wasn’t available to me as a beginning practitioner, is I share apps. There’s a lot of resources now. There’s a lot of great apps, some are free, that have guided practices in many forms, and it’s a great support for beginning a little personal daily practice, even if you only have 5 or 10 minutes a day, either in the morning, midday, evening, whenever you’ve got that space. In fact, we could share a few suggestions in the show notes, if you like, for people to check out.
Rebecca: Yeah, that’d be great.
John: We always end each podcast episode with the question: what’s next?
Roberta: You know, for me, I really, really enjoy and find it very satisfying to share mindfulness practices because they’ve been so helpful to me, and especially in these times that are very unsettling for many of us, and lots of change and difficulty. So one way of doing that is sharing my experience in the book. And for people that are interested and have some mindfulness practice going, and are interested in trying to explore that in teaching. I hope my book will be a resource to them. And the other thing that I’ve been exploring that is less explicitly dissected in the book, because it came after, is trauma-informed practices, and how I’m really integrating more of that into my facilitation, and I’m about to start in a new study group to learn more about group nervous systems and our shared energies, and I think that’s going to be helpful to me, not only as a facilitator and a teacher, but every group I’m in, including my family.
Rebecca: So it’s great to keep learning, right?
Roberta: Yeah, it sure is.
John: And trauma-informed pedagogy, I think, is especially valuable in these times.
Roberta: Sure thing.
John: Well, thank you. We really appreciate you joining us, and it was great to talk to you again.
Roberta: It’s been my great pleasure to talk with you, to meet you Rebecca, and to have this opportunity to reconnect with my Oswego family and beyond. So thank you so much for this podcast offering.
Rebecca: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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