by Brett McCollum and Wei Yan, CELT

This week, we offer two professional development activities to rejuvenate your mind. Creating space in your mind to reflect on your teaching is a valuable practice for scholarly teaching. It is part of the cycle by which educators move from anecdote to evidence-based teaching. Whether you choose to engage with one or both of these activities, or select one of your own choice, we encourage you to create opportunities for you to improve your mindfulness.

The first activity is a mindfulness practice that you can easily fit into your day, anywhere that you can sit, rest, and breathe. This 10-minute guided meditation focuses on listening to your thoughts, acknowledging them, and then shifting your attention to sounds outside your mind.

With practice, you may find this exercise useful to draw upon year-round when you are finding it difficult to prioritize your actions and need to create some head space.

https://soundcloud.com/mindfulnessuvm/sets/resilience-practices?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

The second activity is called “Gratitude Giving”. Engaging in work-community gratitude is an effective strategy for conditioning your mind to see the positives in your work environment and bring that attitude into your classroom.

To help you with this activity you can use a pen and paper. Think of a TRU colleague (faculty, staff, or administration) who made a difference for you this past year. Write down their name. Now think about what they did and the reason behind your appreciation. Capture those thoughts in a sentence or two.

If you would like to, we invite you to send your message of gratitude to celt@tru.ca using the subject line “Gratitude Giving”. We will prepare a thank you card with your short message of gratitude and send it to the intended recipient by interdepartmental mail. Indicate if you would like your message of gratitude to be sent anonymously. We will continue sending your cards of gratitude all summer.