Barbara provides workshops for educators to create a vision of the school they can envision for the future based on her work with IMPAC T II – The Teachers Network. She also offers classroom lessons for educators in the use of awareness techniques to enhance the thinking and learning ability of students based on her book Awareness High School
AWARENESS HIGH SCHOOL
A Guide to Practical Mindfulness Activities for Junior and High School Students
Objectives
- Participants will understand the practical use of mindfulness activities that can be used to better enhance focus, creativity and personal achievement.
- Participants will demonstrate an ability to use several mindfulness techniques that can be used in their daily lives to improve focus, creativity and understanding.
Introduction
It’s a Friday afternoon and there are eleven sections of Interpersonal Communication in session at the same time along the corridor of the Communication Arts Department at Beach Channel High School in New York. Each classroom has a sign on the door saying, ‘Do Not Enter – Guided Fantasy in Session.’ The students in these classes were taking time to improve their ability to imagine. Do you take time out in your busy day to dream, to imagine? If you do take time each day to imagine congratulations; if you do not then let me suggest you are depriving yourself of some golden opportunities to create what you want to have in your life. Daydreaming! Einstein believed in the importance of daydreaming and would allow time for his mind to wander and wonder. In our modern day lives there is little time to put your feet up on the desk and just dream.
Background
There are some cultures where dreaming is an important part of the community’s daily activity. There is a tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon that gets up every day at 4am to determine the meaning of everyone’s dreams.
- What is the faculty that you are developing as did Einstein did when he was day dreaming?
- What is the importance of your dreams?
The importance of your dreams is related to the importance of the images that appear in them.
- Where do these images appear?
- They appear in your imagination, in your ability to create images in your mind.
- This ability can be developed.
The mission of Awareness High School is to assist you all, whether students, teachers or parents, in developing the ability to use your imagination to enhance your own innate talents as you travel the life long Road to Awareness.
- You will come to understand how to take control of your own education and development through exploring activities and exercises that will help you in developing the skill to harness the power of your own imagination.
Would you like to try a few of these activities?