The Ultimate Educator's Handbook for Happiness: Part 2 - Presence, Flow & Classroom Brain Breaks

Okay teacher friends welcome back here we are this is part two in my deep dive into my book Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers. Last week we looked at the science behind happiness this week we're going to look at two of the habits and they are to do with presence and flow. Now listen one of the things that I really appreciate a review that I had on this podcast said I was the perfect mixture of woo and practicality.

You know what? I'll take it. That's a beautiful compliment. So how do we take this idea of presence and really the research points to this but you know also my own life experience you can only really be happy in the present moment. Right? I know myself that when I've been depressed, it's a lot of times because I am not grounded in the present.

I'm grounded in the past. I'm thinking to stuff that happened that made me sad regrets, other things. And a lot of times when I'm looking at the future, that's where the anxiety comes, right? But being happy, contentment, Satisfaction. Those things that we want happen in the present. So how does that play out in the classroom  and the rest of your life?

That's what we're going to look into this episode. We'll see you on the inside.  Welcome to the Balance Your Teacher Life podcast  where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries and achieving better work life balance.  If you're passionate about education but tired of it consuming your whole life, You have found your home in the podcast universe.

I'm your host, Grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show. 

Okay, let me, let's check my summarizing skills, right? Oh my gosh. All those years in third and fourth grades. Summarizing skills.  Using your own words. Restate the main ideas. Okay, here we go. If you missed last week's episode or you just want a quick recap, let me tell you what we covered last week. We started off with the science of happy and what we looked into was happiness is a state of consciousness, not a circumstance, right?

Hey That is good news, right? We looked at how it can be synthesized that while each of us has a predetermined genetic kind of set point for happiness, right? If we're born with, only 10 percent of our happiness quotient is really based on our life. Circumstances. Okay. So even though we think we'd be way happier if we had different students, different grade  teacher partners, different, you know, parents, different admin, you know, more resources, all those things.

It's only 10 percent of our happiness quotient is based on our circumstances. And almost half of our happiness quotient is made up of intentional behaviors and habits that we can learn, right? We can learn them. We have them. In our control. That's a big part of my ECHO framework for educators. Control what you can control and happiness can be synthesized.

So once we accept that happiness is a muscle, right, it can be exercised like anything else and we can make happier.  Being happier is a worthwhile goal. That's what we really talked about last week. Like, you're worthy of being happy. Not only just because it has better student outcomes, but because you deserve to be happy.

And really, anything that you want in life, you think you want it, because at the end of the day, you'll be happier in the having it, right? So last week was really about committing to wanting to be happier. Okay, so that was the first habit. I'm going to combine two habits from the book. One was make like a child and be here now.

That's about being present. And then the other one is this big idea of bringing presence and mindfulness into the classroom with brain breaks. Now I know probably, you know, some of you might be, you know, eye rolling right now, like, oh please, brain breaks. We know all about that. Do you? You know about it, but do you do it?

There's the question.  You know about it. Now, again, I wrote this book, I don't know, seven years ago now. It wasn't quite such a popular notion now. There are so many fantastic resources now for brain breaks and mindfulness in the classroom that just weren't available back then.  And so I spent a lot of time, you know, teaching teachers how to do a take five strategy or starfish breathing or whatever I mean, there's so many resources for that now.

We don't I don't need to go into the tactics of that  I will link some resources below but one of them. Oh my gosh is I don't know if you remember episode 15 where I had one of the founders of EduCalm, which is you know, a fantastic, oh my gosh, fantastic program. And a lot of it free. There is a very robust free version of it with mindfulness for every.

The classroom kind of grade level. So go back. That's episode 15. I'll put the link also in the show notes, but very good conversation that I had with Kaylee Lefkoe there from Educom. But anyway, so  it's one thing to know that brain breaks are really helpful. It's another thing to, you know, incorporate them every day.

Okay. So that's what we're going to look at in this episode, but we're going to start here.  When I started looking at the building blocks for happiness, according to positive psychologists, there were things that made it seem like, yeah, teaching would be the thing. So one of them is purpose. Of course, teaching has purpose.

Another Connection. Oh my gosh, how many connections we have in, in teaching. But then a third thing was this idea of flow, right, where you're totally engaged in something. And  you know, sometimes those athletes call it being in the zone. Right? It's this idea that when you're in a flow state, you kind of lose track of time, right?

Because you're so engaged in what you're doing. And we, you know, another word for that is presence. Okay. Now,  I know that there are many, many, many distractions in the classroom that gets out of our flow state. Right, sometimes we're just like so annoyed that the phone rings or kids have to leave and go to specials and somebody else comes in to observe or, you know, something happens when we were really just in, yeah, in the flow of it.

But you know, one of the things I did love about teaching was it was kind of all encompassing. Certain times in my life when I was under a lot of stress, or there were other things outside of the classroom that really consumed me during the time that I was teaching, both my father and my stepfather actually both died of cancer, and that was a very difficult situation, me being the other side of the world, like there were days that there was just a lot on my mind, but for the Seven hours that kids were in front of me.

Like I didn't think of anything else. It's just so busy, but also you get engaged in this flow state and that's what creativity happens. And it is like I said, one of the building blocks to happiness. So  this whole idea of flow and just kind of being in things and not being distracted. And experience also told me that there are two things that are really what I call death to flow.

And one of them was being unprepared in the classroom.  Right. And, and that's for a whole bunch of reasons. Now I know some of you are going to say like, come on, there's so much to do. Sometimes we just show up and wing it. And I feel like it's something that I did way more later in my career than earlier in my career.

Earlier in my career. I was It's super organized, knew exactly what I was going to do because I know that if you are scrambling, looking for materials, trying to open the right window browser, not exactly sure what's happening next, right? That kind of Unstructured time in the classroom, that's where the drama happens, right?

That's like that tiny window of opportunity that students latch on to  and suddenly they're off task and that's what I call, you know, the vicious circle, right? You've got a distracted teacher. You're searching in file drawers, looking for stuff, walking around the room, where are the copies? I don't have the copies.

Send a kid to the office to make the copies, right? Distracted teacher turns into unscheduled, you know, time, off task students, student behavior issues.  Irritated teacher, like more lost time. It's like a whole kind of vicious circle. And what we want in the classroom is what I call, you know, the virtuous circle that I made a model in the book of called the happy teacher model.

And that is when the teacher is, you know, relaxed and cheerful and their best selves, their energy. Come on, you know what I'm going to say. Your energy teaching more than your lesson plans, right? That leads to more effective teaching. More effective teaching leads to. More engaged students, more student engagement leads to less student behavior issues, which in turn leads to a happy, cheerful teacher, right?

It's the opposite. That circle is, you know, what we call a virtuous circle that keeps going in a good direction as opposed to the vicious circle of the distracted,  you know, scrambling teacher,  right? And so certainly later in my career, like I just had a lot more confidence in my ability to wing it.

So sometimes it happens more with with more veteran teachers that they show up to class on. underprepared, let's say, but it can happen to newer teachers too. They're just so overwhelmed, right?  They're, you know, I know teachers who've had a different grade span assignment, you know, every year for five years somebody's popping them in a new grade.

How do you ever get confidence with that material and comfort with that material? So anyway, just it's a really bad habit to show into to think that you can just wing it because any time that you have that is unscheduled, that you're scrambling, looking for stuff. You know, kids are gonna take advantage of that.

So that's the first thing is just like, you know, be prepared because that is death to flow. The other thing that's death to throw is  being distracted and trying to multitask. Now listen, I wrote a whole book I have another book series called The One New Habit.  I wrote it a long time ago, but it was, and I really looked into the research on multitasking.

I always felt like I was an excellent multitasker. Part of that comes down to, Yeah, I don't, now don't be coming at me people, but as a general rule, and the research backs it up women, you know, like they liken it to, you know, your desktop a man has one file open at a time, you know, a woman, if I'm even looking at my desktop right now as I record, it's embarrassing.

I got like, you know, 30 files open, like we just got a lot of stuff going on. Always in our mind always thinking we, we have a hard time kind of compartmentalizing and just thinking of one thing. And so I always thought, no, I have the ability to do lots of things at once. And the research shows that really, that slows you down, that you are better when you do one thing with all your brain power and then yes, you get into the flow state.

So trying to multitask, when, of course, part of teaching is multi tasking, right? It's like conducting the orchestra. You are trying to get, you know, curriculum going. You are managing behavior. You, you know, you're doing a million things at once. But at the same time, that's not the same as you being distracted.

Being distracted is You know, you are waiting for students to start their work so that you can, you know, try and do something else. Right? And I see where that goes. I know that there is a big push in teaching that, you know, is healthy and promoting more student learning. Autonomy and group work them collaborating and working together.

There's this whole notion of, you know, walk into a classroom and you'll know how well it's running by who's doing the talking and who's doing the work, right? If the teacher's doing all the talking and doing all the work, the idea is they're not a great teacher. The students should be doing the work.  But that doesn't mean that the teacher is engaged.

in it, right? I, I loved the last few years that I taught oh my gosh, some of the software that was available that allowed students like to differentiate, especially like with working with math or language or wherever, these software that, you know, kids took assessments or, or whatever, but it, it, it really worked at their level, right?

That each student, I could have 33 kids in class and they were all working on something different that was Everything was in their zone of proximal development, right? Every kid was engaged at the right level for them and Working independently,  and that was really a beautiful thing because it's hard for me to teach 33 things simultaneously, but the computer could do that, but the idea wasn't that, you know, now that they're engaged working on those software  that like I'm going to start grading, or I'm going to start checking email, like kids know when you're not being present with them.

They deserve our presence. They deserve nothing less than that. So we should still be, you know, circulating, see who needs time help, see who needs time, all those things, right? So even though we want to really promote student development. Autonomy promotes students taking more responsibility for their own learning.

That doesn't mean that the idea isn't to free up teacher time to, you know, grade a few papers or, you know, take a quick look at Google Classroom. I mean, I know those things need to happen  but it really is the kind of death to flow. If we want to be in flow state and we're trying to do other things. 

While we're teaching, you know, it just interrupts our flow and that interrupts our creativity and it makes us kind of irritable and it's just a lot of stimulation for our nervous system. So number one, try and be in flow state and what that looks like in a classroom is Being prepared  and being prepared to spend the day when the students are there, engaging with the students, supporting the students, not trying to get other things done  even though the temptation is there, right?

Because we have so much to do. It is lovely to think, well, I could do a little bit of grading. While they're doing this or watching this little video, but they know, and it leads to this kind of vicious circle, not this virtuous circle of the happy teacher model. All right, so that's on flow. How do we get in flow?

How do we get in presence?  The big idea here that we know that you've probably heard lots about and probably have heard people talk about the research behind, and that is this idea of mindfulness.  And in a classroom that looks like brain breaks.  And again, there is lots of brain breaks that you can have.

You can have moving brain breaks. You can have kind of brain breaks that are based more on kind of like a short little kind of meditation. You can have the little, you know, starfish breathing brain break techniques that you can teach students to help them regulate, self regulate their emotions that they can practice independently, breath work, all those things.

So I don't, I've already done a whole episode on that, on this whole idea of co regulation, that when you're, how students react to your energy level and how that works together. And so you can go back and listen to episode 15 for that. Again, that's with Kaylee Letfo from. But the whole idea between brain breaks, meditation, in the book I actually cited a bunch of research.

It was a school  in San Francisco who had substituted  meditation classes for  suspension. So if you were suspended, instead of sitting there doing whatever you're supposed to do when you're suspended, or you have detention, excuse me instead of doing whatever you're supposed to do when you were in detention they started teaching kids it was  In 2015 NBC ran the news story on this about four San Francisco high schools who introduced meditation and over a four year period, the suspension rate in the high school decreased by 79%. 

Attendance improved, so did academic performance, right? There was just like this whole big thing. And I remember that Somebody, another principal at a different school was interviewed and he said, there's no way I'm going to steal time from English instruction or math instruction in order to do that.

And instead they decided to extend the school day by 30 minutes for meditation time, which resulted in better academic performance. And again, a 75 percent decrease in suspensions. So they really found that when students knew how to self regulate, they were more conscious of their actions. They were,  they were less angry.

You know how that plays out in the classroom. I think the need now more than ever, Oh my gosh, these kids have such a short attention span. They are addicted to devices from such a young age, even coming into, you know, I hate it when I'm in the grocery store or wherever. And I see a little, you know, a kid. 

Younger than preschool age, holding their parent's cell phone, already playing games just because it's like an electronic babysitter, which is, you know, in my day, we used to accuse the television of being that. But this, you know, electronics, the gamification of everything, these dopamine hits in that are just so addictive, then.

These kids with such short attention spans. I feel like the need for brain breaks in the classroom to teach kids how to be  present is  more important than ever. Okay, just the simplest, the simplest one. And the thing is,  when we teach kids let's just say,  starfish breathing right where you put your index finger at the base of your of your palm and you you trace around your fingers right inhale exhale as you go up the finger inhale  as you go down the finger exhale right you you do that takes like 30 seconds you feel kind of like your finger tingling tickling the side you know of your hand like it's a really good pattern interrupt when kids come in from recess Or from lunch, or a passing period.

A quick little brain break is just like a pat and interrupt, calm down everybody.  So, it's good for the students, but you know what's good for us too? Sometimes the teacher needs a brain break, right? And so I encourage you to go look. There are, I mean, you know, I was in younger classrooms. So for us the go to was GoNoodle.

Right. You could have a brain break which would be a little guided meditation or, you know, feeling things in your body or breath work, or you could have a brain boost. Sometimes the kids just need to get some energy out. Right. And so GoNoodle was just a, it was a The website, gonoodle. com, make a free teacher account.

You have access to all the tools. The kids loved it, right? It takes less than five minutes and when you need to change the energy in the room, it was an excellent tool. So there are tons of resources out there. But I certainly encourage you again to go look at Edukarm. So that's inside the classroom.

Outside the classroom, in your own life, I really, I want to encourage you, honestly, if you want to see quantum changes in your stress level and your ability to respond versus react. Right? That's really what we want, right? Instead of just being reactive to everything, we want to thoughtfully respond to things.

Consider cultivating a longer mindfulness meditation practice outside of school. Right? I know that, you know, there used to be this idea that people had Oh, if you meditate, you need to sit cross legged on the floor and and, you know, yoga culture, all those things. It has nothing to do with a spiritual guru.

There are so many things you can do. Again, there are So many apps you can put on the phone, the calm app, the, you know, all of these things. Just try and challenge yourself to sit still  without distraction  and you know, you'll find you have a busy, busy, busy mind. That's okay. Focus on your breath. Challenge yourself to do it.

Just a few minutes a day, a few minutes of calm. in your car before you work onto campus. A few minutes of calm  to get yourself together, get your thoughts together before you step into your home, right? And get assaulted again by children and spouses and partners and pets and  the laundry that needs doing and what's for dinner and who needs to get to soccer practice, right?

Like it's a constant assault on our nervous system. Need to find a way. Even if it's just a minute, even if it's just three really good breaths to get some presence and some calm in our life. And because this whole series, you know, is about being happier, understand.  Being happy, you know, what that really boils down to, it is an excitement.

Like I said last week, it's not like being on a roller coaster. Nobody wants to live in that kind of vibe. It's good for a minute. It's not zoning out like Netflix and chill and just trying to lose yourself in some drama. So, So that you can decompress a little, you know, happiness is that quiet moment of satisfaction.

And it's really when you stream together enough of those moments of quiet satisfaction, where you don't want anything to be different other than it is. That moment of acceptance, like  In this moment, everything is okay,  right? When you string together enough of those moments, that's when you have a happy life.

Okay, so again habit number one was decide. Decide to be happy, that it's worthwhile. We looked at the science of how you can synthesize happiness and how that even though it seems almost impossible, oh my gosh, how could you possibly be happy in this crazy career, that circumstances, you know, there are happy teachers out there.

Right? That some people are figuring it out. And then the next two habits we looked at were flow and brain breaks. And next week we're going to look at something else, but in the meantime I hope you've downloaded the journal where you can practice the habits. It's free. It's a six weeks of my version of the journal.

You go to. www.gracestevens.com/journal  It's going to be right there. And in the meantime, create your own path and bring your own sunshine.

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