Dec 14, 2017
The practice of mindfulness may have its limits when it comes to nurturing students’ creativity and academic success in the long run.
Mindfulness gets a lot of positive press these days, particularly from the Big End of Town. Its advocates insist more mindful employees make for better workers. But the same doesn’t hold true for making better students, argues Art Markman, a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas–Austin.
Studies show that generating creativity involves taking risks, says Markman. Risk-taking means that students need to learn from past failures and develop their critical and lateral reasoning skills.
“What really helps you to become more creative is learning a bunch of stuff and having a wide, broad base of knowledge that you can draw from,” the good doctor explains. “Mindfulness isn't going to help you to get there.”
Markman’s advice for educators? “To give students opportunities to make mistakes and to recover from those mistakes—to give students opportunities to answer questions that nobody in the room knows the answer to, give students the opportunity to read stuff that has no bearing on whatever the lesson plan is at the moment. Because those skills in the long run are the ones that are correlated with success after school.”
banner image from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-12-12-how-teaching-using-mindfulness-or-growth-mindset-can-backfire
How Teaching Using Mindfulness or Growth Mindset Can Backfire https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-12-12-how-teaching-using-mindfulness-or-growth-mindset-can-backfire
