Richard Brown "Contemplative Teaching" **** [MUSIC] Hello. And welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I'm your host, David Devine. And itÕs a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions - Naropa is the birth place of the modern mindfulness movement. [MUSIC] Hello, and today I'd like to welcome Richard Brown to the podcast. Richard is a core faculty member in the Contemplative Education program. And itÕs an honor to have him with us today to share his knowledge. Thanks for coming in. [00:00:57.10] RICHARD: Oh, itÕs my pleasure. I'm happy to do this. [00:01:00.04] DAVID: Awesome. Anything else you would like to share about yourself? [00:01:02.22] RICHARD: Well, I have always been passionate about teaching. You know ever since I was I think in 8th grade when a teacher made me feel like I was worthwhile. And my thoughts were valuable. And I thought if he can do that for me, I want to be able to do that for other people. So, that's always been what I've wanted to do and have done so uh I was fortunate enough to be a student of Naropa's founder and also to teach in a kindergarten through 12th grade school in the 1980s here in Boulder, which was a sister school or Naropa. So, I had the experience of working - bringing contemplative teaching to students at that point. And, that was so inspiring that I decided that the world needed a - teachers who could uh teach in those ways. So, that's when we got started with the uh education program at Naropa in 1990. [00:02:03.06] DAVID: Oh wow. Very inspiring. We all had a moment where we've had a teacher who has inspired us a little bit more than usual and has create a doorway or a path for somewhere for us to go and yours seemed to come in 8th grade through a certain teacher? [00:02:20.14] RICHARD: Yeah, and I was fortunate throughout my educational career to have teachers that inspired me in different ways. You know some of them were very hearth felt people. And some of them were extremely intellectual and uh - you know they appealed in different ways and that was wonderful. [00:02:40.21] DAVID: Yeah awesome. Just collecting as we go. [00:02:44.06] RICHARD: Right. [00:02:45.02] DAVID: Cool. So, you have a little topic that we're going to talk about. What would that be today? [00:02:49.02] RICHARD: Yeah. I thought I'd talk about contemplative teaching and uh - try to give some idea of - of what - contemplative is. And then give an example of a technique that works really well for integrating contemplative teaching into ordinary classroom situations. So, the word contemplate - is a word that's in common usage you know. I need to contemplate this. And itÕs usually meant a kind of reflection that I am going to take my time and figure this out. I'm not going to just jump right into it. And, itÕs interesting to look at the origins of that word. The Greeks felt that it meant creating a space - actual physical space in which the sacred to arise. [00:03:41.05] DAVID: Interesting. [00:03:41.05] RICHARD: So, they would make you know lay out the - the boundaries of a temple. Con-temple-ly. That was reading the - that kind of boundary. [00:03:52.20] DAVID: Yeah. ItÕs a container - to con-temple-ly. [00:03:57.09] RICHARD: And, Christian mystics that contemplation was not what we think of as contemplation so much as creating a space - an opportunity not to think about something. But, allowing the mind to dwell in a kind of open non-duel space where non-thought is arising. So, that was much more mystical. But also, both of those have relationships to what we're developing at Naropa in terms of contemplative practices and contemplative pedagogy. You know how we teach. So, at Naropa - the notion of contemplative education is about drawing out the full richness of the student. And the teacher. In the learning process. And, utilizing different contemplative practices such as mindfulness and awareness and compassion and contemplation to draw out the wisdom of the various dimensions of who we are as human beings. So, itÕs not just about thinking. Most - conventional education trains us to be thinkers and doers. Which is very important. But there's an emphasis in contemplative education about supplementing our thinking process with the wisdom of our emotional life - the wisdom of our sensory experience. The wisdom of our bodily experience. The wisdom of the environment in which we're learning. All these factors, go together to make a kind of wholeness of learning that is what it - in my view anyway itÕs all about creating - a richness, which that richness is permeated by that space. That - Christian mystical non-dual space. So, that all these factors of how we think, how we feel are not just crammed altogether, but there is room for them to move and affect each other. So, the way we think can be - enriched by our feelings. The way we move can be - affected by the environment that we're in. You know so that there's this interplay of these elements and of course you had more and more dimensions. The other people that you're learning with. The issues in the world you know it gets very, very rich, but itÕs really starting from the inside so that we start to untangle this web, which has been very tightly made in our conventional education so that a lot of times we don't know we're thinking. We just think habitually. Uh, we don't know we're feeling. We don't account for feeling because itÕs not allowed in schools you know. [00:07:18.01] DAVID: Yeah, like keep that over there. We got some education to learn. [00:07:21.21] RICHARD: Right, and of course all this takes enormous discipline to bring these various dimensions of who we are into a learning process without it getting chaotic so that we're bringing our emotions in - in a very disciplined kind of way so that you know they're not running rough shot over our thinking, but they're actually supplementing it. So, there all these practices which are really quite wonderful and quite personally challenging in order to get to this state of liberated learning you could say. [00:08:00.10] DAVID: Why do you think they're challenging? [00:08:02.06] RICHARD: I think itÕs because we've ignored them you know. We - and we've gotten them so intertwined you know. For example, if you're reading a book by someone who is very different from you. And you're reading these ideas - you have uh an emotional response to that difference. You - might reject it and both that emotional response might trigger ideas that you've learned. Well this person doesn't know what they're talking about you know. Whatever it is - the script is - the emotions and the thoughts while we're reading something which is challenging because its different become a kind of defense mechanism to allow us to preserve our own identity. We're talking about identity here as something which is kind of narrow, which our narrow identity which keeps us from expanding and growing and learning new perspective. So - so when we read something like that you know we automatically shut ourselves off from empathy, from understanding, from inclusion because of the habitual ways that we've been brought up and that we've been educated. [00:09:26.03] DAVID: Yeah, itÕs interesting when you are confronted with something that doesn't resonate fully with you and you're having to almost step into a different mindset that you're not normally used to. Or you - you feel so challenged that you push it away. Most of us when we feel challenged that's not for us. You know we're not willing to sit with the challenge so I see contemplative education in such a way that where it allows to be ok when things are not working out. Whether it be the education or whether it be information on our stories or just different ideas and we can sit with those and be like I am ok with this. Or at least figure it out and at least ask yourself like why am I not ok with this? Ask yourself the question other than like its external to you. You can figure it out internally as well. [00:10:21.16] RICHARD: Yeah. Yeah that's a place you can start. And uh - then from there you can maybe actually ask the question out loud. You know. I don't understand this. This is foreign to me. Help me understand but instead of being an aggressive rejection it becomes curiosity. So -- that's part of the inner development in contemplative learning is to be able to free up these natural parts of ourselves. Our emotions, our thinking, our bodily sensations, our ability to move and interact and all the rest of it. Liberating those so that we can learn more directly from our experience. And we can have a more personal relationship with what we're learning because itÕs not just in the intellect - itÕs our whole being. So, we bring in our personal experiences, our doubts, our uh questions about things. So, itÕs about -- bringing it in and making it meaningful to us just as we are. And we don't have to pretend to be you know good little learners. We can be confused. And if we share that - then that's the starting point. So, one of the things that makes contemplative education I think incredibly valuable is that these processes that we've just been discussing apply to the teacher as much as to the learner. So, that the teacher is on that same journey of self-discovery. Of being fresh and open in the moment of regarding students and their ideas and the material they're studying even though they may be encountered it before. But coming at it in a fresh new way. And, seeing what the insights and questions are in that moment. So, one of the main techniques is pausing in the middle of whatever is going on. Parker Palmer talks about it in class discussion in his book, "The Courage to Teach" which is an amazing book. When the energy of the class gets so riled up and emotions are going strong and ideas are flying left and right and nobody can process anything because itÕs all so dynamic. He -- he stops everything. And he just has the class pause. And then resume. And, of course Thich Nhat Hanh uses the same technique with his mindfulness bell which uh is rung during discussions every 15 minutes or so when you hear the bell - everyone just stops and then when the sound of the bell is dissipated everyone begins again. Now, one of techniques that we really have used to great effectiveness in the contemplative education department is a technique which was developed in the 1970s after a lot of research. And, goes by various names, but wait time is one of the common names and its taught - wait time is taught as a pedagogy to most school teachers. And the basic practice is when you a teacher is conducting a discussion -- that will pose an issue or a question for discussion and students respond and typically they raise their hands and there's a response. Now, with wait time - the instruction for the teacher is not to call on somebody right away, but to wait for at least 3 seconds before you call on someone. And, that has a number of effects that have been studied that for the students what they found is that when there is that pause and students have a little bit longer to reflect before they answer - the length and accuracy of the studentsÕ responses increases. The number of I don't know responses goes down. There are more volunteered and appropriate responses by larger numbers of students. So, more students are participating when they're given more time before they have to answer. And, academic achievement of scores go up. Now, the teacherÕs behavior also changes which is really nice because this technique you know is about teacher behavior and student behavior which is very contemplative because we're all on this journey together. Teachers they've noticed in their studies they're questioning strategies tend to be more varied and flexible because they're pausing. And, often times they're pausing becomes a part of their general approach so that even before they ask the question there is a pause. So, they're thinking ok - rather than you know what my lesson plan says I'm supposed to ask. I uh - I'll ask it a little bit more freshly, a little bit more in this moment. Teachers when they're asking these questions - they're questions are more varied and there's less length in their questions. You know they're more precise and they be more likely to follow up with additional questions that require a higher level of thinking on the part of the students. So, this is - these are some of the results from uh just good teaching. This is not contemplative. So, what does contemplative practice add to this because it - we noticed right away that there was a tremendous richness here because of what we're talking about earlier in terms of uh being able to bring in a greater richness. Now, part of the problem is with this conventional approach to wait time is that teachers don't want to wait 3 seconds. They're uncomfortable with 3 seconds of silence. [00:17:08.04] DAVID: Yeah, I was thinking that because when you're Thich Nhat Hanh ringing the bell or the teachers taking a moment, our society is so used to like hit the buzzer as quick as you can so you can answer first. You're the one in front and waiting has this availability to think a little bit longer. To I don't know there is some weirdness with like allowing us to think. That's what our brains do and we - when you can integrate the thinking and the contemplativeness of how you feel about the question which is proposed then you can - formulate a better answer almost. And 3 seconds isn't that long. 1, 2, 3. [00:17:47.18] RICHARD: Yeah, but you know a lot of times too teachers feel like got a lot of material to cover and they rush through the day and uh - that's a whole other topic but -- [00:17:58.15] DAVID: Call that rush time? [00:18:00.03] RICHARD: LAUGHS. Yeah, I guess so. So, what happens when contemplative teachers practice this? And we use this technique with our students where we have them actually practice in their classrooms that where they're teaching or student teaching or whatever. Part of it is that they practice being present in their bodies during that three second wait. A lot of times, teachers who aren't given this - kind of training about embodied presence tend to look nervous. You know, they're waiting for the 3 seconds - there's a kind of awkwardness, a blankness, an impatience. But, contemplative teachers are taught to just stand there. Just be present. Make connection with the students, but be confident in their stillness. And, so that creates a kind of calmness with the students where they - learn to reflect. They learn to dig deeper and that's why the number of responses and everything like that that you get conventionally takes on a deeper level when the teacher's presence is there. There is also - in the teacher's presence in silence there is - the opportunity for the teacher to empathize with the students. To actually make a connection with them. To have that empty moment when they're just there noticing the students. Apart from the question itself just that time to make that deep personal connection even though its unspoken. And uh - itÕs also time for the teacher to check in with themselves you know. What are my expectations for students answers to this questions? Can I relax those a little bit? Am I feeling a lot of anxiety because we're running late in class you know can I come to the present moment let a little bit of that go. You know so itÕs a mini practice time for teachers. And, a time to become more authentic in their discussion with the students because of that checking in and bringing more of themselves to that moment. So, you know the other part is that you really have to prepare the students for - for this kind of thing you know because the students are - used to being competitive and being the first one and the best one or they're used to - you know, I can never think that quickly so I am not going to bother. [00:20:52.09] DAVID: Oh interesting. [00:20:53.17] RICHARD: So, you're giving the students a chance to fully participate from wherever they are. And, if you actually talk about this with the students - you know - how many of you always raise your hand the first moment? Even though you haven't completely formulated the answer, but you know you can think well on your feet so you're going to do it and you know you're excited about learning and all this and how many of you just you know you can't do it. I can't do this stuff you know. I'm a bad student you know. And uh - itÕs interesting to bring in these different learning styles of students into the wholeness of the picture. Because some students just because of the way their minds work - it takes them longer to come up with - with answers and often times those answers - have a more profound quality. They're maybe a little bit off the topic perhaps, but they bring in a dimension that is real you know. You're actually inviting the students who are there to - to come from where they are. To bring themselves to the material to the discussion. So, it becomes a very rich, rich situation uh - when the students are included in the intention of this practice. So, they begin to instead of being so competitive begin to appreciate what other students have to offer if its handled well. [00:22:31.18] DAVID: Yeah interesting to think too when I was in school - high school back in California - I was one of those students where it would take me a little bit of time to think of the answer, but most of the time I would kind of know what's going on. And I wouldn't raise my hand because I'm like someone else will answer it. Didn't know what was going on but I wouldn't want to answer it because other people can probably get there faster so you know we'll just let them handle it because they're good - that's their job. So, that's really interesting to think. I've never thought of it that l like oh I was one of those students that would just kind of hang back and oh I know this one but you've got this. [00:23:08.17] RICHARD: Yeah, it changes the whole dynamic of the classroom when you can do this. And, it does take more time. To do it this way. And again, that points to a difference in contemplative education I think - what's more important you know. Covering things quickly and somewhat superficially or allowing there to be greater depth and personal connection with the material. [00:23:41.08] DAVID: Yeah, and I've also noticed in the contemplative situation of being in the classroom is that other students really do want to hear what everyone else has to say because they know there is richness within those answers. So, everyone is holding a container for each other and - and wanting to hear from everyone else. And so, there is an opportunity for everyone to speak up and speak from their truth and say what they need to say what they need to say with any topic that is arising. [00:24:08.16] RICHARD: Right. So, I just want to read one personal experience from -- 8th grade or it was middle school teacher from New Mexico who was in our program. She - she wrote, I noticed other timid voices appeared around the topic. Student voices. There was more space in the discussion. More room for other people in the class. I felt a little lighter. A little freer. An immense gratitude for my willingness to just relax a little. [00:24:46.09] DAVID: Nice. And what program was that that she was in? [00:24:49.17] RICHARD: She was in the master's of contemplative education. [00:24:54.10] DAVID: Yeah it seems like there is something here. And it works. [00:24:59.02] RICHARD: Yes. [00:25:00.08] DAVID: Feeling lighter. Like feeling lighter in a classroom - wouldn't we all want to feel that? Not this heavy rushing or maybe even disconnected like every - itÕs hard to be disconnected in a classroom when everyone is engaging. [00:25:14.09] RICHARD: Yes, Naropa's founder called it the intersection of discipline and delight. [00:25:20.08] DAVID: That sounds yummy. [00:25:22.03] RICHARD: ItÕs all very disciplined, but there is that lightness. There is that - freedom in which other timid voices can appear. [00:25:31.23] DAVID: Cool. Well, I have a question for you. Has there been a class like a full class or an entire semester where you're teaching and the dynamic is so different and vast that you almost have to change how you teach? Have you stepped into a classroom and like wow this classroom - these - these kids feel different? I might have to change what I am doing. And you - you know you have this model you're walking into and you're like ok this might not work. I have to change it right now. Or - have you ever been like taken aback like wow these students are really challenging me in a good way and instantly you shift how you show up as a teacher? [00:26:15.01] RICHARD: Yeah! I mean it should happen all the time you know on a greater or lesser level because you are dealing with real human beings and in this moment and the material should be alive and it should be flexible enough so that you can tailor it to what's actually happening. [00:26:36.08] DAVID: I'm sure most teachers confront some like heavy energy of this is what I am doing. And don't tell me what to do. [00:26:44.18] RICHARD: Yeah. And there are many ways to approach that, but you know what comes up in the moment you know and you have to - trust that. You know sometimes in those situations I'll ask a question or try to draw out somebody's experience or something like that, but you know you have to trust your - your instincts. [00:27:06.16] DAVID: So, when we talk about whole education or contemplative education we factor in feelings. We factor in emotions. How does emotion and feeling inform the information in which we're learning different from just having information in your brain. It seems as though we are informing the body, the emotion, the state of being and the mind. Why is that important compared to just the information held within the mind? [00:27:39.15] RICHARD: Well, ultimately there is no difference between what happens cognitively and what happens emotionally. They're inter related. You know if you're walking down the path and you perceive something - you have an emotional response to that. It may be very subtle. It may be very strong. ItÕs the same when you encounter any kind of educational situation. You're reading the material, you're having a discussion. You know you like what somebody says. You don't like it. You have uh - you're on neutral experience of it but there is some kind of - emotional response that's there. And, that often is seen as problematic. You know we should just look at the facts you know. And, our personal especially emotional response is just muddies up the water. So, there is again this discipline about how to work with emotions which is very important in this process. ItÕs not just about oh I hate that stuff. I mean you might start there. But if you learn contemplative practice - you're feeling that I hate this stuff - but you pause before you share it so its modulated a little bit. And, and then it becomes ok. Either the teacher or yourself - what is it about this that you hate? Maybe itÕs your experience from the past. Maybe itÕs an - purely an idea. Maybe its you've read something which is very different than this. It could be a lot of things, but then it becomes rather than just ok - here's what the author says. I am going to learn it - I have included my emotional responses to that in way that it becomes personal to me. It becomes part of my relationship with the material. So, as I'm - reading this - there are parts of that really grab me. I really like this stuff! Or I can't stand this stuff. But, all that's valuable. All of that is part of our response to this and if we explore that - if we dig into that then we make real connection with the material we're learning and it stays with us in a very personal way rather than just being something objective and outside of ourselves. [00:30:20.06] DAVID: Wow. So much to be known here. [00:30:22.21] RICHARD: Oh, itÕs amazing. LAUGHS [00:30:25.04] DAVID: Well, I think that's our time and it was really a pleasure to speak with you and thank you for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with us. [00:30:32.01] RICHARD: Oh, I enjoyed it. Thank you. [00:30:34.16] DAVID: That was Richard Brown on our podcast. He is a core faculty member in the Contemplative Education. And it was a pleasure speaking with him. So, thank you again. [00:30:42.19] RICHARD: Thank you. [MUSIC] On behalf of the Naropa community thank you for listening to Mindful U. The official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu or follow us on social media for more updates. [MUSIC]