Meditation

Activity

Setting the tone activities, Warm up activities

Meditation provides an opportunity for students to relax before or after teaching.

Tech needed: Video conferencing

Asynchronous

Accessibility: Auditory

Duration: 5-30 mins

Student preparation: None

Educator preparation: None

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

Opportunity for students and educators to relax before or after teaching.

Wellbeing.

Open a 5 minute meditation video, like this example or any others you prefer.
The example video has a 5 minute guided meditation focusing on the breath. This is beneficial for everyone and can be done anytime during the day, either as needed or as a daily practice. I often use this either at the start or at the very end of my class with my students. I sometimes lead the meditation myself, or play a guided meditation video. I’ve found that students remarkably benefit from meditating for 5 minutes and they often tell me that they don’t remember the last time they just sat still. I teach adults and naturally many are stressed because of their jobs, family obligations or anything under the sun, really. So since many of us aren’t in the habit of locating time for ourselves to relax, and since they’ve already carved out the class time in their busy schedules, I like to give them 5 minutes back for themselves.

This is recommended to be an optional activity, so you can say so to students, but more often than not they stick around for it.
Recommend they close their video so they aren’t self-conscious of others watching them, and inside a classroom invite them to turn around and face the wall so they experience this also without worrying about others looking at them therefore interfering with their attention and focus on the practice.
Explain that this is not a religious practice or related to any particular faith, it is instead a simple guided relaxation session.

The meditation itself takes about 6 minutes, with the explanation before it and getting back to class can take a total of 10 minutes.