Mindfulness in tutoring makes all the difference to helping a student achieve their goals and feel good about their grades. Everyone likes to promote mindfulness, but the truth is that conscious thinking in education is way more difficult than it seems.
There are so many factors that are beyond our control as tutors. We have the opportunity to connect with a student for just a few moments out of their day.
No matter what a student’s family life is like, the time we do have can go a long way to helping them develop healthy mental processes that contribute to lifelong learning.
And that experience should continue long after we work with them.
Key Steps for Mindfulness
- Our reactions determine our mental and physical health. For the student, a positive attitude is equally important to your knowledge of the subject material. You can set an example for your students by giving a consistently positive presentation and showing them you really believe in their ability to succeed.
- When you work with students, it is your responsibility to provide them with quality information. If we fail to do this, we bring stress to students. Stress literally makes students sick and factors into 75% of illness and disease.
The point is that we should all pay attention to what our students say. Your job is not only to teach them and provide them with accurate information, but to encourage them to think positively and increase awareness of the negative thoughts they may be thinking. This can be achieved through the art of focus.
However, attitude is impossible to fake. Our true selves eventually come out. Mindful understanding of our true selves is not always easy to detect since we all have subconscious feelings. Dr. Caroline Leaf has developed a 5-step process to help ensure you can project mindfulness in tutoring.
These steps are not 1-minute miracles, and they take time to build out. The reflection can ultimately help define a positive experience for your students that will make them want to come back and work with you again and again.
Five Steps to Positive Thinking
- Gather: What thoughts are passing through your conscious mind at the moment? Can you determine the attitude of those thoughts? What feelings are they generating?
- Focused Reflection: What thoughts consistently flow through your mind? What would you like to directly change?
- Write: Based on steps 1 and 2, take a moment to write a mind map of the thoughts going through your mind. Enhance authenticity by writing it out as creatively as you wish. You can use color, diagram, and illustration to describe the process.
- Revisit: Identify the negative thoughts that you wrote down in your mind map. How can they be redesigned in a way that will help you live the kind of life you want?
- Active Reach: Choose one thought that you would like to change. Review it in its current state and redefine it in detail. Dwell on that new thought and own it as your current reality.
It’s critical to recognize that you can enable your thoughts to act with mindfulness in building your study skills. That positive energy will directly affect the lives of your students.
The shocking truth about tutoring is that competence and a positive attitude go hand in hand!
No matter what, it’s the way that you think that actually determines how far you can take your students. As tutors, we have the great privilege and responsibility to set a positive example and show mindfulness in tutoring.