In a recent puja, during a short period of meditation, one of our youngest children piped up, ‘I’m bored’. How many times have we, as parents or adults, heard ‘This is boring’ or ‘I’m bored’? And what do we say in response to this? Busy adults are rarely bored and, as we know, this does not mean that we are calm. For me, it means that I am very busy and, if not, I am often distracting myself.

Somewhat unusually perhaps, I find boredom interesting and, as a result, I want to encourage my daughter to hold that view, even though I understand that she finds boredom uncomfortable. Boredom has an edge to it. It demands a response; the mind wants to be entertained and energised. There is too much space; we need to fill it. There is nothing happening; we need to do something. It is too quiet; something must be wrong.

I encourage myself and my daughter to stay with the boredom for some time. What I often find is that the boredom shifts into something more satisfying than I expected. A creative idea emerges. Happiness can arise. I have noticed this particularly when I might seek to distract myself from the boredom by looking at Facebook or watching something. Yet, as I bounce painfully from distraction to boredom and back, I don’t seem to be touching anything deeper within myself. I seem to be getting further away from ‘my centre’.

I think we can learn a lot by observing how we oscillate between distraction (entertainment) and boredom. Why do we get distracted, or use distraction? What are we running away from that is so terrible that we find it difficult to stay with?
Perhaps our hope is that if we keep all this distractedness going, we will not have to look at who we are, we will not have to feel what we feel, we will not have to see what we see. Putting space into our lives can be an unmasking process; a scary process of facing hard facts.

The more I have looked into my own (worrying) habits of distraction, the more I frame these habits of distraction as addictive. In other words, the more I distract myself with reading online, for instance, the less I am able to tolerate my essential aloneness and quietude. It becomes really difficult to keep myself company! I am caught in a loop which I can get out of by disciplining, or convincing myself, not to distract myself in the face of what seems like boredom.

This bravery to get closer to myself is something that is really important to teach our children, in my opinion. It is essential for children to gain an understanding of themselves around this cycle, in order to become confident in themselves. I am thinking particularly of the pressures for our young people around social media and gaming.
In all classes in our school, we are teaching both mindfulness techniques and Building Learning Power (BLP). In BLP, there is a process of staying with an uncomfortable feeling, (staying in the ‘pit’ of learning) which builds confidence in independent learning. Staying in the ‘pit’ time and time again teaches children the habit of staying with difficulty and so builds a capacity to take risks in learning, to not fear failure so much and, paradoxically, not to fail as much.

It is my fervent wish that both of these approaches to learning help our children to navigate their way successfully through distraction and boredom to a confident and empowered adulthood.

These blogs from me often feel like an invitation to wax lyrical about my passions, the way I think and - as if we were part of a Venn diagram - I hope it they might overlap with your responses as an individual and in your role as a parent or carer. Another overlap is with my role as a guide for the school, a keeper and espouser of the ethos and curriculum.

In this capacity, I want to say a little more about what we are doing in terms of Building Learning Power this year and how you can invest in this approach, for the good of our children. Building Learning Power (BLP) is about sharing a set of learning dispositions. These are the tools we all use to become successful lifelong learners and can be likened to ‘building muscles’ (which links in with Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset).

“The distinguishing feature of geniuses is their passion and dedication to their craft, and particularly, the way in which they identify, confront, and take pains to remedy their weaknesses.” (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2008)

In other words, it is not what you are born with that matters, it is your mindset. Often people believe that the brain is static and that talent and giftedness are therefore permanent, unchanging personal attributes. (Children are particularly prone to this misconception). However, a wealth of research tells us that every time you work hard, stretch yourself and learn something new, your brain forms new connections and over time you actually become more intelligent. This is the approach that we want our students to adopt.

There are around sixteen learning dispositions identified by Professor Guy Claxton, who developed BLP, and we have chosen to concentrate on four in particular this year. They are: curiosity (proactiveness), adventurousness (up for a challenge), collaboration (being a team member) and perseverance (determination).

When we last met with Guy and an expert BLP practitioner in the classroom, Becky Carlzon, it became clear that using language which supports the development of these learning muscles is the key first step. I feel that if this language is used both at school and at home then real positive change is possible and these learning muscles will get stronger.

There is the idea of no comparative rewards (the best competition is yourself) and of focusing praise on achievement and effort. This last one is actually surprisingly hard to do. However, endless encouragement to work hard, keep going and experiment with whatever it is will pay off in the form of a habit of perseverance. Linked in here is debunking the myth that mistakes are terrible. Mistakes are part of the process by which great inventors came up with new things; they are an opportunity for learning.

It is also important that children know that they can grow their brains, just like athletes grow their muscles in training, in spite of occasional setbacks; they can build resilience. In lessons, we are now using words such as ‘grapple’ and ‘tricky’, and phrases such as ‘ok, I hear that you can’t do it…yet’. We are entertaining ‘could’ rather than ‘is’, opening up a world of greater creativity and possibility.

Evidence that this approach is working is when children are more game for challenging activities and are more open about how that feels; too hard, too easy or just right (with enough ‘stretch’).

During the teacher-parent meetings on Wednesday 19th October, do feel free to ask your children’s class teacher more about what they are doing to support the development of these learning dispositions. You will see that some of the displays are supporting this too.

I will leave you with one further thought from the BLP approach; as you know, children are exceptional ‘mimics’. They copy and mirror everything that goes on around them. Here is a super opportunity to consciously ‘grapple’ with what is in front of us, both as teachers in the class and in our everyday lives, to reinforce these messages of good learning habits.

Carol Dweck on Radio 4 ‘All in the Mind’ - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b062jsn7

photo: BLP tree in Rainbow class