Читать книгу Be mindful - María Teresa Victoria - Страница 8

Foreword

The Emotional Intelligence courses undertaken since the beginning of my career as an English teacher came to a turning-point during the PINEP Program run at the Teachers Training Centre CEP Marbella-Coin in 2018 (Reference: 182923GES251).

The contributions of the PINEP program proved to be the most interesting to top up the experience I had built up as an emotional intelligence practitioner in the English classroom since 1993. The program’s proposals and techniques were developed within B1 Certificate candidates in 2018 focusing mainly and most importantly on how to improve my students speaking competence and skills. So some innovative Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence activities and interventions were brought into the classroom to build up new strategies for the students to tackle their final speaking examination tasks.

The 2018 experience helped candidates [1] FOCUS ONLY on the interactive task with their partner, and nothing else (nervousness, the unexpected, unwanted topics, unusual partners, etc); [2] GET RID of distractions and/or insecurities; [3] BECOME AWARE of their own speaking productions and of pointing out at the most useful items to deliver their best Monologues and Dialogues; [4] REDUCE stress and, [5] CONCENTRATE on speech. The candidates feedback after their practices was interesting: (a) they felt more capable of managing their emotions under pressure, (b) their self esteem was risen, (c) they were more confident when delivering Monologues, (e) they overcame block-outs, (f) their actual performance improved resulting in a genuine interactive task where a dialogue is not two monologues, (g) they were able to focus on breathing until their “mind manages to come back” to the written instructions they need to read and follow, (h) they were able to create conscious Monologues “with a beginning a middle and an end” even closed up sometimes by really witty phrases and quotes, and (i) last but not least, they seemed to enjoy the creative process of building up an intelligent interactive task here and now, which managed to engage their audience in a good improvised little theatre play.

Students admitted to having become more aware of their mistakes and how to improve for the future, learning how to build up their own strategies for when they undoubtedly will block out, growing more aware of present time (3-5min tasks), learning how to “open-develop-close up” their speech without distractions, and most importantly, learning how to register bodily techniques through Mindfulness practices to help them manage their emotions under stress.

From the examiner’s viewpoint I can say that the PINEP program developed my own ability to focus on the positives. The positives become more visible, thus resulting in an interesting more balanced perception of the candidates speaking performances with better final results. And this was just the beginning. What came next was the content of this guide, that is, research work on Mindfulness in Education that closed up my Mater’s Studies and some practical instructions and interventions in the classroom following a brief introduction to Mindfulness concepts and definition. May the reader please notice the references to audios and/or videos can be found in the same sessions of the Be Mindful proposal in my website www.mindfulenglish.net