Holistic Education

What is Holistic Education?

Mindfulness, peace of mind, educating all parts of yourself. A famous researcher by the name of Carl Rogers theorized that there are 3 different domains of education for the whole person: Skills, Cognition, and Emotion.

Skills are specific set of abilities, such as being able to throw a ball, or solve a quadratic equation, or use a knife to peel an apple

Cognition is the ability to gain knowledge by listening, studying, watching, etc.. This is how most of the process of learning happens. For example, cognition is required to learn a new concept such as how to use a tablet operating system, or a new writing style.

Emotion is the feeling you have when you encounter a stimulus from the world. For example, what you feel when presented with a problem you cannot solve, or when you hear a song you really love.

Another educator by the name of Steven Katz agreed that learning is necessarily something that changes a person's behaviour noticeably. For example, do you remember when you learned how to walk? Probably not, but at some point, you didn't know how to walk and you just crawled around. Can you imagine going back to that? It was tough to learn how to walk, but now that you know how, why would you ever go back to crawling? Walking is so much more efficient. You have truly learned something deep and meaningful. It is our hope that through this math class, you will learn many things about mathematics deeply, so that work that you do in the future will be easier and faster. Behaviours and routines that we use in this class will also teach you about what is important, even though it is not specifically taught.

References:

Holistic Apps for Busy Teachers. https://gfolinazzo.wixsite.com/holisticapps. Accessed August 11, 2017.

Gratitude Journals

We will be using an online gratitude journal this year to keep track of all the things for which we are grateful. Showing gratitude or even simply being grateful for something yourself has proven to reduce stress, improve rest during sleep, and make you happier! Who doesn't want to be happy??

How to create a gratitude journal: Create your own Google Doc or Google Sheet where you can write something every day. You don't have to share it with anyone yet, but throughout the course, I hope that we can learn to share some of our gratitudes with each other. Sharing gratitudes can also be a morale booster for you and for me. Here is an example of a gratitude journal that you can copy if you would like, or simply come up with your own design:

<insert example here>

Gratitude: A Powerful Tool for your classroom. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/gratitude-powerful-tool-for-classroom-owen-griffith. Accessed Aug 10, 2017.

Meditation and Mindfulness

Meditation has proven to relax the body and the mind and increase productivity. Sometimes, in our busy lives, you need to just stop and relax and do nothing for a little while (not for too long!). This gives you time to calm down and relax your brain so that you can think more efficiently and faster afterwards. have you ever stayed up really late to work on something? And when you get tired, you just cannot focus or it takes twice as long to do something than it normally does? You need to rest, and meditation can be an even faster way of resting than sleeping.