Mindful Assessment


Book Description

2017 REVERE Awards Finalist 2016 Foreword INDIES Winner It is time to rethink the relationship between teaching and learning and assess the crucial skills students need to succeed in the 21st century. The authors assert that educators must focus assessment on mindfulness and feedback for improvement, framing assessment around six fluencies students need to cultivate. The book provides scenarios, lessons, activities, and assessment rubrics. Benefits Discover the essential fluencies and skills students need for success in the 21st century. Examine different kinds of assessments and their focuses, strengths, and weaknesses. Gain assessment rubrics for evaluating students' skills in the fluencies. Access sample lessons and projects that support the fluencies.




Mindful Assessment


Book Description

The book provides scenarios, lessons, activities, and assessment rubrics that allow educators to focus assessment on mindfulness and feedback for improvement, framing assessment around six fluencies students need to cultivate.




Beyond the Content


Book Description

Learn how to tackle the hardest parts of taking a test—stress, anxiety, self-doubt—with Beyond the Content. In this quick read, you'll learn how mindfulness can help you conquer the voices in your head, study better, and approach the test with confidence. Most test prep books, textbooks, and classes miss the mark by only focusing on strategy and content. This essential guide tackles the other half of test prep: mindfulness and your mental performance. Mindfulness is widely embraced in the business and athletic communities as a valuable technique to optimize performance. Author Logan Thompson, an expert in both test prep and mindfulness, says that it's about time the test prep community embraces it as well. In the book, Thompson explains, "The other half of test prep is the world of fleeting thoughts and emotions, always flickering, always murmuring inside your head, usually going unnoticed and unremarked upon. They shape our perceptions and perspectives. And, they dictate our performance on tests. The other half of test prep is happening all the time, whether we like it or not. Your mental and emotional state, your surfacing memories, your underlying beliefs are always there. The good news is that, by acknowledging the other half of test prep, exploring it, and working with it, you can gain access to your full potential."




The Mindful School


Book Description

Formerly a SkyLight publication Kay Burke, renowned author and educator, takes readers step-by-step in building a conceptual understanding of alternative assessments and demonstrates practical applications of assessment strategies.




Becoming Mindful


Book Description

According to a 2012 National Institutes of Health survey, 18 million adults in the United States -- 8% of the adult population -- practice some type of meditation. What are the possible applications of meditation -- and mindfulness in particular -- in psychotherapy and psychiatry? Becoming Mindful: Integrating Mindfulness Into Your Psychiatric Practice tackles this issue in a down-to-earth manner designed for immediate applicability. Whereas most other books on the topic focus on the benefits of mindfulness either for the clinician or for the patient, Becoming Mindful offers chapters on both, providing advice on how clinicians can establish a personal mindfulness practice and encourage their patients to do the same, both during sessions and at home. For clinician and patient alike, the handbook discusses the practical aspects of mindfulness, from the most effective postures to specific practices, and offers solutions for overcoming common obstacles, including restlessness and boredom, sleepiness, and sensory craving. Several chapters feature embedded exercises and guided meditations, and an appendix with audio guided meditations and a resource list provides psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric residents, social workers, counselors, and nurse practitioners, among others, with readily accessible tools to use in sessions with patients. Key takeaways summarize each chapter's content, making it easy for busy clinicians to quickly reference the information they need to most effectively treat patients, even those in special populations, including children and adolescents; patients battling substance addiction; and patients suffering from such disorders as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. With additional sections on mindful eating, mindfulness and technology, and the growing field of positive psychiatry, this book introduces readers to the full scope of benefits that mindfulness has to offer.




Mindful Safety


Book Description

Synthesising the latest thinking from neuroscience and psychology with the practice of safety management, Mindful Safety shows how a much stronger safety culture can be built from the ground up. Case studies, applied research and practical exercises all demonstrate how attention, and the ability to focus, can significantly boost performance and resilience, whilst reducing human error and the number of safety incidents. Representing a new kind of safety thinking to meet contemporary challenges, the book covers four critical levels: the individual, the relational, the organisational and the societal. The approach can be successfully applied to the healthcare, road, rail, aviation and energy sectors for greater safety and performance. The emphasis on self-care, strengthening relationships and learning from positives signals a clear shift in safety management thinking. This is not just an insightful, analytical approach, but an action-based one ready for implementation. Few approaches in the field tackle the subjects of sleep, fatigue, distraction, smartphone addiction, workplace stress and mental health with the same vigour, or provide the safety toolkit for fighting a pandemic. If you want to create the right mindset to achieve exceptional results in these uncertain times, this book will show you how. It is aimed at professionals in the health and safety industry, as well as graduate students in human factors, ergonomics, industrial engineering and production engineering.




Assessing Mindfulness and Acceptance Processes in Clients


Book Description

How does mindfulness work? Thousands of therapists utilize mindfulness-based treatments and have witnessed firsthand the effectiveness of these approaches on clients suffering from anxiety, depression, and other common mental health issues. But for many clinicians, the psychological processes and brain functions that explain these changes remain a mystery, and effective methodologies for measuring each client's progress are elusive. In Assessing Mindfulness and Acceptance Processes in Clients, Ruth Baer presents a collection of articles by some of the most respected mindfulness researchers and therapists practicing today. Each contribution assesses the variables that represent potential processes of change, such as mindfulness, acceptance, self-compassion, spirituality, and focus on values, and determines the importance of each of these processes to enhanced psychological functioning and quality of life. Clinicians learn to accurately measure each process in individual clients, an invaluable skill for any practicing therapist. A seminal contribution to the existing professional literature on mindfulness-based treatments, this book is also an essential resource for any mental health professional seeking to illuminate the processes at work behind any mindfulness and acceptance-based therapy.




Reframing Assessment to Center Equity


Book Description

This book makes the case for assessment of student learning as a vehicle for equity in higher education. The book proceeds through a framework of “why, what, how, and now what.” The opening chapters present the case for infusing equity into assessment, arguing that assessment professionals can and should be activists in advancing equity, given the historic and systemic use of assessment as an impediment to the educational access and attainment of historically marginalized populations. The “what” chapters offer definitions of emerging terms, discuss the narratives of equity in evidence of student learning, present models and approaches to promoting equity, and explore the relationship between knowledge systems and assessment practice. The “how” chapters begin by progressively moving from the classroom to the program, then beyond the program level to share examples from student affairs. Subsequent chapters address the problem of equitable access to STEM fields; culturally responsive practices within the context of community colleges; the ongoing work of culturally situated assessment practices in Historically Black Colleges and Universities; and the role of technology-enabled assessment as a possible tool for equitable assessment. The final two chapters in the book address the “now what”, providing a way for assessment professional to develop individual awareness within their practice as a next step in the equity journey, and a conceptual framework to anchor equity in their work.




Handbook of Mindfulness


Book Description

An authoritative handbook, this volume offers both a comprehensive review of the current science of mindfulness and a guide to its ongoing evolution. Leading scholars explore mindfulness in the context of contemporary psychological theories of attention, perceptual processing, motivation, and behavior, as well as within a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue with the contemplative traditions. After surveying basic research from neurobiological, cognitive, emotional/affective, and interpersonal perspectives, the book delves into applications of mindfulness practice in healthy and clinical populations, reviewing a growing evidence base. Examined are interventions for behavioral and emotion dysregulation disorders, depression, anxiety, and addictions, and for physical health conditions.




Mindful Teaching and Learning


Book Description

Mindful Teaching and Learning: Developing a Pedagogy of Well-Being features a community of scholar-practitioners from across disciplines, methodologies, and ideological perspectives exploring and examining contexts that support mindful teaching, mindful learning, and a pedagogy of well-being. Collectively, these chapters document and analyze the opportunities and challenges within pedagogical sites and discuss how the disposition of mindfulness can be nurtured and sustained in educational practice and praxis. Bolstered by the positive evidence-based standards emanating from clinical settings, mindfulness based training has spread into a variety of other fields like psychology, healthcare, and more recently, education. Within pedagogical environments, an emergent secular conception of mindfulness, under the auspices of educational psychologists like Langer (1987; 1997), Goleman, (2008), Lantieri (2008), Roeser, Skinner, Beers, and Jennings, (2012), and Schonert-Reichl and Lawlor (2010), is making headway. Consequently, Mindfulness Training (MT) resources have been applied to educational contexts in order to maximize the academic, emotional, physical, and psychological benefits provided by this mind-body approach to well-being. Acknowledging the increasing evidence base for the efficacy of mindfulness interventions as well as the elevated stress levels reported by many educators and their students, this book discusses how mindful practices, praxis, and research can inform and support pedagogy, curriculum, and leadership initiatives in higher education in the twenty-first century. Alongside the multitude of recent studies in the area of Mindfulness, contributors discuss their own experiences using Self-study, Contemplative pedagogy, Living Educational Theory, and Curriculum Inquiry. The content of this book examines ways in which to develop habits of mind and courses of action, as well as a curriculum of study that can support educators as they cultivate competencies for thriving and coping with the modern demands of being a teacher.