Introduction

Over the past five years, I have worked mostly with undergraduates and postgraduates in UK universities and high school students undertaking foundation year or IELTS preparation programmes in China. On joining the middle school, I was, therefore, largely unprepared for the immature behaviour of many grade 6 students. The first unit of the course was a struggle.

Reflecting on the relative chaos of unit one in the hope of finding a way to make working with grade 6 students more tolerable, I identified the students’ inability to focus as a major obstacle. During a professional development session on Approaches To Learning (ATL) skills, I delved into the materials available for helping students to concentrate and came away with a video intended to help students calm themselves by focusing on their breathing. This video featured a flower and a candle with some soothing music. The idea is simple, the students breathe in through their nose when they see the flower (as if smelling the flower) and breathe out through their mouth when they see the candle (as if blowing out the candle) and thus perform a basic breathing meditation.

Screenshots of the video from Candle and Flower Breathing – Mindful and Calming Breathing Technique – YouTube

I decided to make this a significant component of unit two and played the video at the start of every grade 6 lesson. This article discusses the results.

The Process

As noted above, I played this video at the start of every lesson for unit 2. There would obviously be no point in playing the video if the students were running around wildly so before playing the video, I called the students to attention and waited until they were relatively quiet (by their standards) before starting.

Once I started the video, I left it to play through to the end regardless of what the students were actually doing. I modelled the breathing behaviour at the front of the class and this certainly helped calm my nerves 😊

Once the video was over, I made a general comment about the class’s relative calmness before starting the lesson. Where specific students had not engaged and had been disruptive during the breathing exercise, I criticized them directly. Unsurprisingly, these students were the ones who have serious difficulties focusing and exhibit the poorest academic performance in my classes. Anecdotally and logically, there is a very clear correlation between the ability to focus and the ability to produce effective work.

Progress

As unit two progressed, I had reason to believe that this activity was working. The time required to get the students to quieten down reduced as the unit progressed. By the end of the second week, when they saw the picture of the flower on the screen at the start of the lesson, around three-quarters of the students were sitting down quietly ready to do the breathing exercise. This was a massive leap in improved discipline from the two or three students who had typically been ready to start class on time during unit one. In unit one, the average amount of time it took to settle the students down ready to start class had been anywhere between ten and twenty minutes, that was up to half of the class time! By the fourth week of unit 2, this settle down time was reduced on average to well under ten minutes, including the time taken watching the video.

I also noticed that the students were, on average, much better engaged in their work. However, there were several other factors that vie for the status of causal stimulus. Most obviously, the students had just experienced the three-way conference where I directly discussed their classroom behaviour with their parents. It can safely be assumed that several students received a significant amount of parental pressure to improve their classroom behaviour after that meeting. In addition, at the end of unit one, I asked the students to produce a small booklet as a review of the unit and I noticed that they were far more engaged in this activity than they had been with the work they were reflecting on. Indeed, several students even wrote reflective accounts of work that they hadn’t even completed! In response to this, I pushed most of the written work for unit two into a similar creative book format. It is possible that this way of working kept the students better engaged than the worksheets I had prepared for unit one.

Despite these competing explanations for the improved behaviour, none of which are mutually exclusive, I felt that the breathing activity with the flower and candle video was probably at least a contributory factor and worthy of more investigation. Therefore, after three weeks of completing the activity at the start of every lesson, I began a reflective activity that we completed after the video where the students would measure their relative engagement with the activity on a continuum as shown in the image below.

While we were doing the breathing activity, I also made a mark on the continuum for each student so they could compare their internally evaluated engagement with the task to my externally observed judgement. Of course, I could only meaningfully identify those who were clearly not engaged because they were doing some other activity, such as talking to their friend, during the video. In this way, it was perfectly possible for a student to look fully engaged but not to be engaged. However, where I marked a student as not engaged, there is no doubt about their lack of engagement. It would be interesting to see whether any students are so unaware of what they are doing at any given time that they marked themselves as being fully engaged even when they were not paying attention to the video at all. To accomplish this comparison between the student’s self-evaluation and my external judgement, we used a simple comparative scale as shown below.

We completed this reflective exercise after the video in each lesson for one week and the results are presented below.

Results of the Reflection

Before I present the data, I acknowledge that this data set is very limited and is, at best, rudimentary. So, with that caveat out of the way, here are the results.

Figure 1 below shows my record of the students’ engagement in the activity. As noted above, those I observed to be engaged may or may not have actually been engaged. Those who were not engaged were, without a shadow of doubt, not engaged.

To display the students’ self-evaluations for each day of the week, I divided the engagement continuum into five categories: not engaged, mostly not engaged, somewhere in the middle, mostly engaged and fully engaged. The results are shown in Table 1 below. The extent to which the students’ answers corroborated my observation is also recorded.

Table 1 – Students’ self-evaluations and my observations

Table 2 shows a more detailed investigation into the comparison with my observation to see whether those rated slightly or very different were generally rated more or less engaged by me compared to the student.

Table 2 – where teacher and student evaluations differ, who judged greater engagement?

When asked whether engagement in the breathing activity helped them to focus better in that lesson, 14 respondents answered ‘yes’ to 1 responding ‘no’. Other responses included (complete with original language errors):

• a tentative ‘maybe yes’
• ‘I think so-so’
• ‘I can focus but I don’t think that the breathing activity can help me focus’
• a weird line drawing of what I guess is supposed to be a minotaur
• ‘I think the video is anway, I can see and can’t is not different to me.’
• ‘I think the exercise help me a lot in classes, but that’s not enough. I will do more serious.’
• ‘Is ok, but I do so many this kind of pretect, so I fell some boring.’

Further comments in the students’ reflective writing include (again, complete with language errors):

• ‘I feel more peaceful.’
• ‘I fell nice because I am sick because it colde.’
• ‘The breath make me feel good and I’m thinking about how can I be more focus in class.’
• ‘I feel gooooooooooood’
• ‘feel calm down’
• ‘I think this not make me be more good’
• ‘calmness’
• ‘better than we don’t have this. Make me feel more focus and I can be very good in the class.’
• ‘It make me fell to listen careful in the class.’
• ‘I feel very relaxy’
• ‘Ctrl+v’
• ‘It can makes me calm down and focus on work.’
• ‘it makes me feels calm’
• ‘good’
• ‘I feel relaxed and comfortable, but I like the music in this video.’
• ‘I feel relaxed and fluent.’
• ‘fucus’
• ‘unhappy’
• ‘I feel like I am thristy’
• ‘calm, focusing’

Discussion

So, what does this tell us? Well, before embarking on my interpretation of these results, I would like to once again acknowledge the serious limitations in the data collection and analysis. It should be quite obvious that the engagement continuum is open to interpretation and there are no clear standardized criteria for evaluation, so one student’s engaged may well be another’s not engaged. Furthermore, student responses are clearly wide open to acquiescence bias and other inaccuracies. Nevertheless, some potentially useful interpretations can be made.

First, Figure 1 shows my markings are most densely distributed in the middle or to the right of the spectrum. This indicates that the students were mostly sitting in their chairs looking in the direction of the video, whether mentally engaged in the activity or not. If Monday’s results are removed (marked in red), which was the first day we started evaluating engagement, this pattern is more pronounced. Perhaps the realization that we would be measuring engagement itself led to increased engagement. My observation data also shows inconsistency on different days with Tuesday (marked in blue) being particularly positive with Wednesday (green) and Friday (yellow) showing less engagement. Perhaps there is scope for a bigger more robust research project here but the main point I would like to make from my data is that, from my classroom management perspective, the fact that most students were sitting quietly facing the video can be considered a success.

Table 1 supports these observations, showing that the majority of students self-reported to be mostly engaged or fully engaged. This clearly fits with my observations recorded in Figure 1 and my anecdotal observation that the students seemed more settled in class during unit 2 than unit 1. The table also shows that my judgements were mostly the same as the students’ self-evaluations or only slightly different, indicating that we were on the same page irrespective of whether an individual student was trying to report what they believed I wanted to read. Table 2 indicates that where differences of opinion were reported, the majority of these were me judging the student to be more engaged than they self-reported. This suggests that my external judgement based on the students’ sitting down quietly and looking in the direction of the video is a reasonably accurate measure of their perceived engagement in the breathing activity. In any case, as noted above, the simple fact that most students were sitting down quietly and facing the video means that this project can be considered a success.

Furthermore, the students’ reflective written responses are mostly positive with the words ‘calm’, ‘relaxed’ and ‘focus’ showing up repeatedly. I would like to believe that these are not all examples of acquiescence bias. Even if they are all biased, at least the students are now aware of this vocabulary and probably better understand the concepts the words encapsulate. This was by no means evident during unit 1. Again, this is another positive outcome of this activity.

Finally, there is further evidence supporting my own anecdotal observations that the candle and flower video is a beneficial activity. A colleague who has also been running the video in his classes remarked that “the candle and flower video is definitely helping” and one of my students requested that I share the video file with him so he could continue to use it in his own time. That means that three people who were directly involved in this project are very definite advocates of its effectiveness.

Conclusion

Despite the limitations of the data collection, the very rudimentary nature of this small study and the presence of numerous other uncontrolled variables that could impact student behaviour, I have reason to believe that the practice of starting the grade 6 class with a breathing activity to encourage mindfulness is a positive use of class time. The evidence suggests that this activity reduces the most chaotic immature behaviour and corresponding noise levels. It may also help the students focus on their classwork. As a consequence, unit two has been far more tolerable than unit one and the students have undoubtedly been more productive in their studies.

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