A teaching breather — a temporary and intentional pause in instruction during the semester — can help students refocus in your course and give you some extra catch-up time for research or mentoring. To create a teaching breather, consider the following strategies:
- Flip the classroom. Give pre-recorded lectures or find a good video through Kanopy. Have students view the video and complete the “homework” during class time. The homework that they complete does not need to be done in synchronous class time, and may be practice problems. The faculty member can review a sample problem when the students return to class after the pause.
- Give the students a thinking pause. Bill Gates and other creative leaders declare breaks like “think week.” While a week may be too long during a university course, a day or two would likely give students and faculty similar results. During the thinking pause, the challenge is to find boredom. Literally. Try to stay away from electronics and be bored. Students can submit a one-sentence description of how they found their boredom and what that break led them to imagine creatively. Faculty can evaluate this sentence for a completion grade, i.e. did students write/not the sentence? Idea for thinking break adapted from https://alifeofproductivity.com/experiment-taking-a-bill-gates-think-week/
- Another exercise for the thinking pause is to reflect and to apply intention to the work that you want to accomplish. Students can decide, for example, what activities are essential for themselves for the rest of the semester. As no one has likely asked them to think intentionally about their lives, this practice may be new. We suggest the following prompts:
- What are you appreciating about your life right now?
- What goals do you have for yourself this semester?
- How are you taking care of yourself right now?
- What goals will advance your life and which goals won’t? How can you eliminate the goals that don’t move you ahead?
- Assign your students a mindfulness day. Ask them to spend the class time completing a mindfulness activity such as those available from the Barnes Center under Virtual Mind Spa.
- Task students with future thinking. Give them a day to imagine a future project. The project must use the course material/concepts. Students must describe their project in a single sentence.
–Collected by Martha Diede, Director, Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence