Pausing for More: An Exploratory Pedagogical Experience with Mindfulness and Productivity

As college students adapt to new workloads and freedom while facing significant stressors and time management struggles, they need tools to assist their transition. Mindfulness practices have consistently been found to be beneficial to college students' mental health. Twenty-six students took the Brown & Ryan (2003) Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) in class, participated in a classroom presentation on mindfulness, purposeful pausing to destress/re-center, and typical personal productivity methods such as time management tools and commonly adopted systems. Then, they selected a way to practice mindfulness and a productivity tool from an in-class presentation and tried implementing them both for three to five weeks depending on when they were able to report progress during the semester again. At this second reporting juncture, students re-took the MAAS, and completed a Qualtrics survey about their practice experience. Students self-reported slightly increased mindfulness via the MAAS, the Qualtrics survey, and anecdotally. Via qualitative feedback, students described their experience of learning the mindfulness and productivity tools in the classroom as understanding, welcoming and comfortable, and of feeling "seen and heard." Briefly inserting mindfulness and productivity tool instruction into courses, periodically mentioning or having student-initiated conversations about these topics, and setting a faculty expectation that students practice these "best practice" tools, may prove beneficial to students regardless of academic major.