The Conscious Classroom

Send us Fan Mail Bruce Lee, the iconic martial artist, often spoke about the value of a mind like water -- fluid, flexible, soft enough to go around obstacles, persistent enough to carve a hole in rock, and forceful enough to uproot tall trees or buildings. Water can be invisible as steam, transparent in its liquid state, and hard and opaque as ice. Our minds can be as flexible and powerful if we...

Send us Fan Mail Good relationships with adults and peers help teens navigate mental and emotional challenges more effectively than any other intervention. Friendships gone sour can snuff out the light of enthusiasm in an adolescent. How do we help our teens learn the art and science of friendship? In this Conscious Classroom episode, Amy Edelstein will map the cartography of friendship. She will...

Send us Fan Mail Hard to believe, the end of the school year is upon us! In this Conscious Classroom Webinar, Amy Edelstein will lead you in some reflections and meditations that will celebrate the year’s victories, allow more challenging times to be assimilated and transformed into lessons learned, and consciously close the year so everyone can enjoy the summer break ahead. This episode looks at...

Send us Fan Mail Resistance and frustration is an inevitable human reaction to the stressful conditions we are living in. We can learn to allow, observe, and be with our responses as they are, without creating more tension or negative self judgment. Self care means treating ourselves with kindness, learning how to be gentle when needed and how to turn our minds away from thought patterns that sap...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of special support for educators during the time of school closures looks at how we build our inner capacity so we have a little more strength. Our inner systems feel like they have very little give right now. How do we create a little more space for all the frustration? We'll talk about expanding our context, deepening our understanding of interconnectivity a...

Send us Fan Mail The end of the school year is a special time. Conscious endings and appreciation for the heartwarming things that happened during the course of the year make all the difference. As educators, we need to learn to let go, nourish ourselves with lessons learned, and release ourselves to enjoy the downtime. In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein will help you end th...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever thought about why they say "Patience is a virtue"? Virtue is not only meant  as an inherent moral goodness but also as a quality that we can develop if we apply ourselves to it over time. It is not necessarily easy to cultivate. Patience is  a coveted character trait. During the times of great challenge, we naturally want the hardship to be over. We want to...

Send us Fan Mail Teens are more stressed than ever before. The cloud of testing looms large over students and anxiety about grades and performance can incapacitate ordinarily happy kids. In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein will teach you how to help your students use mindfulness and other systems thinking practices to do their best and to gain confidence from the learning and...

Send us Fan Mail How can we integrate all we are thinking and feeling at this time? What is the Body-Mind connection? When we take into account thought patterns, the frameworks we rely on to make meaning, and the quality of our awareness, we start to open up and integrate our entire experience.  Just paying attention without also examining the context within which we are paying attention is partia...

Send us Fan Mail Kids are naturally full of energy. That energy, when channeled helps learning. And yet, as teachers we crave calm. In this episode of The Conscious Classroom Calm, Amy Edelstein will show you that calm doesn’t always look “quiet.” And quiet isn’t always calm. You’ll learn more about how to create authentic calm, ease of being, and openness in your classroom. As always, we’ll do so...

Send us Fan Mail Patience is a virtue. In our era of ever-increasing speed and ever-decreasing attention span, cultivating this virtue may be harder than ever. And yet we must. We must both cultivate our own patience and that of our students. In this Conscious Classroom episode we will work with mindful awareness tools to develop patience. Amy Edelstein will shed light on how and why doing somethi...

Send us Fan Mail In the age of coronavirus, everything has changed. Usually at this time, students would be focusing on testing skills. Now they are needing to cultivate many new habits, some good, some not so good. How do we support them to learn in a relaxed way? How do we help them to bypass self-consciousness and drop into their authenticity and creativity? Join Amy Edelstein for insight and e...

Send us Fan Mail The foundation of good learning is a good relationship with one’s teacher or mentor. Building Love & Kindness practices into your school day creates a culture of appreciation, respect, kindness, and care. In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein shares some simple ways that you can work with compassion building tools, allowing students to embrace goodness. In...

Send us Fan Mail We are living through a great cultural change, while we are in the midst of something so big it is hard to see what is changing and where it will leave us. Still, as educators, this is the time to use the best of our historical knowledge and context setting to think in constructive ways about these times and to challenge our students to think in the same way. During the Civil War,...

Send us Fan Mail In times of challenge, like we are presented with now during the Coronavirus epidemic, when we feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to handle the situation, small tools and actions can help bring groundedness, stability, and courage into our lives. Join Amy Edelstein in this episode as she shares ways to exercise a degree of choice over our circumstances and in so doing build strengt...

Send us Fan Mail Life has been upended as we know it. Now more than ever, we need tools that will provide our students with calm during the storm, compassion when nerves are fraught, and curiosity about how we can emerge triumphant and proud. In this episode, Amy Edelstein looks at the coronavirus and what that means about priorities for ourselves and our students. Support the show If you enjoyed...

Send us Fan Mail Racial stress occurs every day in diverse classrooms. Tensions between students, between teachers, on the news all affect how well we connect and teach our students. In this powerful episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein shows how mindfulness skills can diffuse racial tension and create a classroom of openness, respect, and love. Support the show If you enjoyed this ep...

Send us Fan Mail Holiday season is a time for family, warmth, and peace. For all too many of our students, holiday time is a time of stress, sadness, and distance between media images of gifts and neighborhoods of lack. Many teens, even those who come from stable homes experience depression and loneliness at this time. In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein shares mindfulness to...