Contemplation Strikes an Emotional Chord with Kids

Jeffrey Pflaum

It's 12:35 p.m. I'm picking up my 6th grade class from the cafeteria. You can cut the tension with a knife. The kids are sizzling. We walk upstairs. I'm waiting for something to happen. Two boys start shoving each other, back and forth. Two girls are cursing each other out, laying into their respective mothers, fathers, and grandfathers. We stop on the fourth floor. We're out of emotional breath. Thoughts of getting back to work again are repugnant to everyone—including me.

We finally get to the classroom. We're still boiling. In desperation, I reach into my desk drawer, take out a cassette tape of an old Billy Joel album, and put it into the tape player.

"Get your heads down on the desk and listen!" I bellow. Lights are off. Shades are drawn. "Sit back and relax," I tell them in a calmer voice. "Don't think about work or anything. Forget the world for a little while."

The tape ran for 15 minutes. We came out of our dreams and I asked the class, "How did you feel while listening to the music? What happened inside you?" My students spoke freely:

• "I thought I was flying."
• "I wanted to throw up."
• "My head was heavy."
• "Everything was like a dream."

Exit "Bad Vibes City"—alias the cafeteria—and enter a new world of contemplation.

We continued to listen to music on a daily basis. Weeks later, I asked them to express their experiences on paper: "Tell it like it is. There are no right or wrong answers." Here are some fragments from my students' writings:

• "I imagined being a window and the children threw rocks at me, but I didn't break."
• "Sometimes I don't know whether I'm in a dream or in real life."
• "I don't want to do contemplation."
• "I am a loser. I try and try, but I always lose."

I kept their pieces anonymous because the contents were personal. At first I read them aloud and went directly into the next lesson. But the writings were so fascinating that I felt we could get more from them. For each "contemplation"—as I later called it—I made up questions about the main idea, the images conveyed, the feelings created by the images, and the thoughts triggered.

After breaking the ice, students discussed, analyzed, and responded openly to their classmates' experiences via probing questions from me. These sessions were intense yet still enjoyable because of our strong communication—a cross-fertilization of ideas—coming from a shared musical listening and writing experience. I took our dialogue a step further: "How do you discover what happens inside? What processes get at the events?"

I illustrated the contemplation process on the board:

There's an inner or mind's eye that searches for the images, feelings, and thoughts of experience. This eye is like a spotlight illuminating the inside world. When you discover the memories, dreams, fantasies, and realities you might want to write about, let the light of the imaginary eye shine on the events.

At that moment, carefully study, observe, or contemplate the inner experience before writing. Focus all your attention on the inside world. See what's happening. Find your life as it floats or rushes by the inner eye. Remember that a word, picture, feeling, thought, or idea can trigger creative thinking and writing.

By implementing a contemplative music writing project like this, a brave new socially and emotionally intelligent world arrives. Students change, and so do you. Classroom tension decreases. Students become more empathetic and cerebral.

Contemplative music writing also motivates children to read because the skills for both are very similar. Thinking, feeling, visualizing, sensing, experiencing, creating, concentrating, and communicating transfer to reading—making it more pleasurable, meaningful, understandable, visible, and real.

When the school year ended, I returned the writings to my students for rereading and assessed their involvement through a contemplation questionnaire. Here are some of their responses:

• "Contemplation helped me by taking the 'I am scared' out of reading."
• "Contemplation helped me concentrate longer."
• "I enjoy writing about fantasies because they are like a book you read."
• "I like these periods because I could read about the good and bad in my life and solve the problems."

I also measured their progress in emotional intelligence with a contemplation comprehension activity. Students analyzed classmates' contemplations with questions like those asked during our discussions.

I am only touching the tip of the iceberg of my 25-year contemplative music writing project, which became the foundation for teaching character education. A practical application I implemented known as "Sight-Ins" integrated greater inner-sight into their contemplation experiences. I fed them a quotation—for example, "Know thyself"—for investigation via authentic student inquiry. Each different saying expanded itself into unknown avenues that brought out new perceptions for living within themselves and dealing with others and the world.

Another outgrowth of my emotional intelligence project led to what I call concentration workouts, where students practiced the skill of focusing through fun, novel activities like the "Staring Game" (students paired up and stared at each other for three minutes without losing concentration) and then followed up with reflection, writing, and discussion.

Reflection writing, which consists of simple exercises to recall past events, is yet another activity I had my students take part in. This activity came about because many contemplations involved painful situations that needed a release. Visualizing, re-viewing, and reflecting on an experience when they felt love and sadness together, along with writing and talking about the memory, allowed kids to "get into it and get it out."

Contemplative music writing doesn't just help your students; it helps you as a teacher by allowing you to become a more mindful and spontaneous listener and discussion leader. Drawing out internal experiences improves intra- and interpersonal communication skills and creativity and brings down psychological walls: everyone will actually stop to see themselves and each other. Because of the contemplative work we did in my classroom, communication lines between my former students—now 40 and 50 years old—and me remain open and warm even today.

Jeffrey Pflaum has been an inner-city teacher, researcher, developer, and experimentalist for 34 years. Although he retired from the New York City Department of Education in 2002, he continues to contribute to the field as a regular blogger at EDWords and as the author of the book Motivating Teen and Preteen Readers: How Teachers and Parents Can Lead the Way (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011). A version of this article appeared in the April 13, 1998, New York Teacher: City Edition newsletter. Learn more about his work at www.JeffreyPflaum.com.

ASCD Express, Vol. 11, No. 3. Copyright 2015 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.