LESSONS FROM BOOT CAMP FOR PROFS®: DEVELOPING MINDFUL TEACHERS TO PRODUCE MINDFUL LEARNERS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Boot Camp for Profs® (see http://profcamp.tripod.com/bootcamp09.htm), begun in 1993, was similar to other faculty development events—a series of knowledge and skill-building workshops. Little of the original program remains in our current camp other than the central product of development of a mindfully constructed written personal teaching philosophy. "Mindful" practice enlists a progressively developing awareness of self and relationships with others (students and colleagues) in making a successful, satisfying professional life through promotion of learning. The mindful state has much in common with Self-Regulation principles and William Perry's highest stages 8 and 9, which combine evaluative, cognitive, affective, ethical, and metacognitive components of thought. Early college instructors perceive success as arising from content knowledge of a discipline and, hopefully soon thereafter, in knowledge about good pedagogical methods for better involving students in their learning. Both traits are essential, and instructors can engage in both without a written teaching philosophy. Yet, our experiences with the camp indicate that these constitute less than a third of awareness required for a satisfying, successful long-term career. Boot Camp now employs a conceptual model based on fractals and awareness of the unappreciated power of affect and of small-scale choices (lesson design) on large-scale outcomes (life-long learning). It introduces the oft-missing two-thirds as a way for building more satisfying and more productive long-term careers. Higher education's over-emphasis on course-scale thinking, individual evaluation, disciplinary tribalism, and unreflective busyness works against both faculty career satisfaction and students' experiencing of mindful learning. Helping students at the undergraduate level to develop correlative mindful learning philosophies and appreciation for diverse frameworks of reasoning offers a way to change that tradition.