How does silent sitting help to develop my students’ characters?
1. Does silent sitting help to improve my students’ academic performance?
2. Does silent sitting help to improve my students’ concentration and behaviour?
3. Does silent sitting help to improve my students to look inside themselves for answers to their problems?
1. Use silent sitting with the class every day for 3-5 minutes. During this time I will also talk to the students about the value of silent sitting.
2. Academic improvement can be measured by test results. Present a graph showing the changes in results for different subjects over the 3 months.
3. To measure behaviour and concentration, use observations. A short questionnaire can be given to the whole class once a month to assess their perceptions of their behaviour (in and out of school) and corresponding copies can also be sent home to their parents once a month. A selection of students can be interviewed about their perceptions of their behaviour and character development.
4. A particularly useful focus can be on visualizations that encourage the students to visualize themselves looking inside themselves to solve their problems rather than getting depressed or expecting somebody else to solve them. I will ask the students about their self-perceptions in a questionnaire and whole-class interview. In particular I will ask the students to give cases about times when they have used this technique to solve their problems in and out of class.
In this section, present a clear summary of all the results you have collected.
Discuss your experiment. What was successful? What was unsuccessful? What will you do differently next time? What insights have you gained about education in human values? What new questions have been generated for your next cycle of experiment?
