Class 3 – Intro to the Practicum

Don McCormick, Ph.D. and Julianna Raye

If I hear, I forget

If I see, I remember,

If I do, I understand

— Confucius

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a practicum as:

a course of study designed especially for the preparation of teachers and clinicians that involves the supervised practical application of previously studied theory.

The Unified Mindfulness Pathways program has two parts: the course (which is made up of twelve class sessions), and after that, the practicum (which involves teaching an eight-week class with some group support). Two settings can be used in the practicum.

Outside Work. For the practicum, one setting in which you can teach is outside of your current work. This often involves volunteering. For example, one trainee might teach mindfulness to prisoners in the local jail. Another might be a schoolteacher who teaches mindfulness to his fellow teachers after work. Trainees who use outside work for their practicum may include people:
who don’t have a setting in which they can teach mindfulness.
who have a setting for teaching mindfulness (for example, in their work as an addictions counselor) but who want to gain experience in a different setting (for example, teaching mindfulness in a corporation).
who want to serve others who are disempowered (for example, underserved populations such as lower-income individuals). They may or may not have an existing setting for teaching mindfulness.
Existing Work. Another setting that you can use for the practicum is your current work—assuming that your work lends itself to teaching mindfulness. Examples of people who may be able to do this include the following:
Corporate trainers
Therapists
Life coaches
Yoga teachers
Teachers
Healthcare workers

The three-month Pathways program will prepare you to teach an eight-week course in mindfulness to a group (although you are free to teach your practicum to an individual). Ideally you will have a situation in which you can teach mindfulness by the end of the 12-week course part of Pathways.

Depending on your situation, you may choose to start teaching your practicum earlier. For example, some participants in the Pathways program will already be teaching mindfulness and will want to start incorporating what they are learning right away. The formal practicum group support, however, doesn’t start until after the 12-week course ends.

Why is There a Practicum? There are several reasons.

A Practicum Allows You to Pursue Your Personal Interests Common sense and educational research show that students who are personally interested in what they are learning retain what they’ve learned for a longer period of time and are more likely to apply it. This is one of the things that differentiates the Unified Mindfulness system from many other mindfulness teacher training programs. The Unified Mindfulness program offers a diverse set of techniques that empowers students to teach in a variety of situations. Most mindfulness teacher training programs show all their students how to teach the exact same lessons in the exact same way, regardless of the context in which they’re teaching. The Unified Mindfulness Practicum is an opportunity for students to learn how to apply mindfulness to different situations or to areas they are particularly interested in or challenged by.

Some Things Are Best Learned Experientially The mindfulness teacher Stephen Levine put it well:

There is a story about an intellectual youth who felt he could learn everything from books. He read about the stars and became an astronomer, he read about history and became a historian, he read about swimming and drowned.

Some tasks (and most social roles) are best learned experientially. One of these is teaching mindfulness. There is a huge difference between learning how to perform a role or a task experientially—that is, by doing it—and learning about a role or task by reading about it or watching others do it. The best way to learn to be a manager, a nurse, a social worker, or a

mindfulness teacher is by direct experience. One of the most recognized experts on experiential learning, Morris Keeton, points out that no one wants to fly in a plane with a pilot who learned to fly by reading about it but hasn't actually flown a plane. And no one wants to have a surgery performed on them by someone who has only learned about surgery by reading and watching videos.

Donald Schon, M.I.T. professor and author of The Reflective Practitioner, points out that there is always a gap between what you learn from books or classes and what you actually need to know to apply it to a specific situation. You get many good ideas and techniques from reading and watching videos about teaching mindfulness, but you get an entirely new level of understanding when you actually start applying them. To use what we teach in our courses, you need to try them out—first in role-plays in class and then in real situations with supervision. You need to practice teaching mindfulness and get feedback on your teaching. This is generally agreed upon, and most mindfulness teacher training programs we’ve seen don’t involve extensive experiential learning.

The Practicum Gives You a Chance to Try Out What You Are Learning It is important for you to try out the teaching methods you are learning in this program. It’s ideal to do this as close as possible to when you’ve learned them. Too often, students learn ideas about how to act, but that learning doesn’t affect how they actually behave. They may read about the importance of listening to their mindfulness students, but this knowledge doesn’t actually make a difference in the way they relate to them. Their knowledge is inert; they have it, but don’t use it. The practicum prevents this problem because it gives you practice teaching mindfulness in a real situation.

The Practicum is an Exercise in Developing a Spirit of Love and Service "The end of all education should surely be service to others.” — Cesar Chavez

Two of the three general ethical principles we subscribe to at Unified Mindfulness are service and love. By service, we mean that our main purpose is to help the people we come in contact with—acting in their best interest, with kindness and compassion. And by love, we are referring to deep appreciation of and caring about the well-being of others.

The desire to share mindfulness practice with others is a natural outcome of deepening your own practice as well as a fundamental way to serve from a spirit of love. The practicum gives you the opportunity to serve others by helping them to learn mindfulness. Most people who teach mindfulness offer their services for free before they start to get paid. That said, some people in the Unified Mindfulness training are getting paid. Either

way, when you are teaching mindfulness, you are serving those who you teach at the deepest level.

The practicum gives you an opportunity to serve people in need. Our mindfulness practice has developed a spirit of service in ourselves that makes us want to help people learn how to practice mindfulness regardless of how much money they have. This is one of the reasons that we do some free mindfulness instruction. I (Julianna) offered facilitation for free for 12 years before I started charging as a teacher. And I, (Don) have taught mindfulness to inmates in the local jail, to other professors, and to members of different religious groups. Together with the rest of the staff of Unified Mindfulness, we offer a free introductory class in mindfulness through our CORE Training Program. And by offering it online, we have the potential to reach many more people than we could if we were limiting ourselves to face-to-face training.

Finding a Setting for Your Practicum There are many ways you can create opportunities to teach a course in mindfulness. Make sure you choose a situation commensurate with your experience. For example, if you are new to teaching mindfulness, you probably would not want to start by teaching a group of people who are actively psychotic. Choose a situation you’ll enjoy and that will be likely to go well. You might offer a course:

to the general public. It could be located in a local library.
to environmental activists.
to your colleagues at work. One person in the Foundations program was a teacher who offered an after-school mindfulness class to her fellow teachers.
to prisoners in the local jail.
to members of a professional society that you belong to. For example, if you belong to a local restaurant association, you could offer a course through it.
through an existing organization that serves local nonprofits.
to people at your church, temple, synagogue, or mosque.

You want to be sure that you have something lined up before you start the practicum, so we recommend that you start working on this fairly far in advance. It’s a good idea to make a list of several settings where it would be easiest for you to teach mindfulness and begin reaching out. We recommend that you run your ideas by us. There will be time in class for you to do this.

Experiential Learning is Emotional and Memorable A practicum is one type of experiential learning. Experiential learning is usually more exciting and emotional than learning from lectures or books. It often has a richness to it that classroom learning or book learning lacks. It is one thing to read that mindfulness can help someone suffering from intense physical pain; it is another thing entirely to learn this by working with someone and seeing their relief as their suffering diminishes. As Michael Lombardo puts it, “Such learning becomes deeply personal.”