Compassionate Critical Thinking

Teachers can’t add more minutes to a school day, but with mindfulness they can add depth to the moments they do have with students in their classroom. Compassionate Critical Thinking demonstrates how to use mindfulness with instructional effectiveness to increase student participation and decrease classroom stress, and it turns the act of teaching into a transformational practice. Many books teach mindfulness, but few provide a model for teaching critical thinking and integrating it across the curriculum. The purpose of this book is to show teachers how to create a classroom culture of compassionate critical thinking. When students feel a lack of meaning and purpose in their school lives, they resist learning. Using a Socratic style of inquiry, Rabois changes the classroom dynamic to encourage self-reflection, insight, and empathy. Vignettes capture dialogue between teacher and students to illustrate how mindfulness practices elicit essential questions which stimulate inquiry and direct discovery. What bigger mystery is there, what more interesting and relevant story, than the story of one’s own mind and heart and how they relate us to the world?

Impressively written, organized and presented, Compassionate Critical Thinking is especially recommended for college and university library Teacher Education collections in general, and student teacher supplemental studies reading lists in particular., Rabois' innovative approach places students at the center of learning, encouraging deep thinking about themselves and the world around them. A timely antidote to conventional education—and stultified thinking in general., Compassionate Critical Thinking: How Mindfulness, Creativity, Empathy, and Socratic Questioning Can Transform Teaching is based on Ira Rabois' thirty-year career teaching English, philosophy, history, and psychology to high school students. Rabois includes six types of practices in his teaching: Mindfulness, Concentration, Visualization, Inquiry, Compassion and Empathy, and Group Dialogue and Questioning…. This combination of practices fosters greater awareness of the students' own lives and how they think and feel. In turn, this deepens the interpersonal connection between teacher and students, and also deepens the students' understanding of academic content and how it is relevant to their lives…. In this instructional approach, the teacher's role is to foster a safe, supportive community for youth not only to increase their knowledge but also to develop the wisdom that will help them live a meaningful life. Recommended., Rabois' innovative approach places students at the center of learning, encouraging deep thinking about themselves and the world around them. A timely antidote to conventional education — and stultified thinking in general., Dialogue has often been an important part of the [Buddhist/spiritual] path, but it does not always receive the attention it deserves. Ira Rabois’ book, Compassionate Critical Thinking, shows the way to do it, and what it can mean for those who engage in such conversations sincerely and openly. This is what education should be about.

Ira Rabois recently retired from the Lehman Alternative Community School, a public secondary school in Ithaca, NY, where he taught English, Philosophy, History, Drama, Karate, and Psychology for 27 years. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan, a M.A.T. from SUNY-Binghamton, served in the Peace Corps, studied Zen and Japanese martial arts for 40 years with Hidy Ochiai, and took classes in meditation and Buddhist psychology at Namgyal Institute for Tibetan Studies, The Omega Institute with David Loy and Robert Thurman, healing meditation with the Consciousness Research and Training Project, and Proprioceptive Writing with Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon.