Instead of going to Graham House for counseling or the Academics Skills Center for tutoring, students who find themselves having difficulty focusing can now be referred to the Addison Gallery of American Art to improve their concentration and reduce stress. The Addison Gallery, Academic Skills Center (ASC) collaborated with the Neuroscience and Behavioral group this summer to develop a new self-conducted meditative exercise for easily-distracted students. The exercise involves concentrating on one specific work of art in the Addison Gallery for an extended period of time. The purpose of the activity is to guide students to focus on a single subject without being distracted by outside sources. “The Addison Gallery is a place where students can practice sustained attention, which also results in subtle changes to the brain. Regular meditation, in addition to promoting calmness in the moment, has been shown to help keep us calm in moments of stress,” said Jamie Kaplowitz, Education Associate and Museum Learning Specialist at the Addison. Students can visit the museum on their own at a time of their convenience if they find themselves getting easily distracted, or Cluster Deans can recommend students for the Addison mindfulness exercise in the same way that faculty can suggest Graham House counseling to students, according to Kaplowitz. “If we know that a student struggles, or if a student self-identifies as being hyper-distracted, then maybe an out-of-the-box approach to self-training and self-discipline on that is to go into a quiet space like the Addison and actually practice doing this,” Frank Tipton, Dean of West Quad North and a member of the Neuroscience and Behavior Psychology group. Students who have been referred to the Addison will be asked to submit a reflection on the activity to their Cluster Dean, but the school will not collect notes taken during the actual activity so as to promote uncensored activity. “We’ve created a whole activity which invites a kind of focused experience: looking at a painting and writing down what you’re seeing, thinking about different aspects of it and really staying focused on it—not being distracted by things or texts or friends or what everybody else in the class is doing,” said Tipton. Tipton hopes that both faculty and students will consider this exercise as another on-campus resource for students who struggle with procrastination or lack of focus. The idea was initially conceived by the Phillips Academy Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Group, an association of faculty created past Winter term that includes Frank Tipton, Patricia Davison, Amy Patel, Medical Director at Isham Health Center, Jeremiah Hagler, Instructor in Biology, and Carol Israel, Associate Director at Graham House. The group’s primary goal was to develop ideas to further support students in healthy ways, both physically and psychologically. Over summer, the group read extensively on various topics related to adolescent cognition. The group came upon the idea of mindfulness, a strategy of focused meditation or reflection, and reached out to the staff at the Addison Gallery to develop a learning exercise for Andover students, according to Tipton. “Most students are accustomed to the visual literacy skills that we practice when they visit the Addison with a class, but I hope that this mindfulness activity will help guide them through similar explorations on their own time, through an artwork of their choice,” said Kaplowitz. “We are developing some other ideas right now [to enhance concentration]. For example, overall wellness has a tremendous impact on concentration and other elements of the learning process. [The Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology group] looks forward to great partnership between faculty connected with the future Wellness Center and the Dean of Students Office in pursuit of wellness-related strategies for students who are struggling,” said Tipton.
