It is not good enough for teachers and other school leaders to simply stay the course with a sole academic focus. If they are going to address the many challenges associated with trauma and stress that so many students and teachers endure, and how they impact both learning and teaching, then small steps are not enough. It is not enough to practice compassion one day a week or to celebrate success with an annual assembly. If we are to improve the lives and education for all students, it will require a paradigm shift in the way we think about education, our children, families, and our world. It will require a move toward educating the whole child, with a balanced focus of academics and health and well-being so that all students feel safe and are cared for. We are concerned about the trauma, the violence, and the stress that permeate society, our families, and our schools. However, we believe we can turn this around.
Today, schools can increase protective factors—factors that help protect students from both the short-term and long-term damage of stress and trauma (Howard, Dryden, & Johnson, 1999; Knight, 2007; Santos, 2012). Schools can also decrease risk factors when we use our hearts to educate our students and ourselves. Listening to our hearts is not always easy to do. In fact, we have been trained as professionals to not get too involved with our students’ problems, to not care too deeply. Yet, with the approach we will outline in this book, we can achieve a balance—high expectations for students, research-supported pedagogy, and mindfulness.
We can help magnify protective factors in schools so long as there are caring and compassionate adults to help support students and parents during times of need. These supportive actions help to increase resilience and grit, making it easier for individuals to bounce back when experiencing stress and trauma. Using mindfulness practices in this book will guide us to achieve more favorable and positive outcomes for all students, helping to prevent child maltreatment and other social problems that complicate their lives.
What Do Students Need to Focus and Flourish?
Where would you begin if your task was not to ensure academic excellence, but to consider the ultimate well-being of each student, to give each student a toolbox to enhance skills, knowledge, and opportunities for individual feelings of success and being valued? If you think of students in your school who seem happy, successful, joy filled, and ready for the challenges of any particular day, what traits come to mind? Why do some students seem to be able to readily focus on tasks at hand, and others become easily distracted? Why do some gravitate toward high achievement, a healthy self-esteem, and happiness while others seem to walk under a cloud of doom? Substantial research suggests that we start with consciousness and mindfulness—something we consider to be two sides of the same coin (Diamond & Lee, 2011; Flook et al., 2010; Rempel, 2012; Schmalzl, Powers, & Henje Blom, 2015; Zelazo & Lyons, 2012). Mindfulness and the steps we recommend are research-based strategies for creating compassionate school communities where students, and the teachers on whom they depend, can flourish.
Mindfulness focuses our attention on the here and now. Meditation and yogic practices heighten our awareness of self and others by quieting our thoughts and creating a sense of calmness, and improving our awareness of the relationship between our physical feelings and our emotions. Research supports their value in a wide array of instances and for various subpopulations of students. It shows that mindfulness and yoga decrease anxiety and depression and increase self-esteem, mood, and ability to focus and control emotions (Büssing, Michaelsen, Khalsa, Telles, & Sherman, 2012; Felver, Butzer, Olson, Smith, & Khalsa, 2015; Raes, Griffith, Van der Gucht, & Williams, 2014; Semple, Droutman, & Reid, 2017).
Yoga, meditation, and mindfulness are being integrated into a growing number of U.S. schools, and teachers and students are adapting as they learn about these practices that used to be relegated to fitness centers and after-school programs. We find it useful for middle or high school student athletes, perhaps even some who participate in what some consider traditionally masculine sports such as football and wrestling, to talk with middle schoolers about their own yoga practices. Because athletes are sometimes revered, students are often surprised to find that these rough and tough student athletes are doing yoga. Using student leaders to guide activities also helps narrow the gap of discomfort some students associate with trying something new. Adolescents with depression or mental illness; children with learning disabilities, autism, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; students with conduct disorders, or students with high rates of truancy or school suspensions all benefit from mindfulness (Ehleringer, 2010; Frank, Kohler, Peal, & Bose, 2017; Malboeuf-Hurtubise, Lacourse, Taylor, Joussemet, & Ben Amor, 2017; Zenner et al., 2014).
Teachers and school leaders create mindful, compassionate communities when they have the foundational knowledge in part I of this book; personal and classroom experience with the exercises in part II; and the deeper collaborative understanding and experience that we present in part III. We present a package to help grades preK–12 teachers, school leaders, and school communities practice the steps we recommend.
Mindfulness Practices: About the Book
While developing Mindfulness Practices, we relied on our collective experience leading schools and districts to consider what was essential to set the stage for cultivating more responsive and compassionate school communities through mindfulness. Our experiences facilitating systemic change, focusing on student self-determination and strengths, and collaborating with neuroscientists and educational leaders provided an important backdrop for our recommendations. Our work with rural and urban, including high-poverty, schools rounded out our practical experience, grounding us in the realities that teachers and principals face. Our experience teaching and practicing yoga, mindfulness, and meditation gave us confidence in the instructions we provide for incorporating these into your lives and into your classrooms through compassionate, heart centered action and instruction. The CEI (n.d.) says Heart Centered Learning™:
Equips students with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, feel and show empathy for others, resolve conflicts nonviolently, think creatively, and overcome obstacles to succeed in the classroom and in life. Heart Centered Education is not overly dependent on rigid academic scheduling or expectations for academic growth—instead taking a holistic approach.
Note that the CEI is not alone in its connection of mindfulness to heart centeredness: many yogic and mindfulness traditions refer to listening to and acting from our hearts (Ruth, 2017). Hence, we use the term recognizing the importance of tuning into our hearts as we make decisions and help children heal from the trauma they have experienced. As a life-long student of metaphysics, mysticism, and spirituality Kiyanush Kamrani (2017) states that a “mindfulness practice is only complete when it includes the heart, as awareness is not limited to the mind; the heart is the center of our consciousness” (p. 1).
This book is grounded in research, input from exemplary principals, and practical experiences in schools. The research-based principles and activities that follow are universal, and you can easily adapt them across grades preK–12 or apply them to multiple settings. Whether you are concerned with a preschooler who seems withdrawn, a fourth grader who is missing too much school, or a ninth grader who bullies others, you will find that the mindfulness practices we recommend can help you restructure learning expectations, give you tools to help establish a sense of calmness, and turn around the lives of that student and teachers.
While there is an urgency to provide mindful instruction to help students mediate immediate and long-term trauma and stress impact, mindfulness is a simple and useful life tool for everyone (including our own selves, parents, families, and the larger community). With this book, you will learn steps and strategies for creating compassionate communities of students, teachers, staff, and school leaders to alleviate the impact of trauma and toxic, daily stress. In our approach, we make apparent the value of helping all students become more aware of the needs of self
