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Mindfulness, as described by Kabat-Zinn, is “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn 1990, p. xxxv).
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) - Program designed by Kabat-Zinn and researchers at UMASS to help people learn to manage stress and anxiety through meditation.
Instructional Coaching - peer support and guidance for teachers

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Mindfulness offers teachers and instructional coaches promising interventions to reduce teacher work-place stress and improve student-teacher relationships.  Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) provides participants with skills and tools to engage in nonjudgmental awareness of emotions.  It is necessary to promote educational reform and to continue understanding how mindfulness practices benefit learning.  The purpose of this literature review is to examine the available research defining mindfulness in education and how school leaders, specifically instructional coaches, can utilize mindfulness to reduce stress, enhance teacher professional development, and improve work-place experiences.

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2018 Conference

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The practices of mindfulness, contemplative education, and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) are now being widely explored in schools throughout the United States and other countries. Extensive research has shown that mindfulness practices and SEL decrease stress, attention deficit issues, depression, anxiety, and hostility in children, while benefitting health, well-being, and social relationships.

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Association for Mindfulness in Education

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Association for Mindfulness in Education

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Mindfulness in Education:
the Foundation for Teaching and Learning

The Association for Mindfulness in Education is a collaborative association of organizations and individuals working together to provide support for mindfulness training as a component of K-12 education.

Research over the past few decades has found that mindfulness training develops:

Increased attention

Increased executive function (working memory, planning, organization, and impulse control)

Decreased ADHD behaviors-specifically hyperactivity and impulsivity

Fewer conduct and anger management problems

Increased emotional regulation

Increased self-calming

Increased social skills and social compliance

Increased care for others

Decreased negative affect, or emotions

Decreased anxiety in general and text anxiety in particular

Decreased depression

Increased sense of calmness, relaxation, and self-acceptance

Increased self-esteem

Increased quality of sleep

As such, mindfulness is a foundation for education; mindfulness provides the optimal conditions for learning and teaching and also supports all pedagogical approaches.

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Association for Mindfulness in Education

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The Association for Mindfulness in Education is a collaborative association of organizations and individuals working together to provide support for mindfulness training as a component of K-12 education.

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The Impact of Toxic Stress on School Communities

Healthy stress is a natural part of life, including childhood. Children and adults alike need to be challenged in order to grow and develop. However, in the modern education system, healthy stress is frequently displaced by toxic stress. Toxic stress occurs when life's demands consistently outpace our ability to cope with those demands.

Students

Toxic stress impairs attention, emotion and mood regulation, sleep, and learning readiness daily in American classrooms. Even more troubling, prolonged exposure to childhood toxic stress has lifelong impacts on mental and physical health.

Educators

Toxic stress starts as decreased productivity and creativity, escalating to more serious symptoms like frequent anxiety, dissociation, frustration, and, eventually, burnout. Roughly half a million U.S. teachers leave the profession each year - a turnover rate of over 20 percent.

Parents

Toxic stress can lead to a parenting style that looks more like a "to-do" list, rather than an empathic, present-centered relationship with a developing child. Exposure to parental stress in early childhood has been shown to impact gene expression even years later in adolescence.

Toxic stress is challenging to work with because our stress response taps into some very old survival hardware in our evolutionary biology.

When a 4th grader reports that she felt she "was going to die" from test anxiety, she's telling the truth. The responses of her autonomic nervous system are the same whether she's taking a math test or sensing actual physical danger.

Even children who have not suffered adverse childhood experiences may struggle with frequent "mismatches" between the severity of a stimulus (a routine pop quiz) and their response (loss of peripheral vision, sweating, nausea, terror and immobility). In children suffering from trauma, these "mismatches" become chronic and habitual.

Because the roots of toxic stress lie deep in the nervous system, we need tools that go beyond the conceptual mind to directly target that system. To transform our habitual responses, we need to regularly practice our skills when we are not in "fight - flight - freeze" mode.

"Under duress we don't rise to our expectations, we fall to our level of training."
-Bruce Lee

Our courses establish two forms of training as the foundation for teaching
other methods of stress management, emotion regulation and interpersonal skills.

The Development of Mindfulness

The development of mindfulness, a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, emotions, sensations and surrounding environment.

The Development of Heartfulness

The intentional nurturing of positive mind states such as kindness and compassion.

These two trainings improve our ability to manage a number of significant psychological challenges associated with stress, including:

Overwhelm. The sense that life - and particularly your own thoughts and emotions - is "too much to handle."

Busyness. The sense that "doing things" has become compulsive - that you are constantly avoiding simply being with yourself.

Rumination. The sense that the same stressful thought patterns "loop" over and over again in your mind without being questioned.

Dissociation. The sense that you maintain unhealthy psychological distance from life and from people, cut off from your own and other people's emotions.

Narcissism. The sense that life is about defending, protecting and enhancing one's sense of self. A lack of empathy for the needs of others and an inability to take compassionate action.

Not Just Coping. Thriving.

In discussing how mindfulness practice addresses stress and other problems in education, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that mindfulness can take us beyond the terrain of managing symptoms to a place where we are developing the deepest capacities of the human mind.

We can think of the process as a spectrum:

Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) have nearly 35 years of research & development supporting them, and have moved progressively through three large institutional cultures: health care, mental health, & education. The timeline below gives some important milestones in this progression.

Solid scientific evidence suggests that mindfulness interventions improve attention, self-control, emotional resilience, recovery from addiction, memory and immune response. Here's a summary of benefits particularly relevant to educators:

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Benefits of Mindfulness in Education | Mindful Schools

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The Impact of Toxic Stress on School CommunitiesHealthy stress is a natural part of life, including childhood. Children and adults alike need to be challenged in order to grow and develop. However, in the modern education system, healthy stress is frequently displaced by toxic stress.

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The Presencing Institute

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The Aspen Institute

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From Parkland, Florida to Washington, DC, youth are leading change in American education - in classrooms, town hall meetings, and the streets of their communities. "The voices of young people of all races and genders, of all political persuasions and backgrounds, are rising up," said Tim Shriver, co-chair of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. "[They] remind us what's best about our country and challenge us to fulfill the dreams that we have for our children."

Shriver joined a series of panelists for the Commission-hosted Youth and Family Calls to Action event, which centered on building individual and community resilience by advancing young people's comprehensive development. The youth and parents on the panel underscored the need for safe and healthy learning environments, youth mentorship and psychological support, and approaches to school culture and classroom teaching and learning that ensure children have the support they need to thrive socially and emotionally in addition to sharpening their academic prowess.

Across the board, the panelists advocated for the integration of social and emotional learning strategies into school curriculum and after-school programs. Social and emotional learning focuses on enhancing students' capacities to problem-solve and think critically, regulate their emotional responses, work collaboratively, and successfully deal with challenges in school, life, and the workplace. According to " The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development," a collection of statements from the National Commission's Council of Distinguished Scientists, "decades of research in human development, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and educational practice and policy, as well as other fields, have illuminated that major domains of human development - social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, academic - are deeply intertwined in the brain and in behavior. All are central to learning."

"The Evidence Base for How We Learn" described how social and emotional learning fosters safe and positive social climates within schools and cultivates values and skills that are conducive to both strong academic performance and overall life success.

Statistics show that just 34 percent of twelfth graders were actively engaged in school in 2016, according to a Gallup Student Poll. (The poll showed that the higher the grade level, the lower the percentage of actively engaged students.) This disengagement, coupled with the inability to maturely and successfully confront and overcome adversity, leaves many youth vulnerable to adopting high-risk behaviors. In fact, just under a third of American high school students are involved in a slew of high-risk behaviors, from depression and substance abuse to physical violence. But educators are working to reverse these trends by integrating social and emotional learning into classrooms and by involving parents and communities in the process.

"In our school, it's a requirement that every team has a weekly communication with our families," said Roberta Duvall, who serves as the principal at Cold Springs Middle School in Reno, NV. "We highlight what it is that the students are doing in the classrooms, we highlight social-emotional lessons that are being taught in those classrooms, so that parents can have that conversation at home."

The early integration of social and emotional learning in a child's life enhances learning and academic performance - but it can also help to ingrain healthy attitudes and practices that would reduce their vulnerability to high-risk behaviors and better prepare them to deal with challenges in their careers and daily lives. Social and emotional learning practices aren't just for the classroom. Out-of-school-time activities can also support students' comprehensive development, such as service programs which enrich students' lives by instilling the values of charity, hard work, compassion, cooperation, tolerance, and responsibility in them from a young age.

High school senior Grace Dolan-Sandrino and Princeton freshman Eric Guerci, members of the National Commission's Youth Commission, described the benefits of restorative disciplinary policies, noting that punitive measures disengage students from their social and educational communities rather than help them to deal with conflict in a healthy way. Providing the right conditions for students to flourish means ensuring that each youth has an adult to turn to for mentorship and support and that every student is guaranteed the resources they need in order to learn. These measures are part of a holistic approach to education that engages all those who are directly involved in students' development in order to offer young people their best chance at achieving success.

"Learning can't happen in isolation," said Guerci. "Students want to learn―we just need the right conditions to do so."
You can learn more about the Youth and Family Calls to Action and sign on to show your support for an approach to education that builds students' social, emotional, and academic skills.

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Students and Parents Call for Social and Emotional Learning

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From Parkland, Florida to Washington, DC, youth are leading change in American education - in classrooms, town hall meetings, and the streets of their communities. "The voices of young people of all races and genders, of all political persuasions and backgrounds, are rising up," said Tim Shriver, co-chair of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development.

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University of Massachusetts Medical School

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Since its inception, more than 24,000 people have completed our Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program and learned how to use their innate resources and abilities to respond more effectively to stress, pain, and illness.

MBSR was founded by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 and has been featured in:

Bill Moyers' PBS documentary Healing and The Mind

NBC Dateline

ABC's Chronicle

The Boston Globe

CNN

Al Jazeera

NHK, Japan national public broadcasting

and in various national print media. It is the subject of Jon Kabat-Zinn's best selling book, Full Catastrophe Living and Saki Santorelli's book, Heal Thy Self.

The central focus of the Program is intensive training in mindfulness meditation and its integration into the challenges/adventures of everyday life.

Research Snapshot

Our work over the past thirty-five years has shown consistent, reliable, and reproducible demonstrations of major and clinically relevant reductions in medical and psychological symptoms across a wide range of medical diagnoses, including many different chronic pain conditions, other medical diagnoses and in medical patients with a secondary diagnosis of anxiety and/or panic, over the eight weeks of the MBSR intervention, and maintenance of these changes in some cases for up to four years of follow-up.

We have also seen consistent, reliable, and reproducible demonstrations of significant and clinically relevant increases in trait measures which are usually stable in adulthood, indicative of enhanced psychological hardiness (Kobasa) and greater sense of coherence (Antonovsky) over the course of the eight week intervention, and maintenance of these gains for up to three years of follow-up. The latter measures indicate a heightened sense of self and self-in-relationship, and a greater ability to find coherence and act effectively under high degrees of stress. These changes enhance the experience of self-efficacy in patients and their view of the value of engaging in their own on-going health and well-being through meditation, yoga, and above all, the systematic cultivation of awareness [Kabat-Zinn, Skillings, and Salmon, manuscript submitted].

MBSR Principles

MBSR spans a confluence of epistemologies and practices from two very distinct and until recently, divergent lineages, both committed to empirical investigation, albeit utilizing very different methodologies: that of science, medicine, and psychology, on the one hand, and that of Buddhist meditative traditions and their teachings and practices, known collectively as the Dharma, on the other. One reason MBSR proved viable in mainstream clinical settings is that the Dharma is in essence universal. Mindfulness, often being spoken of as "the heart of Buddhist meditation," and being primarily about the systematic training and refinement of attention and awareness, compassion and wisdom, is a manifestation of its universal applicability. In the present context, to recognize the universal character of the dharma, we use the term with a small "d."

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MBSR was founded by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 and has been featured in: Bill Moyers' PBS documentary Healing and The Mind NBC Dateline ABC's Chronicle The Boston Globe CNN Al Jazeera NHK, Japan national public broadcasting and in various national print media.

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Potential Research Questions

·      How can instructional coaches utilize MBSR training to help teachers reduce job-related stress?

·      How does MBSR training support an instructional coach’s role in teacher professional development?

·      What type of MBSR training will benefit instructional coaching and best impact change in a teacher’s practice?

·      What type of MBSR training will produce beneficial educational results for teachers and students?

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Melissa Schmitz

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MBSR and Education