Putting mindfulness programs in place at school can be beneficial to students and teachers, but only if the school leader helps to create the right conditions.

It is 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. Ms. Rachel, the school nurse at Marion-Walker Elementary School in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, broadcasts this message across the schoolwide PA system:

To begin our mindful minute, we invite you to find your mindful body by sitting up tall and closing your eyes or looking downward.

We count our breaths to develop concentration. Just like when playing a sport or an instrument, the more we practice, the better we are at concentrating.

Breathe in naturally and silently say ONE in your mind. Then, as you breathe out, relax your forehead. (pause)

Breathe in and silently say TWO in your mind. As you breathe out, relax your neck and shoulders. (pause)

Breathe in, say THREE in your mind. Breathe out, relax your tummy. (pause)

Breathe in, say FOUR in your mind. Breathe out, relax your whole body.

Counting while you breathe can quiet your mind and help you relax. Open your eyes.

These students are engaging in a “mindful minute,” a routine that occurs every day at this elementary school, mid-morning, when no transitions are happening in the building. The mindful minutes were written by the school’s principal, Karen Krisch, in collaboration with the school counselor. They are loosely based on practices offered in the Mindful Schools curriculum (www.mindfulschools.org).

Krisch invites students and educators to use mindfulness practices, like mindful breathing, a calm corner, and various literary resources, to promote well-being and improve self-awareness, attention, and self-regulation. Using these practices, educators have cultivated resilience and emotional steadfastness in themselves and their students and helped students come to their lessons ready to learn.

What the students and educators are doing looks both calming and downright easy. However, creating a school environment that integrates mindfulness requires a particular kind of leadership: the capacity to lead for and with mindfulness. Krisch had to ensure the right building blocks were in place to introduce and sustain mindfulness at Marion-Walker Elementary and bring her vision of well-being to fruition.

No explicit blueprint exists for these “building blocks,” but some common principles exist that help create the conditions for successfully integrating mindfulness in K-12 schools. First, educators need a basic understanding of what mindfulness means and why it has become popular in education.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is defined as awareness that arises through “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990). It encompasses both practices and skills that nurture this mindful orientation.

Mindfulness practices take many different forms. Probably the most popular and most portable practice is mindful breathing. This can involve counting each inhale/exhale sequence, keeping the attention on the breath, and noticing if your mind wanders. Another common practice, the body scan, involves focusing attention on different parts of the body, in sequence, and noticing where stress exists in the body. Practices like mindful listening or mindful eating bring whatever is happening into focus. There are also mindful gratitude, kindness, and perspective-taking practices.

These practices can help cultivate important skills, such as focused attention, emotion regulation, or empathy. The same practice may be used to develop a variety of different skills, depending on the focus of the specific mindfulness-based program. For example, children may do a mindful breathing practice to sharpen their attention skills, to help regulate their emotions, or to encourage self-compassion.

Why mindfulness in schools?

Mindfulness curricula started appearing in schools after a spate of programs for adults showed improvements for well-being. Initially, adult programs were offered primarily in therapeutic or medical settings. In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness-based stress reduction to help patients suffering from debilitating disease develop a new orientation toward their pain and physical challenges. Seemingly simple practices, like focused breathing, decreased individuals’ stress and boosted their physical and psychological well-being (Creswell, 2017).

Following the momentum of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs in the past 15 years, school-based mindfulness programs increased in popularity. There’s evidence that mindfulness can build students’ social-emotional skills, including their self-regulation, empathy, and relationship skills. It may also enhance academic functioning, especially students’ ability to maintain focused attention (McKeering & Hwang, 2019).

However, there is wide variability in what constitutes a school-based mindfulness program. Programs differ in terms of the practices introduced, the intended skills they develop, and the resources and time required for implementation. For example, some school-based mindfulness curricula include eight lessons and are intended to last only a few weeks. Some include more than 40 lessons and are intended to be used for an entire school year or more. Some programs require that teachers have a mindfulness practice themselves and have attended mindfulness training, while others require no teacher training.

When we examined the theories supporting 12 different mindfulness programs, we found every program had a unique combination of 15 theoretical frameworks, including behavior modification, SEL, neuroscience, emotion theory, secular ethics, and positive psychology (Schussler, Doyle, & Kohler, 2021). Such variability means the programs are integrated into the school day in a variety of ways and likely accomplish different goals.

Leading with and for mindfulness

Although selecting the right program is important, it is only a part of what education leaders must consider when introducing and sustaining mindfulness at their school. Leading with and for mindfulness requires the skills of a “prosocial leader” (Mahfouz, Greenberg, & Rodriguez, 2019). A prosocial leader creates the conditions for starting and sustaining a mindfulness program by 1) understanding the content and goals for the program and practices, 2) embodying social-emotional skills, 3) promoting buy-in, and 4) offering meaningful professional development.

Understanding the content and goals

Prosocial leaders must have a basic understanding of what mindfulness is, know what they want to achieve using mindfulness practices, and understand if and how different curricula help fulfill their aims. Research on related programs, like SEL and school-based health, suggest that programs are more effective in reaching their goals when they are integrated throughout the whole school, rather than implemented piecemeal (Durlak et al., 2011). Therefore, school leaders should set the stage by emphasizing how well-being and mindfulness are integral to the school’s mission. Often, mindfulness programs supplement existing programs, like SEL, anti-bullying, or other prosocial behavior programs. To make mindfulness programs successful, school leaders should seek to align the school’s mission with appropriate program(s) and adapt programs to best meet their needs.

Asking children to emotionally regulate only works when the adults with them also can emotionally regulate. This means that a prosocial leader must lead with mindfulness, exhibiting the skills and ways of being that express their vision.

At Marion-Walker Elementary, Krisch began with a clear vision: to foster well-being for students, educators, and staff by integrating mindfulness practices and skills. Rather than implement a single program, Marion-Walker uses a combination of programs and informal strategies to embed mindfulness into the school day. For example, the school counselor meets with every class once every two weeks. While they use the Second Step Curriculum, which has some mindfulness teaching, the counselor supplements with other resources. Every guidance lesson begins with a mindful minute or a mindful practice and a discussion about the best times to use these strategies.

When a student is having a tough moment and arrives in the office in tears, the counselor or principal brings the student to the “calm corner” in their offices. This is a designated spot where students can go when they are feeling upset. Almost every classroom has a calm corner as well. Educators might also suggest mindful breathing to a student under stress. The students are familiar with these strategies because they are taught in guidance lessons and reinforced in classrooms.

Embodying social-emotional competencies

Asking children to emotionally regulate only works when the adults with them also can emotionally regulate. This means that a prosocial leader must lead with mindfulness, exhibiting the skills and ways of being that express their vision. The prosocial leader models mindfulness and cultivates the capacities of other educators so they can implement practices and programs as intended. By inspiring other educators to demonstrate mindfulness, leaders help infuse a vision of well-being through mindfulness throughout the school.

Principal Krisch embodies and promotes educator social-emotional skills in a variety of ways. Importantly, she describes herself as “a leader with a personal practice first.” A personal practice helps leaders and teachers embody the practices and model them day to day, not only through the formal curriculum, but also through informal interactions. When leaders model and practice the skills, it creates a mindful culture within the school.

Along these lines, Krisch presents a mindfulness session at the district’s health and wellness professional learning day each year to encourage staff to develop their own practice. Knowing there are different levels of familiarity and interest, Krisch tries to make mindfulness concepts inviting while creating a culture where it is accepted and comfortable. A variety of optional opportunities are available for teachers to learn and use mindfulness practices. These include a “recharge room,” like the students’ calm corner, and mindfulness practice offered after school.

Promoting buy-in

Any program (e.g., SEL, writing across the curriculum, anti-bullying) will fade or fail without staff buy-in. To create the conditions to start and sustain the programs and practices that cultivate well-being, achieving buy-in from faculty and staff is critical. Optional and invitational (as opposed to coercive) opportunities to explore mindfulness can foster educators’ buy-in.

Ideally, buy-in involves both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. A top-down approach occurs through leadership and modeling. A bottom-up approach harnesses the power of educator champions. For example, Krisch recently went into a kindergarten class, at the teacher’s request, to teach students about mindful bodies and to practice walking mindfully. In conversations with the teacher, Krisch learned that the room setup was not ideal due to the spacing required to comply with pandemic protocols. The teacher uses a mix of traditional and alternative seating, and students often were stepping on each other’s belongings, bumping into each other, and knocking things over because they lacked body awareness.

In deciding whether mindfulness is appropriate for your school, considering the leader’s capacities to lead with and for mindfulness is essential.

Krisch used the lessons from her two years of training with Mindful Schools to teach the kindergartners about mindful bodies, movement, and walking. Over four sessions, she practiced the skills with the students and, simultaneously, demonstrated for the teacher. Krisch’s modeling for this teacher demonstrates a top-down approach. The teacher observed the lesson and then continued practicing with her class. If she discusses positive impacts with other teachers, they may feel motivated to learn more about mindfulness and to integrate it into their own classrooms: a bottom-up approach.

Offering professional development

To enhance educators’ capacities and improve buy-in, two kinds of professional development are important: One helps educators develop their own mindfulness practice, and the other helps them implement the programs. The first kind of professional development nurtures the mindfulness practices of the educators and leaders and helps the adults in the school to build their own practice. Educators with their own mindfulness practice, even if limited, can better model what they are teaching. As a teacher incorporating a curriculum called Peace of Mind (www.teachpeaceofmind.org) noted, “It is wonderful to have a shared language with my students.” Peace of Mind teachers often use strategies from the curriculum, like five-finger breathing or flower breathing, to regulate their emotions or their attention, and they help students do the same.

Educators also should have access to professional development that is specific to the programs they are using so they can teach practices effectively. For example, when our research team brought the Learning to BREATHE curriculum (https://learning2breathe.org) to two high schools in a northeastern district, one of the goals was to provide ongoing coaching to the health teachers while they were implementing the curriculum with their 11th graders. After observing the teacher’s lesson, the coach, who was an experienced mindfulness practitioner and facilitator, would schedule a phone call and ask reflective questions to help the teacher teach the mindfulness curriculum in a mindful way. Teachers noted how invaluable this resource was in making the necessary “shifts” to be most effective, like using more experiential teaching, creating an invitational learning environment, and approaching classroom management more collaboratively (Schussler et al., 2022).

At Marion-Walker, Krisch gives her teachers the freedom to adapt resources from programs like Mindful Schools and from different apps and websites. She also provides supports so teachers’ forays into mindfulness are scaffolded. For example, the speech therapist, who is trained in mindfulness, offers a 10-session program, each about 15 minutes, to classroom teachers who request it. By combining a top-down approach, through leadership and modeling, with a bottom-up approach, through inviting participation and making professional development available, the approach at Marion-Walker illustrates how to implement a mindfulness program and integrate mindfulness throughout the school day.

Ongoing professional development can include formal and informal communities of practice that help educators reinforce each other’s skills. For example, Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) for Teachers and Community Approach to Learning Mindfully (CALM) are mindfulness professional development programs geared toward adults in the school building, not the students. Teachers who have participated in these programs have described how having colleagues participating in the same program reminded them to use mindfulness practices throughout their day. These teachers also help sustain a mindful culture by operating as teacher champions, promoting buy-in, and reinforcing the school’s vision.

Is mindfulness right for my school?

In deciding whether mindfulness is appropriate for your school, considering the leader’s capacities to lead with and for mindfulness is essential. To effectively implement mindfulness in schools, leaders maintain a strong vision and discern which programs help enact that vision. They nurture their own social and emotional skills, and leverage appropriate professional development to encourage buy-in that is both top-down and bottom-up. (See below for some tips for leaders engaging in this work.)

Mindfulness can offer many benefits to students and educators alike, but establishing and sustaining the culture change necessary to integrate mindfulness integration takes time. Therefore, it is wise to take a long view. For the past eight years, the United Kingdom has engaged in an effort to integrate mindfulness into education. Implementation has been a key element in their effectiveness (Weare, Behtune, & Bristow, 2021), and the school leader’s ability to both practice and promote mindfulness is essential to successful implementation.

Implementing a school-based mindfulness program

The following tips may provide some direction for leaders engaging in this work:

Be invitational. Invite, rather than coerce educators to participate by showing them the benefits.
Champion your champions. Create opportunities for both educators and students to engage with and learn more about mindfulness.
Provide professional development. Provide initial and ongoing professional development to support educators in learning about mindfulness for themselves and leading mindfulness programs for their students.
Formally be informal. Encourage mindfulness practices, like mindful breathing, that fall outside of just teaching the formal curriculum.
Speak the same language. Infuse common language throughout the school to integrate and reinforce mindfulness and well-being.
Take the time. Dedicating at least some time during the school day makes mindfulness and well-being priorities throughout the school.
Don’t just implement a program. Create a culture. In ways that makes sense for your school, put mindfulness and well-being at the center of what you do and how you do it.

References

Creswell, J.D. (2017). Mindfulness interventions. Annual Review of Psychology, 68 (1), 491-516.

Durlak, J.A., Weissberg, R.P., Dymnicki, A.B., Taylor, R.D., & Schellinger, K.B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82 (1), 405-432.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Bantam Books.

Mahfouz, J., Greenberg, M., & Rodriguez, A. (2019). Principals’ social and emotional competence: A key factor for creating caring schools. The Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, Pennsylvania State University.

McKeering, P. & Hwang, Y. (2019). A systematic review of mindfulness-based school interventions with early adolescents. Mindfulness, 10 (4), 593-610.

Schussler, D.L., Doyle, S.L., & Kohler, K.M. (2021). What educational leaders need to know about school-based mindfulness interventions to promote student wellbeing. University Council for Education Administration.

Schussler, D.L., Mahfouz, J., Broderick, P.C., Berenna, E., Frank, J.L., & Greenberg, M.T. (2022). Shifting to embodiment: A longitudinal qualitative investigation into the experiences of high school teachers teaching mindfulness. Mindfulness, 13 (2), 509-525.

Weare, K., Bethune, A., & Bristow, J. (2021). Implementing mindfulness in schools: An evidence-based guide. Mindfulness Initiative.

This article appears in the February 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 5, pp. 50-55.