Mindfulness in the Classroom

Strategies for Promoting Concentration, Compassion, and Calm

Thomas Armstrong

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416627975
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

In today's schools, students and teachers feel unprecedented—even alarming—levels of stress. How can we create calmer classrooms in which students concentrate better and feel more positive about themselves and others? Author Thomas Armstrong offers a compelling answer in the form of mindfulness, a secular practice he defines as the intentional focus of one's attention on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way.

In Mindfulness in the Classroom, Armstrong - Explains how mindfulness affects the structure and function of the brain.
- Provides an overview of mindfulness as both a personal practice and a classroom methodology that aligns with such educational models as Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS), and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
- Shares and explains the extensive research that shows the positive effects of mindfulness practices in the classroom.
- Describes how to adapt mindfulness for different grade levels, integrate it into regular school subjects, and implement it schoolwide.
- Offers guidelines for teaching mindfulness responsibly, without religious overtones.

Dozens of observations from teachers, students, researchers, and practitioners provide striking evidence of the power of mindfulness and offer hope to anyone who wants to make classrooms more productive places of learning.

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Chapter 1

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Joining the Quiet Revolution

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An epidemic is sweeping through our classrooms today. Not connected to a virus, bacteria, or any other pathogen, the malady is stress. Our students are experiencing stress at levels never before seen in the history of U.S. education. The statistics are alarming. Here are a few of them:

• One in 10 preschoolers has had suicidal thoughts (Whalen, Dixon-Gordon, Belden, Barch, & Luby, 2015).
• Doctors are increasingly reporting children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers, and many physicians see a clear connection to pressure related to school performance (Abeles, 2016).
• A third of our adolescents report feeling depressed or overwhelmed because of stress, and their single biggest source of stress is school (American Psychological Association, 2014).
• Roughly 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 10 boys in U.S. high schools try to harm themselves even when they are not attempting suicide (Monto, McRee, & Deryck, 2018).
• In a Yale University survey of more than 22,000 high school students, teens reported feeling stressed 80 percent of the time in school (Brackett, 2016).
• By age 21, according to one longitudinal study, 82.5 percent of our students will have met the criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder (Copeland, Shanahan, Costello, & Angold, 2011). (No, this is not a misprint.)

Student stress occurs at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid. Dale Caldwell, former head of school at the Village Charter School in Trenton, New Jersey, uses the phrase "urban traumatic stress disorder" to describe the problem among those living in poverty. A consultant at the school, Trish Miele, talks about the anxiety that plagues these inner-city students: "So much of their life is living on the edge of stress. … It could be food insufficiency, it could be general safety, not having a home, it could be abusive. … So many things are coming at them in the urban environment" (Buffum, 2017). On the other end of the economic spectrum, students are under tremendous pressure to perform academically. Reflecting on her experience teaching 3rd grade in the wealthy West Windsor–Plainsboro public school district for 10 years, Miele comments, "The district is very high-achieving. … I would have kids coming to me when we started doing testing, [saying], 'If I don't do well, I won't get into Princeton!' And I'm like, 'You're eight. What are you worrying about?'" (Buffum, 2017).

The Mindful Solution to Stress

Fortunately, schools are beginning to respond to this epidemic of stress. One intervention that has received a great deal of attention over the past few years is mindfulness: the nonjudgmental awareness of each present moment in time. Although rooted in a thousand-year-old Buddhist tradition, mindfulness was given a solid secular foundation in science through the efforts of biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He created a stress-reduction and chronic pain management program in the early 1970s based upon mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn, 2013). Since that time, more than 3,000 scientific studies have addressed the topic of mindfulness (Regents of the University of California, 2014). These studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of mindfulness practice in treating chronic pain (Garland et al., 2017); high blood pressure (Palta et al., 2012); immune function (Davidson et al., 2003); anxiety (V⊘llestad, Sivertsen, & Nielsen, 2011); depression (Kuyken et al., 2008); post-traumatic stress disorder (Possemato et al., 2016); eating disorders (Katterman, Kleinman, Hood, Nackers, & Corsica, 2014); psychosis (Aust & Bradshaw, 2017); substance abuse (Bowen et al., 2014); and a host of other mental and physical ills.

Mindfulness in Popular Culture

As a result of such a strong evidence base, mindfulness has entered popular culture in the United States (as well as in the United Kingdom and Australia). The mindfulness and meditation industry has become a one-billion-dollar-a-year business (Wieczner, 2016). Close to 80 percent of all medical schools in the United States offer some aspect of mindfulness training in their programs (Barnes, Hattan, Black, & Schuman-Olivier, 2017). The National Health Service in the U.K. lists mindfulness as one of its five steps to mental well-being (National Health Service, 2016). Chris Ruane, a member of the British Parliament, has set up a mindfulness training group for its MPs (Booth, 2017), and U.S. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio has authored a book on mindfulness (Ryan, 2012) and promoted its widespread use among the American electorate.

These examples are just part of the mindfulness revolution. In addition, the U.S. Army has instituted a mindfulness program—Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT, pronounced "M-fit")—to improve mental performance and bolster the emotional health of soldiers under the stress and strain of war (Myers, 2015). The National Basketball Association (NBA) has teamed up with Headspace, a leading mindfulness app, to provide mindfulness training to all league and team staff and family members (NBA Communications, 2018). Mindfulness training is used in several Fortune 500 companies, such as Nike, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Google, and Apple (Levin, 2017). Even Sesame Street is using mindfulness principles. In one video created by the Children's Television Workshop, the Count teaches Cookie Monster how to concentrate on his breathing to reduce stress (to watch it, go to https://sesamestreetincommunities.org/activities/count-breathe-relax/).

The Growth of School-Based Mindfulness Programs

The first major effort to use mindfulness in the schools began in the United Kingdom in 2007 with a series of uniform lesson plans delivered in classrooms across the country (Davis, 2015). Over the past decade, several other programs have emerged to deliver mindfulness training in classrooms around the world. They include Mindful Schools, MindUP, Calm Classroom, Inner Explorer, Master Mind, Moment, A Still Quiet Place, Mindful Schools, the Attention Academy, Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and Learning to Breathe (see Appendix B for contact information on these and other mindfulness programs). MindUP reports reaching over 500,000 students around the world in the past decade, and Mindful Schools says it has reached over 300,000 students in the United States in the past five years (Strauss, 2016).

Although alike in embracing mindfulness, these programs vary considerably. Some offer discrete training classes, whereas others use whole-school or even districtwide immersion models. Program duration runs from four weeks to several years. Some use external facilitators to teach mindfulness, others train a school's teachers to provide these lessons, and still others use no facilitators at all, relying upon audio and video recordings to guide mindfulness sessions. Evaluations of these programs reveal successful implementation, high recruitment and retention rates, positive qualitative feedback from teachers and students, broad program dissemination, and long-term sustainability (Semple, Droutman, & Reid, 2017).

What the Research Says About Mindfulness

A number of school-related research projects are currently underway to gauge the long-term effectiveness of mindfulness training in students. The Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky, has partnered with the University of Virginia to implement the Compassionate Schools Project, a seven-year, $12 million research project based on mindfulness principles (Marshall, 2017). In the United Kingdom, the University of Oxford has teamed up with University College London and the Medical Research Council in another seven-year project to study the application of mindfulness practice with adolescents in the schools, at a cost of $7.5 million (Mundasad, 2015). In Chicago, the Erikson Institute, a developmentally based graduate school, has been given $3 million by the U.S. Department of Education to study the effectiveness of mindfulness at 30 high-poverty schools encompassing more than 2,000 students in kindergarten through 2nd grade (DeRuy, 2016).

Along with these longitudinal programs, there's been a tsunami of short-term studies on using mindfulness in the schools. These have offered preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of mindfulness with respect to a wide range of important skills necessary for school success, including

• Executive functioning (Flook et al., 2010).
• Sustained attention (Gu, Xu, & Zhu, 2018).
• Working memory (Quach, Jastrowski Mano, & Alexander, 2016).
• Social and emotional development (Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010).
• Improved math performance (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015).
• Self-regulation (Viglas & Perlman, 2018).

Interestingly, two of these studies (Flook et al., 2010; Viglas & Perlman, 2018) indicated that mindfulness practices were especially effective with students who had difficulties with executive functioning or self-regulation. Similarly, mindfulness appears to be very effective on a number of levels for low-income minority students in urban settings. One randomized controlled study, for example, published in the prestigious journal Pediatrics, showed improvements in urban, at-risk middle school students with respect to somatization (having medical symptoms without any known cause), depression, negative affect, negative coping, rumination, self-hostility, and post-traumatic symptom severity (Sibinga, Webb, Ghazarian, & Ellen, 2016).

There is also emerging research suggesting that mindfulness practices benefit students with special needs. One study of adolescents with autism who went through nine weeks of mindfulness training saw decreases in rumination, as well as improved social responsiveness, social communication, social cognition, and social motivation (de Bruin, Blom, Smit, van Steensel, & Bögels, 2015). A review of several recent studies concluded that mindfulness may prove to be a novel psychosocial intervention for students with ADHD (Cassone, 2015). Mindfulness has shown effectiveness with a group of adolescent psychiatric outpatients displaying a heterogeneous mix of emotional and behavioral disorders. Those students engaged with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) self-reported reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatic distress, and increased self-esteem and sleep quality. Of clinical significance, the MBSR group showed a higher percentage of diagnostic improvement over the course of the five-month program (Biegel, Brown, Shapiro, & Schubert, 2009). A study of students with intellectual disabilities showed that mindfulness practice led to improved task performance and reduced task avoidance (Kim & Kwon, 2018).

As of 2019, there have been three separate meta-analyses of the existing literature on mindfulness in the schools. Although meta-analyses can produce watered-down data due to differences among the studies analyzed, they can also be useful in determining the overall effectiveness of an intervention across a wide range of studies (see Ahn, Ames, & Myers, 2012, for a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of meta-analyses in educational research). In the first meta-analysis, which included 19 studies using control groups (Zenner, Herrnleben-Kurz, & Walach, 2014), overall effect sizes within and between groups was .40 and .41 respectively (using Hedges' g, a measure of effect size). An effect size of .40 is considered to be within the range of desired intervention effects, according to Hattie (2008). The meta-analysis also looked at specific components of desired effects and found a large effect size (.80) in cognitive performance among students in mindfulness studies.

A second meta-analysis (Maynard, Solis, Miller, & Brendel, 2017) demonstrated a small, statistically significant positive effect on cognitive and socioemotional outcomes from mindfulness practices in the schools but no significant effect on academic and behavioral outcomes. A third meta-analysis (Klingbeil et al., 2017), examining 76 studies involving 6,121 participants, found small positive effects (.32 in controlled studies), which surprisingly became stronger at follow-up (.46), suggesting that mindfulness has a cascading effect long after the study has ended.

Taken as a whole, these studies suggest small to moderate positive effects due to mindfulness-based practices in the schools. We must keep in mind, however, that the research on mindfulness in education is still in its infancy, and future studies will help to illuminate which factors are most potent in initiating positive effects on students' emotional well-being, cognitive performance, and academic achievement. Future studies also promise to indicate which interventions are most effective with specific groups of students.

Teacher and Student Testimonials for Mindfulness

Another way to gain insight into the benefits of mindfulness in schools is to listen to the teachers who are implementing these practices. Laura Markus, 6th and 7th grade math teacher at Dunn Middle School in Los Olivos, California, reports that the school schedule "can be chaotic for some students. They often come to my classroom after science class, where they may still be excited from setting something on fire just minutes before. … Taking a few minutes for quiet meditation at the beginning of each class serves as a transition for students to get into a different mindset for learning the logic of math" (Dunn School, 2018). Jana Standish, school counselor at Colrain Central School in Colrain, Massachusetts, who leads mindfulness sessions for elementary school students, comments, "Children have so many activities—things they're expected to learn and memorize. They're taking in so much information … just taking a little time to pause and feel your breathing is helpful" (Broncaccio, 2018). Intervention teacher Stacey Achterhoff, who has worked with K–5 homeless students in the Duluth Public Schools in Minnesota, says,

There were just so many layers of yuck to get through before we could get to academics. … If we don't address the trauma, then the kids are going to become stunted in academic growth. … When I go into the classroom, I see that quiet magic of kids being able to settle into their own bodies. … They see there's power in being able to control what they can, when there are so many other things out of their control. (Zalaznick, 2017)

We can also learn from the students themselves about the impact that classroom-based mindfulness has had on their lives. One high school student who had participated in a mindful self-compassion program for adolescents said this:

Mindfulness has helped me focus because every day, I have like 20 pages to read in APUSH and APES [AP U.S. History and AP Environmental Science], and somehow right now it is hard to get reading, and every day I would come home and think "I don't want to do this," and so I wouldn't, but if I sat down and focused only on this and nothing else then I got it done and it didn't even take that long. So I actually like meditating and … focusing on my breath, because it helped me focus on my schoolwork. (Bluth, Gaylord, Campo, Mullarkey, & Hobbs, 2016, p. 485)

Another high school student involved in a mindfulness study of an alternative high school program reported, "When we started meditation, it seemed that I would get angry and stay angry, but now it seems when I get angry, I calm down quicker" (Wisner, 2014, p. 632). In Baltimore, Maryland, Patterson High School student Chris Bowman commented on the effect mindfulness has had on him personally:

Growing up without a father and stuff like that, I struggled with a lot of depression, a lot of grief, and a lot of just really bad—really bad zones of like suicidal thoughts. But I had to find a way to get out of that. A mindful moment is when you—you just take a deep breath in a moment of conflict and just—maybe you just look at that and just like, I can do this in a different ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Other ASCD Books by Thomas Armstrong
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Joining the Quiet Revolution
• Chapter 2. Reviewing Evidence from Neuroscience
• Chapter 3. Understanding the Basics
• Chapter 4. Practicing Self-Care as a Teacher
• Chapter 5. Teaching Kindness and Compassion
• Chapter 6. Adapting to Students' Development Levels
• Chapter 7. Applying in the Content Areas
• Chapter 8. Expanding Schoolwide
• Chapter 9. Respecting the First Amendment
• Chapter 10. Anticipating Future Challenges
• Appendix A. Glossary of Neuroscience Terms
• Appendix B. Resources for Mindfulness in Education
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright