In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson.

The techniques, among them focused breathing and concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”

At Stanford, the psychology department is assessing the feasibility of teaching mindfulness to families. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

The experiment at Piedmont, whose student body is roughly 65 percent black, 18 percent Latino and includes a large number of immigrants, is financed by Park Day School, a nearby private school (prompting one teacher to grumble that it was “Cloud Nine-groovy-hippie-liberals bringing ‘enlightenment’ to inner city schools”).

But Angela Haick, the principal of Piedmont Avenue, said she was inspired to try it after observing a class at a local middle school.

“If we can help children slow down and think,” Dr. Haick said, “they have the answers within themselves.”

It seemed alternately loved and ignored, as students in Ms. Graham’s fifth-grade class tried to pay attention to their breath, a calming technique that lasted 20 seconds. Then their coach asked them to “cultivate compassion” by reflecting on their emotions before lashing out at someone on the playground.

Tyran Williams defined mindfulness as “not hitting someone in the mouth.”

“He doesn’t know what to do with his energy,” his mother, Towana Thomas, said at a session for parents. “But one day after school he told me, ‘I’m taking a moment.’ If it works in a child’s mind — with so much going on — there must be something to it.”

Asked their reactions to the sounds of the singing bowl, Yvette Solito, a third grader, wrote that it made her feel “calm, like something on Oprah.” Her classmate Corey Jackson wrote that “it feels like when a bird cracks open its shell.”

Dr. Amy Saltzman, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif., who started the Association for Mindfulness in Education three years ago, thinks of mindfulness education as “talk yoga.” Practitioners tend to use sticky-mat buzzwords like “being present” and “cultivating compassion,” while avoiding anything spiritual.

Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.

A recent study of teenagers by Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, Calif., found that meditation techniques helped improve mood disorders, depression, and self-harming behaviors like anorexia and bulimia.

Dr. Susan L. Smalley, a professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center there, which is studying the effects on schoolchildren, said one 4-year-old noticed her mother succumbing to road rage while stuck in traffic. “She said, ‘Mommy, Mommy, you have to sing the breathing song,’ ” Dr. Smalley said.

Although some students take naturally to mindfulness, it is “not a magic bullet,” said Diana Winston, the director of mindfulness education at the U.C.L.A. center. She said the research thus far was “inconclusive” about how effective mindfulness was for children who suffered from trauma-related disorders, for example. It is “a slow process,” Ms. Winston added. “Just because kids sit and listen to the bell doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more kind.”

Glenn Heuser, who teaches a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class at Piedmont, said one student started crying about a dead grandparent and another over melted lip balm. “It tapped into a very emotional space for them,” Mr. Heuser said. “They struggled with, ‘Is it O.K. to go there?’ ”

Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.

Midge Kinder, a yoga teacher, and her husband, Rick, started the program six years ago at George Ross Elementary, where their daughter Wynne taught.

Camille Hopkins, the principal, said initially she was skeptical. Growing up in South Philadelphia, “I was never told to take an elevator breath”— a way of breathing in stages, taught in yoga — “or hear the signals of chimes to cool down,” Ms. Hopkins said.

But the stresses today are greater, she conceded, particularly on students who lived with the threat of violence. “A lot of things we watched on TV are part of their everyday life,” she said. “It’s ‘Did you know so-and-so got shot over the weekend.’ ”

In after-school detention, children are asked to “check in with their feelings,” Ms. Hopkins said. “How are you really changing behavior if they’re just sitting there?”

Yolanda Steel, a second-grade teacher at Piedmont, said she was hopeful that the training would help an attention-deficit generation better manage a barrage of stimuli, including PlayStations and text messages. “American children are overstimulated,” Ms. Steel said. “Some have difficulty even closing their eyes.”

But she noted that some students tapped pencils and drummed on desks instead of closing their eyes and listening to the bell. “The premise is nice,” Ms. Steel concluded. “But mindfulness can’t do it all.”

by Patricia Leigh Brown from the New York Times

Mindfulness at Tonbridge

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.”

J. Kabat-Zinn, 1994 : Wherever You Go There You Are
Tonbridge aims for boys to leave school prepared for the adult world with the knowledge and self belief to fulfil their own potential. So that they might do this Tonbridge places importance not just on developing the academic abilities and extending horizons of our pupils but also on ensuring that they have a full range of skills which will help them deal with the increasing complexites and stresses of a busy life. Mindfulness is one of these skills, giving boys a way to focus on the present moment rather than getting caught up in what has happened or what might happen.

Mindfulness at Tonbridge is part of the broader PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) Programme. It has been and is taught in many different ways and in many different places : from small groups in squash courts, to classes on the games fields and even the whole school in the chapel.

The core of the Mindfulness programme is an eight week course for Second Years (year 10). The programme focusses on key skills:

First steps in focussing attention
Establishing calm and concentration
Recognising rumination and coming home to the body
Developing present moment awareness in the every day
Slowing and savouring activities, including walking
Stepping back from thoughts that hijack you
Allowing, accepting and being with difficult emotions
Pulling it all together and making it personal
Pupils are expected to do a degree of ‘home practice’ in order to get the most out of the course and additional classes are then held for anyone who wishes to develop their interest in this further.

Benefits of Mindfulness

“It was calm and relaxing. I felt like it was a break from the day.”

“It is a skill which I can use throughout my life. I enjoyed feeling good after doing it. I enjoyed feeling calmer once I had finished, and more content as well. It enabled me to be able to focus on the present moment, without worrying about exams, results, homework etc.”

Whilst for some lessons in mindfulness are appreciated simply as an exercise to help relax and calm, for many the benefits extend well beyond this, helping pupils cope with exam stress, get to sleep, manage anger, deal with difficult relationships, improve their performance in sports and simply handle the increasingly stressful pace and pressure of adolescence.

The benefits of teaching mindfulness to adolescents were explored and confirmed in research between Tonbridge School and the Cambridge University Wellbeing Institute in 2007. We are continuing to explore, develop and research the teaching of Mindfulness as part of the Mindfulness in Schools Project.(http://mindfulnessinschools.org/)

For more information about mindfulness at Tonbridge School please contact Richard Burnett rb@tonbridge-school.org.

This is the sharing offered by Sister Hoi Nghiem and Thay Phap Dung during the Teachers and Applied Ethics Retreat in the Upper Hamlet of Plum Village, on Tuesday January 3rd, 2012. Sister Hoi Nghiem shares about her experience as a teacher in Vietnam, and Thay Phap Dung shares about his experience dealing with his relationships with his parents and friends as a young man growing up in Los Angeles.

“Our intention for this retreat is to get the teachers here to learn to take care of yourself. Hopefully you will remain a teacher, because we need more happy teachers. Do what ever you need to do to trick the school. Don’t say mindfulness, don’t say meditation. Be happy. Happiness is contagious. Know how to be happy and know how to tend to your suffering. It sounds complicated. I didn’t become a monk to become a Buddhist–sorry, brothers and sisters!. I came because Thay taught me how to deal with my emotions. That’s all we do here. It’s nothing very complicated. If you stay here long you’ll see. You’ll see we have suffering, we have difficulties. We have brothers and sisters that want to leave here–can you believe that? And you all want to come here and stay here a long time!”

“Know your mind, know your history, as a farmer knows the season and the earth. This is what is constantly on my mind in the community. We need to sit, stop, and look at it. We all have that one person we’re avoiding–it may even be ourself.”

Applied Ethics: Talking with Br. Phap Dung

But What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness in Schools

Mindfulness is a practical technique which helps us all be calmer and able to focus. It helps calm the mind- chatter which can distract and stress us, and the young people we work with

Come and enjoy 3 days training with experienced practitioners and go home refreshed and with ideas for you to use in your life, your classroom and staff meetings.March 30 (evening) to April 2 (afternoon).

By the end of this retreat you will:

• Have started to develop skills to calm your own mind
• Have experimented with ways to help you students focus
• Have tried speaking and listening skills which improve staff meetings
• Know where to go to get more help and advice.
• Have made contact with teachers, youth workers and others who are using these ideas.

 These practices have been used in the highly effective Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction courses.

 The course will be led by monks and nuns from the Buddhist tradition. Teaching will be led by Thich Nhat Hanh – well known for making mindfulness practice available to ordinary people in simple language. However, the teachings are secular and the retreat is open to people from all religions and none.

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