A new educational paradigm for youth mindfulness. “If you are a teacher, or an educator, or involved in school administration and curriculum development, the book you hold in your hands has the potential to transform your life, the lives of your students, and the life of the school itself, as well as education in America.”—Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, from the Foreword With attention spans waning and stress on the rise, many teachers are looking for new ways to help students concentrate, learn, and thrive. The Way of Mindful Education is a practical guide for cultivating attention, compassion, and well-being not only in these students, but also in teachers themselves. Packed with lesson plans, exercises, and considerations for specific age groups and students with special needs, this working manual demonstrates the real world application of mindfulness practices in K-12 classrooms. Part I, Why Mindful Education Matters, explains what mindfulness is, the science behind its benefits for students and educators, and the inspiring work that is already underway in the Mindful Education movement. In Part II, Begin with Yourself, we are reminded that in order to teach mindfully, we need to be mindful. Here teachers will learn the when, where, and how of mindfulness so they can effectively embody its practices with their students. Mindfulness practices offer teachers self-care and attention skills that prepare them to teach with greater energy and mastery. Discover how simple exercises can help manage stress, focus attention, develop compassion, and savor positive experiences in everyday life. Part III, Cultivating a Mindful Classroom, explores the qualities of a mindful teacher, the ingredients of a mindful learning environment, and helpful skills for appropriate, supportive work with cultural diversity, student stress and trauma, and varying age groups and developmental stages. Finally, in Part IV, Mindful Education Curriculum, we learn eighteen ready-to-use mindfulness lessons for use in schools. These practical exercises, designed to foster skills like embodiment, attention, heartfulness, and interconnectedness, can be readily adapted for any age group and population, and the author draws from his extensive personal experience to offer a wealth of tips for introducing them to students in real-time. Decades of research indicate the impressive benefits of mindfulness in social, emotional, and cognitive development, and as an antidote to emotional dysregulation, attention deficits, and social difficulties. This book invites teachers, administrators, and anyone else involved in education to take advantage of this vital tool and become purveyors of a mindful, compassionate, ethical, and effective way of teaching.

Mindfulness has gone mainstream, and author Deborah Schoeberlein pioneers its practical application in education. By showing teachers how to tune into what's happening, inside and around them, she offers fresh, straightforward approaches to training attention and generating caring both in and outside of the classroom. Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness emphasizes how the teacher's personal familiarity with mindfulness plants the seed for an education infused with attention, awareness, kindness, empathy, compassion, and gratitude. The book follows a teacher from morning to night on a typical school day, at home, during the commute, and before, during, and after class. This book is perfect for teachers of all kinds: schoolteachers, religious educators, coaches, parents-anyone who teaches anything.

With mindfulness initiatives currently highly topical in a range of academic, therapeutic and other domains, new applications of mindfulness have begun to appear in educational settings. This accumulation of twelve research-focused papers contributes to the nascent field of mindfulness in education by exploring practical implementations, as well as theoretical concerns within a range of educational contexts. The contributions in this volume reflect and capture the diversity of approaches to research-linked mindfulness programmes being implemented in contemporary education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Ranging across a number of disciplines, the chapters contribute to work on mindfulness in psychology, education theory, and Buddhist studies. From the evidence provided here, it is shown that the implementation of mindfulness in educational settings is certainly worthwhile, while appropriately rigorous research methods are still being developed.

This handbook addresses the educational uses of mindfulness in schools. It summarizes the state of the science and describes current and emerging applications and challenges throughout the field. It explores mindfulness concepts in scientific, theoretical, and practical terms and examines training opportunities both as an aspect of teachers’ professional development and a means to enhance students’ social-emotional and academic skills. Chapters discuss mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy programs that have produced positive student outcomes, including stress relief, self-care, and improved classroom and institutional engagement. Featured topics include: A comprehensive view of mindfulness in the modern era. Contemplative education and the roots of resilience. Mindfulness practice and its effect on students’ social-emotional learning. A cognitive neuroscience perspective on mindfulness in education that addresses students’ academic and social skills development. Mindfulness training for teachers and administrators. Two universal mindfulness education programs for elementary and middle school students. The Handbook of Mindfulness in Education is a must-have resource for researchers, graduate students, clinicians, and practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, education, and medicine, as well as counseling, social work, and rehabilitation therapy.

In recent decades, education at all levels has been seriously impoverished by a growing obsession with standards, targets, skills and competences. According to this model, only a circumscribed range of basic cognitive skills and competences are the business of education, whose main role is to provide employability credentials for people competing for jobs in the global economy. The result is a one-dimensional, economistic and bleakly utilitarian conception of the educational task. In Mindfulness and Learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education, Terry Hyland advances the thesis that education stands in need of a rejuvenation of its affective function – the impact it has on the emotional, social, moral and personal development of learners. Drawing on the Buddhist conception of mindfulness, he advances a powerful argument for redressing this imbalance by enhancing the affective domain of learning. Mindfulness and Learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education shows how the concept and practice of ‘mindfulness’ – non-judgmental, present moment awareness and experience – can enrich learning at all levels. Mindfulness thus contributes to the enhanced achievement of general educational goals, and helps remedy the gross deficiency of the affective/emotional aspects of contemporary theory and practice. The author outlines a mindfulness-based affective education (MBAE) programme and shows how it might be introduced into educational provision from the early years to adult education with a view to harmonising the cognitive-affective balance across the system.

Although mindfulness can be located in a number of different traditions and disciplines, it was originally an esoteric and powerful practice based on developing a capacity attainable only by certain people. After previously publishing on the positive outcomes, in this book the author identifies a range of adverse effects of mindfulness meditation for some individuals that, from the point of view of mindfulness in schools and higher education, represents uncharted territory. The author demonstrates through research, personal experience and case studies how mindfulness activities can be safe for all students in education settings including the most vulnerable. This book assists teachers in school and higher education settings to make informed decisions about whether to include mindfulness in their teaching, depending on their own capacity, student cohorts and activities to make sure it is safe for more vulnerable students. This guidance is based on a combination of existing pedagogical and clinical knowledge about meeting the needs of vulnerable students, clients and patients and the specialized expertise of trained mindfulness clinicians and teachers. This book puts school and university teachers in the driver’s seat as regards mindfulness teaching in education settings. It argues that the only way forward for mindfulness in education is to adopt an individualized approach which builds on what effective teachers already do in their work with vulnerable students through extending their knowledge about mindfulness and its possible effects. In this way teachers’ existing skills are celebrated and extended, and mindfulness pedagogy develops organically with teachers, becoming a genuine and felt experience both for themselves and their students rather than an ‘add-on’ intervention.

A structured curriculum of classroom-ready lessons, practices, and worksheets for actualizing a powerful new educational paradigm: student mindfulness. This workbook offers a step-by-step curriculum of classroom-ready mindfulness lessons for personal and professional development. It’s a trove of fun, easy activities specially designed to help educators engage K-12 students and cultivate mindful attributes like attention, compassion, and well-being. Rich with simple and effective tips, techniques, worksheets, and guided exercises developed through extensive on-the-ground experience with real students and teachers, The Mindful Education Workbook empowers readers with all the tools they need to integrate mindful education in the school day.