Teachers and afterschool providers who finds themselves becoming increasingly interested in mindfulness and integrating mindfulness into their classrooms or programs have to keep one very important thing in mind…it starts with them. Introducing kids to mindful awareness, bringing attention to their breath, focusing their mind on particular thoughts or mantras, has been shown in recent research to be effective in helping kids deal with the stresses, pressures, and changes that’re taking place within themselves and their environment. However, these practices and techniques are only as effective as the one teaching or leading them. It’s not enough for teachers or afterschool providers to bring in a mindfulness specialist of some kind to teach students about how to cultivate mindfulness within themselves if that teacher or afterschool provider isn’t also practicing those same techniques on a regular basis. These providers need to have their own well-established practice because once that mindfulness training is gone then they’re on their own to ensure what is learned continues progressing forward.

Here is a quick snippet from a 2016 study:

“Teachers who regularly use stress-reducing strategies increase their abilities to cope with the demands of the career and are positioned to do a better job educating students, according to results from a program administered by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

Teachers in New York City public schools who participated in ‘Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education,’ or CARE, a mindfulness professional development program, not only felt an improvement in their own well-being, they also improved the quality of their classroom.”

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