Teaching Mindfulness In Schools

A few years ago, I was approached by the Headteacher in my school to ask if I would be interested in teaching Mindfulness to our students. I am a science teacher but was already known as a regular meditator and had ‘come out’ as a Buddhist at work by leading a Chapel service about Buddhism, so my Head felt I was best placed to lead this initiative in the school. When I replied that I didn’t really know much about how to teach Mindfulness she promptly told me that was not a problem as she knew exactly who I should go to and was willing to pay for me to train with them. This started the ball rolling for my training with the Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP), and has led to me teaching over 300 girls in my school and 120 year 6 children in the local primary school to date, plus a familiarity with a huge range of strange acronyms.

A few months later I found myself sitting in a room full of strangers starting the 8-week MBSR course (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) as a prerequisite for attending the training course to learn to teach .b (or dot be as it is pronounced). There are a few different organisations leading Mindfulness in schools in the UK and the Mindfulness in Schools Project is just one, but is fast becoming the largest and most well known. It has a course for primary school children called Paws b, for secondary children, called .b and programmes for teachers to teach other teachers and for parents. This is the organisation with which I have studied and trained, and they believe that it is important for mindfulness to be learned from experienced meditators. As a result they insist that all those attending their programmes have completed, as a minimum, the standard 8-week course of MBSR. This is the reason I was in a room listening to a softly spoken woman inviting me to eat a raisin mindfully and then discuss it with the people sitting next to me.

The 8-week course was an interesting contrast to my experiences with Chan and meditation up to that point. My resistance to these practices, which I viewed as lesser than Chan, and the assumptions I had about the secular mindfulness movement in general have been challenging throughout the training and as I’ve continued through to teaching. But as time has gone on and I have become more confident in the programme and in my own ‘voice’ to teach it I have found each lesson I teach has been as important a learning experience for me as it is for the young people in my class. Seeing the effect it has had on the young people I’ve taught, I’ve come to believe that Mindfulness has an important role to play in the way the teachings of Buddhism can be offered secularly to those who are put off by the unfamiliarity of the practice of meditation or the trappings of religiosity.

But I get ahead of myself. After the 8-week programme there was a compulsory 6- month wait before I could attend the training week. During this time I was expected to meditate daily for half an hour, and to write an essay of between 1000 and 2000 words explaining why I would be suitable for the training course, which was a little like applying for a job, but in the end was not as difficult as I expected. Meditating daily was also not a challenge as by this time this was a part of my daily routine. However it was advised that I try all the different practices I had learnt in the Mindfulness course, which to be honest I found much harder and mostly did not do. I found visualisation meditations very stressful l as I could not imagine a mountain and feel myself grounded like the mountain and nor did I relate well to guided body scans or other meditations. In retrospect there may have been benefits in listening to other people guiding meditations a little more, but mostly I found it was not a problem for teaching the Mindfulness .b or Paws b courses. Eventually, after all these hoops were jumped I was able to attend the 5-day training course to learn to teach .b. 

The course was fantastic and the training to prepare us to teach the programme was meticulously planned. It is now 10 years since MiSP was started by Richard Burnett and Chris Cullen. They were both teachers who had completed Mindfulness courses themselves, felt the benefit it gave them, and wanted to offer it to the young people in their schools. There was no national programme then so they set about planning and trialling their .b programme It is now in its 10th version. It consists of 10 sessions, each one hour long. There are powerpoint presentations with short videos or activities to engage children and young people, along with short practices, the length and depth of which increase gently as the course progresses. As it is intended to be part of the regular curriculum in schools it is written knowing that not all students would have chosen to be learning this, so it is clearly secular, invitational by its nature and encourages us as teachers to allow students to make their own exploration at their own pace. Ground rules of expected behaviour are agreed at the start, making it clear that no-one has to do anything they do not want to, but that allows those who do wish to try it to feel comfortable and supported in trying.

The lessons are well organised and very experiential in nature. From the very beginning there are short practices each lesson with time to discuss together as a group or in small groups how the students found each practice. The idea is to normalise all experiences and to encourage an attitude of curiosity and kindness to oneself. After a while the lessons get deeper and look at how our minds tend to rumination and worry, but how we might have a choice in how to react or respond. By lesson 6 we are consciously looking at how to notice thoughts without being carried away by them, or at least noticing when we have been carried away. Lesson 7 really challenges students to stay, with curiosity, in a difficult situation by passing round a Shockball, which will randomly give them a small electric shock (for younger children we use something less scary!), In lesson 8 there is a focus on gratitude and noticing the good in our lives. Then we finish with students writing a letter to their future selves, which I keep and return to them up to a year later.

After the first few courses I asked the students to fill in a questionnaire so I could see the impact it might be having on them. I was thrilled to see that over 72% had found the course useful and wanted to do more of the practices. Some of my regular science classes ask me to start with a meditation (perhaps they just want to avoid work!) and the younger ones in particular take well to it. Some continue it privately either using the same practices or apps such as Headspace, which our school subscribes to for their use. Recently one of my Year 7 girls (age 11) came to me at the end of a different lesson to ask about how to not think while meditating, which brought up a very interesting discussion and showed that she and her friend have obviously been practising since we completed the course over 6 months ago.

Of course it’s not all a bed of roses running a mindfulness course for teenagers. Teenagers have a tendency to act like, well, teenagers. Standing at the front of a room of thirty 14-year-olds one particular Tuesday afternoon just before the end of the school day I remember again that I really don't enjoy teaching lesson 5: mindful movement. Getting a roomful of them to sit still and focus inwardly when one or two get giggly and bored requires all of my self-control not to get cross and tell them off. Walking around the room and quietly catching the eyes of the miscreant usually does the trick. But mindful movement requires getting all of them to walk slowly in a form of kinhin. it's raining outside so my original plan of spreading out over the grass outside has not turned out to be possible so we're walking on two parallel lines in the corridor outside the Head’s office. The temptation for them to highfive as they pass each other turns out too strong, despite my regular reminders to “stay in their own bubble”. I sigh inwardly and we go back to the classroom early. Getting angry would spoil the experience for those who are engaging and focused so it is a difficult balance and sometimes you have to cut your losses. Back in their seats we discuss why it was so difficult and they surprise me with their self-awareness of their reasons and impulses, so I let go of counting this as a failure after all.

Another issue I continue to struggle with is the things I think mindfulness leaves out. There is no explicit discussion of compassion. As a teacher you can bring this out during the discussions, but the mindfulness movement as I've experienced it so far leaves that as an implicit self-discovery rather than a key part of the dharma. Many students struggle with the focus on breathing, noticing how they try to control their breathing and get it ‘right’. As this was an issue for me for a long time I am able to connect with them over this and take care in my teaching and meditation guidance to emphasise there being no ‘right’ experience of body or breath awareness. But given that as mindfulness teachers we can be at any point on this path of discovery ourselves, there are bound to be other teachers who do not recognise this, and equally very likely to be other mindsets or difficulties that I do not recognise.

Mindfulness also lacks specific moral discussions. Buddhism, with the precepts and eightfold path, brings that element to the fore, putting a foundation on which to build the experiences. Meanwhile mindfulness focuses on personal development, connecting with the idea of getting better, making ourselves better, as well as reducing our personal suffering. One of the key ideas on the first lesson of Paws Be is that the prefrontal cortex allows us to concentrate, make choices and be our best. These are helpful messages for children, but sit slightly uncomfortably for me alongside my own practice of letting go of the need to be better or to improve or to strive.

All this said, I have seen that there is a direct benefit to the students I teach as they become aware of this very natural way of being, and begin to investigate for themselves how their own minds work. I have found teaching the younger ones particularly rewarding as they are generally much more open and able to connect immediately with the practices. It has certainly been eye-opening to see, from the inside, how the mindfulness movement is growing and becoming more accepted and mainstream. The misunderstandings surrounding mindfulness come to the fore but are open to discussion now in the staff room and workplace. The Deputy Head in my school once told me she is terribly envious of the serene way I walk around school, which seemed terribly funny to me as at the time I was very stressed. Teaching mindfulness allows a new generation of people to get a taste of the dharma without being put off by its religiosity or history and to give an experiential understanding of what it means. My students know I am a practising Buddhist and that this is where my interest in meditation comes from, so the door is open if they want to know more. Perhaps they may choose to return to it later in life in one form or another, in which case, it is a gift I am happy to give.