So you have a mindfulness practice, and you’ve seen how it makes you a better person. Maybe you’ve learned to be kinder to yourself when you flub it with a student. Or maybe you avoid getting TOO high on that pedestal when ranting about the College Board. Or maybe it just allows you to get out of bed in the morning and start the day fresh (no small feat in this year of tedium!).
Whatever the case, you’re on the train. But what about your students? How do you introduce them to something where gratification is definitely not instant, and where you’re asking them to do NOTHING when they’re constantly stressed about everything they have to do?
And what about the teacher next door who is definitely not sold on this New Age McMindfulness mumbo-jumbo? Or the Principal who’s judged on her school’s test scores and doesn’t want you to be wasting precious classroom minutes?
First, a word of reassurance. You are undoubtedly, categorically, objectively right in wanting to spread the goodness. All of your intuitions and personal experiences are backed up by solid research.
And it can be done. In my school, we offer a nine-week class to all 9th graders, meeting once a week. The students report that they highly value it; in fact, 88% of them think their friends at other schools should take the course.
Without further throat-clearing, here are five reasons everyone should embrace mindfulness for teenagers:
1. The prefrontal cortex. If there’s a part of the brain that teenagers and those who teach them need to know about, this is it. It’s responsible for executive skills like self discipline and emotion regulation, and it’s still forming in teenagers. Teenagers are not mini-adults, at least not yet. Mindfulness activates parts of the brain that help those skills develop and de-activates parts of the brain that are more...ummm...reptilian (say it with me: amygdala). You know how people always say “pay attention!” Mindfulness trains students how to do that. If you want to know a lot more about this, please, please read John Medina’s book, The Attack of the Teenage Brain. It’s a super informative, hilarious guide to all sorts of brain science and what it means.
2. Improved academic performance. Mindfulness is NOT something that distracts students from what they should really be doing, or eats away valuable class minutes. In fact, there are decades of research indicating that social-emotional learning yields academic results. In a huge meta-study (a compilation of studies involving more than 270,000 students) students who had the benefit of social emotional instruction increased their academic performance by 11 percentile points compared to those who didn’t. Done right, mindfulness makes time for itself. So there.
3. It’s free. You can implement this stuff with basically no budget. You just need people who know what they’re doing (that’s where YOU come in!). On a longer-term scale, students can use the skills they pick up as a form of preventive care. Do your students struggle with anxiety and depression? Want to help them avoid major issues down the road? This could help. We know from studies that mindfulness-based therapies are equally and sometimes more effective than pharmacotherapy (drugs) in treating anxiety, depression and a relapse of depression. Same with insomnia. Why isn’t something so simple and affordable baked into our unwieldy health care system? Because we prefer silver bullets to things that take patience and time.
4. You don’t need a screen. In fact, it might just be one of the best antidotes to screen time. Feeling more scattered or distracted? Mindfulness can anchor you. Feeling disconnected from your peers? Approaching relationships mindfully allows for deeper connections and, if trained properly, can also lead to enhanced empathy. Check out Richie Davidson’s and Daniel Goleman’s book for more on how that works. Of course, there are tons of apps proliferating that help people discover mindfulness, and even incentivize the practice of it. As a foot in the door, they’re super valuable. At some point, though, it helps to move your practice beyond the screen and into community. If you don’t have a community where you are, consider joining our community on Facebook. (And yes, I fully recognize the irony of directing you to Facebook in this credo on screens.)
5. It’s thousands of years old! And bonus: it’s no longer just available to monks sitting in a mountain cave. Yes, certain elements of mindfulness were sustained by religious traditions, particularly Buddhism, over its history. But the version you see in schools these days is highly secularized, and isn’t actually trying to convert anyone to anything. It’s simply distilling years of wisdom -- wisdom that at some point has been recognized by almost all religious and philosophical traditions -- and presenting it in a way that applies to the modern student/human. If you want to get into the spiritual context, go for it. If you want to geek out on the brain science, that’s fine too. Both of them lead to the same place: mindfulness is good for you.
But here’s the thing: it takes practice, it takes patience, and it takes a teacher to guide you. Just like soccer or the piano or ballet, it comes little by little with steady practice, setbacks, and self-doubt. And just like you have a coach or instructor when you practice those other things, you have a teacher for mindfulness. For your students, YOU are the teacher. But what about you? If you’re like a lot of teachers out there, you see the value in this but might not feel entirely comfortable leading students in practice. If that sounds familiar, please consider joining this community regularly for practice and support. Most blog posts at Still Teaching end with a guided practice, and there are live meditations on most Sundays. In the Facebook group, there’s a whole cadre of like-minded teachers waiting to answer your questions or commiserate after a bad day. At the very least, read some books on the resource page, many of which have practices included in them. And reach out to me directly if you have questions.
Let’s wrap this up, as usual, with a practice.
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