This is part 3 of a series exploring mindful practice and the implementation of the Mindful Schools mini-intervention at the Sandbox Schools. The articles are written by Mulalo Rasalanavho and Vanessa Scherman. You can read part 1 here.
“Mindfulness is an effective tool for settling and focusing the students at the beginning of any classroom activity.”
Smiling Mind
In this third and final blog post of our pilot intervention series, we have reached the point where we can mindfully reflect on the process – the ‘glows’ and the ‘grows’. It has been an insightful journey, and we are grateful to the schools for affording us the privilege of partnering with them.
Unfolding the Mindful Schools mini-intervention implementation
Mindful Schools began at the end of August 2020 and ended in November 2020. Our first task was to understand the educators’ and learners’ state of mind before exposing them to daily mindfulness practice. The Sandbox project team then issued teachers two mindfulness practice activities every second week, for them to facilitate in their classrooms daily. The activities were five to ten minutes long, and teachers and principals were encouraged to practice mindfulness during their staff meetings and peer-to-peer engagements.
This notion is supported by a growing body of research that affirms that educators are more likely to teach mindfulness practice effectively if they have experienced mindfulness (Roeser, 2016). Towards the end of the intervention, both the educators and learners were also asked to share their thoughts on their mindfulness practice experience after exposure to daily activities.
Defining mindfulness: Educators’ perspectives
The educators indicated they thought mindfulness meant “getting in touch with your inner self”, “sharing ideas”, “what you think and do at the same time”, “activities to relax the mind” or “after those practices, one feels relaxed and calm”. Their responses suggest that there are several misconceptions about mindfulness including “advance thinking”, “caring”, “games that we do in the classroom to improve knowledge and skills”, and “thinking about the challenge and changing the world”.
Although some of these statements are closer to the true meaning of mindfulness than others, an important starting point before implementing an intervention of this nature is to develop a shared understanding of what mindfulness is As described in our first blog post, mindfulness is the capacity to attend to present moment experience in a receptive and open manner, one moment at a time.
Feasibility of implementing mindfulness practice
One of the most exciting findings is that interspersing the school day with brief mindfulness activities is possible. 82% of educators indicated that mindfulness activities were either sometimes, often, or always easy to incorporate into their daily planning. Additionally, implementation is not much of an issue as 80% of the educators reported that the activities were either sometimes, often, or always easy to implement.
It was also comforting to learn that the educators felt that learners seemed calmer after the mindfulness activities had taken place. This feedback aligns with evidence from other mindfulness programmes, described in the second blog post.
What did learners think?
From learners’ feedback, we gathered that many learners found the activities enjoyable and felt more positive emotions after their mindfulness breathing activities. Most learners (93%) expressed that breathing/mindfulness activities were fun, and that they would be interested in doing more of these activities (92%).
This positive feedback provided an opportunity to reflect on the design of the Mindful Schools mini-intervention and research. It is evident that mindfulness has a place in our classrooms, especially now, when the pandemic’s impact has heightened anxiety and stress levels.
A Path Forward
As the global education movement is gearing towards educating the whole child, it has become even more critical for us, as a nation, to understand the place of social and emotional development in our school public school systems. Social emotional learning is essentially the process through which our children learn to understand and manage emotions, and foster positive relationships. In the context of a classroom, social emotional learning provides the foundation for safe, positive learning that will be carried throughout life. Generally, the development of social and emotional skills includes understanding your own emotions, regulating your emotions, making positive choices, empathising with others, and establishing healthy relationships.
In this context, mindfulness is a useful tool for teaching learners some of these essential skills that they need to identify and manage emotions and self-regulate. Our participants had valuable suggestions for improving the design and delivery of mindfulness-based interventions in school, including:
- Conducting workshops for facilitators of mindfulness activities
- Providing training booklets or manuals
- Formally including mindfulness activities in the curriculum or timetable.
- Diversifying activities, such as introducing mindful games. This could also be extended to activities like mindful eating and mindful colouring.
- Introducing some form of parental involvement to support the development of mindfulness in the home environment.
As a project team, we are taking many of these suggestions on board. We feel that a “one size fits all” intervention in terms of mindfulness is perhaps short-sighted. For this reason, we are exploring the possibility of establishing an age-appropriate intervention for the Foundation Phase, Intermediate Phase, and Senior Phase. We are also revising our research approach to include qualitative and quantitative data collection and additional data points.
Over the next few weeks, we will be taking these learnings on board to design an updated intervention, considering the Sandbox Schools’ contextual realities, the experiences of teachers, and the mechanisms that would work best in this environment. We are looking forward to writing future posts, sharing insights about our endeavour to support the self-awareness and wellbeing of educators and their learners through mindfulness practice.
More reading on Social Emotional Learning:
BetterKids (2020) 5 Mindfulness activities that foster Social Emotional Learning
Edulastic (2019) Mindfulness and SEL: What’s the difference?
Edutopia (2016) Why Social and Emotional Learning is essential for students
Schonert-Reichl et al. (2015) Enhancing Cognitive and Social–Emotional Development Through a Simple-to-Administer Mindfulness-Based School Program for Elementary School Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Wings for Kids Core Competencies of SEL
The Sandbox Blog 