 Hi, I'm Betsy Hanger. I work as a mindfulness trainer in Los Angeles in public schools. Mindfulness training is happening all over the world in education, and it's causing educators to ask themselves, after reading, writing, and arithmetic, is reflection the new fourth R. This important new movement in urban education is providing students and teachers with the skills to reflect and to improve their ability to be attentive to one another. We're always asking our students to focus, to pay attention, but we haven't understood the need to train the skill in our students. Using the language of mindfulness, we can move from chiding our students to leading our students. Using the skill together reduces everyone's stress. It can build a much healthier learning community. This presentation asks four questions. What is mindfulness? Who does mindfulness help? What is the curriculum? What changes can I expect in my classroom? If I use mindfulness for myself and my students. So let's begin. What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is a way of paying attention on purpose to your present moment experience. We notice our experiences, thoughts, and emotions without reacting. Mindfulness training helps students to choose responses that improve their attention, learning, empathy for others, emotional self-control, and conflict resolution. Mindfulness is at the core of social emotional learning. Here's what a class looks like when students have learned the core practice of noticing their experience from moment to moment while sitting in their classroom. Students learn best by experimenting with mindfulness, so we encourage them to practice at home by reminding them through the Edmodo website. Every lesson, 20 and all, has an Edmodo badge associated with it. So here's the first lesson. You might want to follow along as you're viewing this presentation. I'll use the same language with you that I use with the students. Let's begin by getting into your mindful body. This means to sit comfortably having your feet on the floor and sit up so that you feel awake and tall. Place your hands on your legs so that your hands can feel your legs and your legs can feel your hands. Now close your eyes gently or let them rest, looking down. I'm going to bring a time now. That sound is your signal to bring yourself inside for an inner journey. Notice your next breath. Notice as many details as you can. How does it feel? Cool? Soft? Full? Shallow? When your exhale comes, just let it out naturally and keep on noticing your breath each time it arrives. Now I want you to open your ears while you keep your eyes closed. Notice whatever you can outside. If you start to label it good sound or bad sound or noisy, just notice that you've made that label and go back to letting the sound into your ears. Now bring your attention into this room. What can you hear while you sit here breathing and listening? Maybe you can even notice the sound of your own breathing. If you hold yourself still and just feel your whole body. So let's take one more mindful breath together and keep listening. So that was your first mindfulness practice. And gradually we increase the number of minutes that students sit. Many look forward to the stillness and they enjoy feelings of relaxation and calm. Some report mild dizziness or strong imaginative imagery. The job of the mindfulness trainer is just to bring students back into their body awareness so that they learn to regroup their thoughts around the sensations of the breath. The experience of being in the present moment. We're asking the students to be open and curious about their experiences. So the mindful teacher has to model this curiosity by gently guiding the students. Being open and curious about their experiences rather than judging whatever they report. So who does mindfulness help? Mindfulness training has a long history. Drawing from contemplative traditions that are several thousands of years old. Long before there was psychology or neuroscience, philosophers and students were studying the mind. But in the late 1970s a major interest in the concept of stress reduction developed primarily in medicine and psychology. Adults who had chronic disease and pain were helped by learning mindfulness. This program of reflective skills was developed by Dr. John Kabat-Zinn, a professor at the medical school of the University of Massachusetts at Worcester. Other fields began to adapt the practices. In psychology, mindfulness was used for the treatment of anxiety, depression and many other problems. In sports, mindfulness was used as preparation for competition in the Olympics and among professional sports teams. In business, mindfulness was used to develop leadership skills and to help with team building. And in the military and the police, mindfulness skills helped to decrease conflict and help practitioners take calm and dangerous situations. Meanwhile, the neuroscientists started to use fMRI to explore the brain function of adults under various chronic conditions. And they noticed definite improvements in cognitive function, specifically memory, if subjects undertook a course in meditation. This field has exploded. Academic research on mindfulness now publishes an average of 50 articles monthly. The research on mindfulness with children is still evolving and ongoing. The curriculum I use was developed by Mindful Schools, a non-profit in Oakland, California. Mindful Schools partnered with the University of California Davis to conduct the largest randomized controlled study to date on mindfulness and children involving 937 children and 47 teachers in three Oakland public elementary schools. The graph you see shows the change in children's behavior scored on a teacher rated scale courtesy of Kinder Associates LLC wellness works in school. The results show statistically significant improvements in paying attention and social compliance. And showing care for others was close to being significant. Now the control group's large gain in self-calming was probably due to the climate in the three schools, all of which were exceptionally calm compared to other schools that Mindful Schools has trained in. The results show that mindfulness can impact children's behavior in a short time at low cost. And the mindfulness exercises can transcend the language barrier. 68% of the children were English language learners in these schools. Mindfulness training contributes to creating optimal learning environments. Neuroscience's study of the growing brain informs us that when students are triggered by undue stress, violent or difficult situations in their home environments, or by a continual lack of success in their classrooms, their adrenal systems are overtaxed. They have trouble making short-term memories because the hippocampus seat of memory is being overridden by the limbic system's reactivity. Long-term memory, more difficult to access as well. So students have problems taking tests and remembering rules. Mindfulness gives children reflective space to experience the present moment. And from the increased self-awareness comes a greater feeling of autonomy. Students begin to choose to pay attention as well as know how to increase their stamina for attention. They feel safer as they learn how to self-regulate and they're more ready to learn and to care about their learning environment. Megan Cowen, one of the founders and program directors of Mindful Schools, was the focus of a 2012 documentary on mindfulness in an urban middle school. The film, Learn to Breathe, has been circulating wildly recently on PBS stations. Check the website for the air schedule. In a bonus feature on mindfulness training for the school available on Vimeo, Megan observed this about mindfulness training in classroom settings. Mindfulness is useful for schools because it addresses a wide range of issues that aren't traditionally addressed through pure academic learning. One is that it prepares the brain to learn. Research is showing that mindfulness calms the brain in a way that actually makes their brain have a higher capacity of functioning. So one thing is just preparing the brain to learn, so being prepared for academics. And the other thing is that it's addressing the social-emotional side of learning and the social-emotional side of life. And I really believe that it's important to nurture the social-emotional side and the academic side in school. And I believe that one should not be neglected at the expense of the other. I think that they both serve each other. Mindfulness creates more self-awareness so that you notice how you feel in different situations. So that when you are doing something that's harmful to yourself or to someone else, you recognize that feeling and it's more likely that you'll stop doing it. I'm in the classroom and I see kids gaining this skill. I often see this trajectory, these two different trajectories. You have a first grader who is being sent to the office regularly because they can't pay attention. And because they can't pay attention, they're poking their neighbor or they're crawling under their desk or they're asking to go to the bathroom. And you give them a skill that helps them focus and helps them maintain more autonomous control over their body and over their attention. And then you're setting this different trajectory. They're no longer being sent to the office, they're in the class and they're getting educated and both of those options lead to different places. And so to feel like there's a skill that they're cultivating is really gratifying. Research is showing that mindfulness does affect the brain and that it helps to cultivate sort of social behavior that is facilitated through our prefrontal cortex. And so mindfulness is increasing things like self-regulation and bodily regulation, fear modulation, intuition in the sense that our visceral organs are reacting before our mind gets involved. So the more self-awareness we have around our physical reaction, the more quickly and accurately we can respond to different situations. Mindfulness training is organized into three skill sets. We begin with mindful breathing and mindful listening. Students are asked to practice again on their own and some experience an immediate burst of creativity when they imagine where they'd like to practice. While others connect to the feeling they've experienced in the classroom, they learn to close their eyes or keep their eyelids lowered and to sit with still bodies. They're coached to stay alert to each inhale and anchor themselves in body sensations. Some find it easy to concentrate. I don't think it's hard to focus on my breath. While you're looking at this journal page you might try noticing your next breath also. But some students notice right away that their thoughts are moving very fast and keep shifting their focus away from their body senses. These are students who might be labeled as having attention deficits, but their research shows their self-regulation improves the most with mindfulness training. After a few lessons in mindfulness, many students begin to look forward to effects like these. This student is autistic and loved connecting to his breath in his lungs. His participation in class shut up during the course. After a few weeks, most students begin to be ready for the next level of training noting our thoughts. Metacognition is the ability to notice our thinking and it's a key ingredient in executive function, a major skill set in academic success. We train the students to notice the shift of their focus away from breathing and to guide themselves gently back to feeling their breath in the present moment. This gentle reminder to ourselves is mindfulness and we connect the practice of mindfulness to kindness for ourselves and others. Students take quickly to the practice of sending one another kind thoughts, wishes for health, happiness and calm. This ritual closes every lesson and some teachers will use it in very creative ways. This fifth grade class created an entire bulletin board of symbols for the generous acts that others had given them. The board was a continuous reminder of why we were developing our mindfulness. The third skill set is mindfulness of emotion. Mindfulness practices seek not to change our emotional states but to regard them as passing clouds, strong winds, but nevertheless just part of the landscape. The openness to whatever emotions and moods students bring to practice allows them a lot of freedom to explore how they're feeling safely. Mindfulness training can be a kind of universal mental health available to everyone in the class. Students are encouraged to explore difficult emotions and some begin to have powerful effects of healing. This student noted that the skills she learned helped her get through the year and she's continuing to practice. Students are taught to pause with patience for themselves and others. Soon they take this skill into their world and are eager to report back how it's going. They learn to apply the skills that they've learned by practicing for short periods. Two or three minutes of quiet until the practice is easy for them. They see themselves being able to use these skills to observe others with compassion and to be better citizens on the playground and in their neighborhoods. Students are under so many pressures these days. They internalize these pressures and get sick or they externalize them and create conflict in the classroom. But the mindfulness skills that they learned together help grow their learning community. The majority report that they continue to use mindfulness in their daily lives in sports, playing music, preparing for tests, facing difficult situations, being in pain. They feel more mature when they can choose to have more self-control. This student faces a weekly allergy shot now with more equanimity. Well this student, according to her mother, has finally stopped arguing every day with her younger siblings. So now that you've seen evidence from the research done on large groups of students and viewed the journals of my students and heard an overview by Megan Cowan, the principal creator of the mindful schools curriculum, there's one more question to answer. What changes can I expect in my classroom if I use mindfulness for myself and my students? Mindfulness is a personal interior experience as well as one shared by the whole group in a classroom. So like many other things in life, quote-unquote, your experience may vary. But here's what one teacher in an urban Los Angeles school had to say about her year practicing mindfulness in her classroom. In mindfulness curriculum has definitely helped my students and one student in particular in the very beginning of the school year he was impulsive and inattentive and as the curriculum was introduced he had, I recall, he had somewhat of a hard time settling into the routine but once it was underway he became more of an active participant when the lessons were given and then it came to the point where he actually took initiative to implement practices on his own and in the classroom community everyone was mindful of each other's mood especially my own if I was getting frustrated students would remind each other they would say things like teacher's getting upset we need to listen or we need to pay attention or I had students tell me to directly practice mindfulness because they noticed that I was getting either frustrated or I had a certain mood that was not normal quote-unquote normal for them and as far as the students are concerned there they were they became more united they were aware of each other's emotions and mood they were generous and kind to each other in the classroom and that also went outside of the classroom in the school community for myself mindfulness helps me to keep in touch with what's happening in the moment so if I'm giving a lesson and I know the students are not on the same page maybe I'm going too fast maybe I need to slow down I hope you've enjoyed this presentation about how mindfulness skills are growing in the classes where I train both teachers and their students if you're interested in getting more information you can write to me at Betsy Hanger at gmail.com or just look in the resources listed in the credits thank you