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NDTV
5 days ago
- Health
- NDTV
The Rise Of Mindfulness In US Schools: But what Are Students Truly Learning?
New York: Writing, reading, math and mindfulness? That last subject is increasingly joining the three classic courses, as more young students in the United States are practising mindfulness, meaning focusing on paying attention to the present moment without judgment. In the past 20 years in the US, mindfulness transitioned from being a new-age curiosity to becoming a more mainstream part of American culture, as people learned more about how mindfulness can reduce their stress and improve their well-being. Researchers estimate that over 1 million children in the US have been exposed to mindfulness in their schools, mostly at the elementary level, often taught by classroom teachers or school counsellors. I have been researching mindfulness in K-12 American schools for 15 years. I have investigated the impact of mindfulness on students, explored the experiences of teachers who teach mindfulness in K-12 schools, and examined the challenges and benefits of implementing mindfulness in these settings. I have noticed that mindfulness programs vary in what particular mindfulness skills are taught and what lesson objectives are. This makes it difficult to compare across studies and draw conclusions about how mindfulness helps students in schools. What is mindfulness? Different definitions of mindfulness exist. Some people might think mindfulness means simply practising breathing, for example. A common definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a mindfulness expert who helped popularise mindfulness in Western countries, says mindfulness is about "paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, nonjudgmentally, in the present moment." Essentially, mindfulness is a way of being. It is a person's approach to each moment and their orientation to both inner and outer experience, the pleasant and the unpleasant. Fundamental to mindfulness is how a person chooses to direct their attention. In practice, mindfulness can involve different practices, including guided meditations, mindful movement and breathing. Mindfulness programs can also help people develop a variety of skills, including openness to experiences and more focused attention. Practising mindfulness in schools A few years ago, I decided to investigate school mindfulness programs themselves and consider what it means for children to learn mindfulness in schools. What do the programs teach? I believe that understanding this information can help educators, parents, and policymakers make more informed decisions about whether mindfulness belongs in their schools. In 2023, my colleagues and I conducted a deep dive into 12 readily available mindfulness curricula for K-12 students to investigate what the programs contained. Across programs, we found no consistency of content, teaching practices or time commitment. For example, some mindfulness programs in K-12 schools incorporate a lot of movement, with some specifically teaching yoga poses. Others emphasise interpersonal skills such as practising acts of kindness, while others focus mostly on self-oriented skills such as focused attention, which may occur by focusing on one's breath. We also found that some programs have students do a lot of mindfulness practices, such as mindful movement or mindful listening, while others teach about mindfulness, such as learning how the brain functions. Finally, the number of lessons in a curriculum ranged from five to 44, meaning some programs occurred over just a few weeks and some required an entire school year. Despite indications that mindfulness has some positive impacts for school-age children, the evidence is also not consistent, as shown by other research. One of the largest recent studies of mindfulness in schools found in 2022 no change in students who received mindfulness instruction. Some experts believe, though, that the lack of results in this 2022 study on mindfulness was partially due to a curriculum that might have been too advanced for middle school-age children. The connection between mindfulness and education Since attention is critical for students' success in school, it is not surprising that mindfulness appeals to many educators. Research on student engagement and executive functioning supports the claim that any student's ability to filter out distractions and prioritise the objects of their thoughts improves their academic success. Mindfulness programs have been shown to improve students' mental health and decrease students' and teachers' stress levels. Mindfulness has also been shown to help children emotionally regulate. Even before social media, teachers perennially struggled to get students to pay attention. Reviews of multiple studies have shown some positive effects of mindfulness on outcomes, including improvements in academic achievement and school adjustment. A 2023 report from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention cites mindfulness as one of six evidence-based strategies K-12 schools should use to promote students' mental health and well-being. A relatively new trend Knowing what is in the mindfulness curriculum, how it is taught and how long the student spends on mindfulness matters. Students may be learning very different skills with significantly different amounts of time to reinforce those skills. Researchers suggest, for example, that mindfulness programs most likely to improve academic or mental health outcomes of children offer activities geared toward their developmental level, such as shorter mindfulness practices and more repetition. In other words, mindfulness programs for children cannot just be watered-down versions of adult programs. Mindfulness research in school settings is still relatively new, though there is encouraging data that mindfulness can sharpen skills necessary for students' academic success and promote their mental health. In addition to the need for more research on the outcomes of mindfulness, it is important for educators, parents, policymakers and researchers to look closely at the curriculum to understand what the students are doing.
Mint
09-05-2025
- General
- Mint
I thought I needed anxiety for my job. I was wrong.
I recently took a personality test and decided I needed to change some things; some aspects of my personality seemed to be responsible for making me unhappy. A high level of neurotic anxiety was one of them. To help adopt a new mindset, I took intensive meditation class; the 'homework' involved meditating for 45 minutes a day. This was challenging because, as I confessed to my meditation teacher, I hated meditating. As an ultra-productive efficiency lover, I didn't like doing nothing for long stretches of time. But also, and more important, I wasn't sure I really wanted my anxiety to go away. I saw anxiety as my secret weapon, the edge that an immigrant kid like me had on my more privileged, pedigreed peers. Sure, they went to Yale, but I could have a huge panic attack about my career that would fuel me to work through the weekend like it was nothing. I didn't know how I'd live without anxiety, which I saw as a useful net for my high-wire life as a journalist. I'd proudly recall times when my hair-trigger Spidey sense jolted me awake at 3 a.m., to correct a factual error before a story went live in the morning. I still cringe at the time in college when my lack of anxiety had let classmates down: In true senioritis style, I slacked off on an assignment and left our team with a mediocre grade. Our professor, a journalist of some renown, said our project 'didn't even make sense.' The lesson I took was that I had been laid-back and anxiety-free, and it showed. A pillar of the meditation method of the class that I took, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, is the concept of 'not-striving.' People who come to it are told not to chase specific outcomes. In his book 'Full Catastrophe Living,' founder Jon Kabat-Zinn writes how, in meditation, 'the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment.' But stripped of my meditation headset, I was still an anxious little immigrant who thought you should, in fact, be striving. If you're not careful, some deeply buried shtetl gene told me, you can mindfulness yourself into so little drive for success that you end up sleeping on a park bench. Ultimately I got over this anxiety reliance through advice I encountered from another guru of sorts, the Democratic operative David Axelrod. According to Dan Harris, author of 'Ten Percent Happier,' Axelrod has a secret for staying calm during political campaigns, which involve striving furiously for months and then, come Election Day, letting go. He tells himself, 'All we can do is everything we can do.' In other words, you can do your best, but you can't do more than that. I found this a useful mantra for so much of my life. It's OK to get amped, to work hard, and to strive for success. It's OK to do everything you can do—triple-check the story before you go home for the night, send one more email for work, research a better school for your child. But once you've done all you can do, it's time to let go. I realized my hard work and intensive planning—not my unending anxiety over outcomes—were helping me achieve. Sometimes things will happen the way they are going to happen, 3 a.m. wakeups notwithstanding. I could tilt the course of events in my direction, but I couldn't control the future—and certainly not by worrying more about it. Now, I avoid rechecking assignments that I've already reviewed. I don't reread emails to my boss after I've sent them. I only peek at my bank account balance once a month, and my 401K even less frequently. After I've gotten my work done, I make time for guilt-free fun with my family. Or by myself. For modern-day go-getters, mindfulness can mean striving to do things well, but it also means acknowledging when the results are out of your hands. There's no need to be anxious when I've done all I can do—including meditating. Olga Khazan is a journalist and the author, most recently, of 'Me, but Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change.'
