Implementing mindfulness based approaches in schools takes time, here's 4 top tips to get the ball rolling and everyone involved.
Research shows that a whole school approach leads to more positive student outcomes such as optimism (for teachers and students), social-emotional competence and reduced anxiety for teachers.
Our community shared with us the best tips to start getting your whole school on board for mindfulness based approaches within your school and classrooms.
- Have a personal mindfulness practice in teachers, principals and all staff at your school. This helps with staff wellbeing, workplace culture and student wellbeing. You can do this by first encouraging your school to book a staff workshop with Smiling Mind to help introduce what Smiling Mind is, how it is beneficial and how it works
- Find or Create the mindful champions at your school. This would be someone (or a few teachers) who live and breathe mindfulness and understand the concepts around it. They can help motivate others and guide the way. They would practice mindfulness consistently in their own classroom and go into other classrooms and run sessions until the home teacher felt comfortable to take over.
- Use the research and evidence. Smiling Mind did a research project that examined the effectiveness of our programs at schools and found that there were positive outcomes for teachers, students and the school environment. Take this research to your school leadership team to show them the potential benefits to students and staff within your own environment.
- Get everyone on board with Smiling Mind. Encourage the use of Smiling Mind to everyone in the school community including students, teachers, principals, staff and parents. You can book a Smiling Mind professional development workshop for your staff, send out parent letters to inform parents about Smiling Mind and how you or your teachers are using it in the classroom.
Good luck! We love hearing from our community so tag us on social media or write to us here with your story.
Smiling Mind have developed easy-to-follow mindfulness education curriculums for every school age including exactly how to implement mindfulness in any school whilst embedding a mindful culture amongst students.
Find out about the research to support mindfulness in schools here or read more about the benefits of mindfulness in education here.
Smiling Mind’s vision is to see Mindfulness Meditation on the national Australian school curriculum by 2020.
We will do so by providing accessible, life-long tools to support healthy minds through our FREE mindfulness app with supporting education programs. We are a 100% not-for-profit organisation that works to make mindfulness education accessible to all.