It was my daughter’s ninth birthday party and I’d lost track of the birthday girl. A group of fourth graders were in the kitchen attempting homemade pasta, the dogs were sniffing around for dropped bits of dough, and one of the party guests was loudly trying out the rented karaoke machine.
When I found my daughter, she was sitting with her legs crossed in the lotus position two rooms away, her eyes closed, her hands on her thighs. I called her name. She opened one eye to look at me. “What are you doing?” I asked. “You have guests in the kitchen.”
“I need calm,” she responded, a slight grin on her face. Preach, I thought, returning to the chaos of the kitchen.
My daughter later explained to me that her fourth-grade teacher had recently introduced meditation to her class, leading students in box breathing and centering themselves. My daughter, easily stressed and often overstimulated, had recognized in meditation something she needed.
How Mindfulness Helps Both Students and Teachers
When Jill Guerra asks her students if they’re sometimes mean to themselves, she says, almost everyone raises their hand. “I teach them compassion for themselves and others. We talk about that a lot.”
She loves watching her students at Manzanita SEED Elementary School in East Oakland grow and change from when they start until they leave after grade five.
Guerra was already an elementary school teacher when she discovered mindfulness. “I was burning out,” she says. So when an organization called Mindful Schools showed up at her school twice a week to teach students mindfulness, Guerra was intrigued. “The kids really loved it,” she says.
“Quiet inside,” was how one of Guerra’s kindergartners described feeling after a mindfulness exercise. One of Guerra’s fifth graders told her that “my heart feels less heavy, and I feel lifted.”
When teachers were given the opportunity to train in mindfulness, Guerra “jumped on it.” At first, it was simply part of her larger teaching role. After a few years, she says, “It was all I wanted to do.” So, when she got an email from an Oakland school that wasn’t performing well but had received a grant to implement mindfulness and yoga, Guerra jumped at the opportunity and was hired.
Five years later, she’s still there.
“Quiet inside,” was how one of Guerra’s kindergartners described feeling after a mindfulness exercise. One of Guerra’s fifth graders told her that “my heart feels less heavy, and I feel lifted.”
Does Mindfulness in School Work?
Increasingly, meditation is being understood as something all students need, or could, at the least, benefit from. And a handful of programs around the US aim to deliver it into schools. While their approaches vary slightly, the leaders creating these programs are united in their belief that mindfulness and meditation are valuable tools that can help students manage such issues as poverty, trauma, violence, and stress, as well as more garden-variety test anxiety and tech overload.
Surprisingly, however, the largest study to examine mindfulness in schools—dubbed the MYRIAD study—indicated that mindfulness didn’t, in fact, improve students’ mental health. What it did do, the study indicated, was help teachers.
Critique of the study’s findings pointed to its basis in an eight-week compulsory student mindfulness program. Better success, it was theorized, might come if mindfulness was incorporated into the overall curriculum, and if it lasted throughout the year. And indeed, some mindfulness programs in schools, including the ones we looked at for this story, are long term, part of a school’s overall climate, answering at least some critiques of the MYRIAD findings.
What’s more, those involved in delivering mindfulness to students (and, frequently, their parents and teachers) describe a climate of increased respect, fewer in-school fights, less truancy, and higher test scores.
Compassionate Classrooms
Consider Kara Cosby’s students, most of whom, she says, have been dealt a tough hand. Cosby is a teacher at one of the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is one of the largest urban districts in the United States, serving roughly 96,000 kids. The kindergarten to grade five students at Cosby’s school are mostly Black and Brown, she says, and most experience poverty. “We’re struggling on every front,” she says. So, when Cosby had the chance to bring mindfulness to her students six years ago, via a program called the Compassionate Schools Project in cooperation with the University of Virginia, she eagerly took it on.
It hasn’t been easy. “I thought I knew bad behavior,” she says. But by her second week at the school, she says, “I’d never dealt with that level of disrespect.” Kids threw things in