Using Mindfulness to Improve Well-Being in Schools! What Is Mindfulness?

Transcription

1 Using Mindfulness to Improve Well-Being in Schools! By Tyler L. Renshaw, Sarah J. Bolognino, Sarah P. Fletcher & Anna C. J. Long!! School psychologists have long been in the business of improving students well-being. Along the way, through solid research and practice, we have learned that youth s well-being is intertwined with their caregivers well-being (e.g., Sameroff, 2009), and that good student outcomes are strongly influenced by the ins and outs of classroom and home environments, which are usually arranged and managed by well-intentioned yet often overwhelmed caregivers (e.g., Fleming, Mackrain, & LeBuffe, 2013). These facts have led to an increased focus, as of late, on promoting the well-being of caregivers. Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about these facts is that they are actually old news, as school psychologists have known about the importance of positive relationships and environments for quite some time. Indeed, these facts can be directly derived from some of school psychology s most commonplace and empirically supported theories of human behavior, including ecological and behavioral approaches, which have guided our professional practice for many years (cf. Daly, Martens, Skinner, & Noell, 2009; Gutkin, 2009).!! At bottom, behavioral and ecological theories share a common core element: They are fundamentally concerned with social interaction in context. When applied to student well-being, these theories suggest that the many varieties of well-being from happiness to academic success to physical health are functions of beneficial social interactions among youth, caregivers, and the wider environments they are situated within. Because these causes of wellbeing are seen as being irreducibly contextual, school psychologists intervention strategies for promoting well-being are likewise fundamentally social in nature. Although there are several ways to go about influencing relationships and environments, one of school psychology s most tried-and-true strategies is to teach students and caregivers new social skills, which they can then put to use to improve their own and others well-being. This approach to intervention has historically been called social skills training, but as it has grown and expanded over the years, it has come to be known as social emotional learning.!! Lots of research has demonstrated the positive effects of social skills training and social emotional learning on various aspects of students and caregivers well-being (e.g., Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). That said, the purpose of this article is to provide a practical introduction to a key social emotional skill known as mindfulness, which has promising utility for improving well-being and, at least over the past decade, seems to be growing in popularity in schools (cf. Felver, Doerner, Jones, Kaye, & Merrell, 2013). Because many school psychologists might think of mindfulness as a rather solitary skill something that is performed in one s head alone or as something that is more akin to a cognitive ability than a learned behavior, we intend to offer a strictly skills-based perspective on mindfulness, describing how it can be understood and learned by both students and caregivers as well as how it can function to promote positive relationships and environments. To do this, we will first describe the lay of the land surrounding mindfulness by examining the nature of the skill itself and then summarizing what the research says about its correlates and effects on well-being. We will then get to the heart of the matter by outlining how mindfulness can be used in schools and, specifically, by providing a script for how basic mindfulness skills training can be carried out with a classroom of students.!! What Is Mindfulness? Mindfulness has its origins in the teachings of the Buddha and other Eastern religious traditions, where it was conceptualized as a desirable state of consciousness, not an applied psychological skill. Starting in the 1970s, mindfulness became a topic of interest in professional psychology, where it was conceptualized variously as a cognitive ability, a personality trait, a mindset, a quality of consciousness, a cognitive style, and a life orientation. Although some early theorizing about mindfulness posited that it was a stable disposition, recent work by applied psychologists has focused more on understanding its

2 behavioral components and on testing interventions for promoting its development in real-life situations. Given the conceptual and empirical work that has been carried out so far, as well as the purpose of school psychologists as change agents within schools, we suggest that it is most useful to conceptualize mindfulness as a meta-skill that is composed of three subskills: (a) mindful awareness, (b) mindful responsivity, and (c) mindful effort (cf. Renshaw, 2012; Renshaw & O Malley, 2014). Each of these subskills can be understood and developed separately, yet it is only when they are used in combination that mindfulness is fully practiced. And it is when mindfulness is fully practiced, especially in stressful moments, that it can facilitate effective use of prosocial skills.!! The first subskill, mindful awareness, refers to actively observing what is going on here and now in one s self and in one s environment. To put it in student-friendly language, we operationalize this skill as noticing the little things happening right now. A more technical way of understanding this skill is coming into contact with and then staying in touch with presentmoment stimuli. In everyday life, we contact various stimuli using our five basic senses (i.e., tactile, visual, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory), our three bodily senses (i.e., emotional, vestibular, and kinesthetic), and through thinking-related behavior (e.g., conceptualizations and judgments). Practicing mindful awareness, then, might include a range of noticing behavior, from observing our breathing during an exam, to attending to our knotted brows after a frustrating encounter with a friend, to realizing a students sad-looking body posture as he sits quietly during class. Instead of simply noticing these things and then quickly and mindlessly moving onto something else, the practice of mindful awareness helps us stay in contact with and become familiar with the details of life as it unfolds here and now.!! The second subskill, mindful responsivity, refers to the quality of our response to stimuli that we contact through mindful awareness. To frame it in student-friendly language, we operationalize this subskill as being friendly to ourselves and others. This skill is essentially about responding deliberately and positively to whatever is present here and now, especially when what is present are negative stimuli (e.g., uncomfortable emotions or provoking comments). Scholars and practitioners have described this part of mindfulness using many adjectives, but probably the most common thread running throughout these descriptions is compassion or kindness towards one s self and others. Instead of doing what is easiest or least aversive, mindful responsivity is about behaving in a way that is sensitive to and beneficial for everybody involved. That said, practicing this subskill could look quite different depending on the context. For example, practicing mindful responsivity would manifest differently for a student in a confrontation with a peer, a teacher in a power struggle with a student, or a student dealing with her test anxiety. The first instance might result in the student walking away and cooling off; the second instance might end with the teacher reconsidering the situation from the student s point of view; and the third might result in the student engaging in deep breathing exercises to promote relaxation. The upshot is that mindful responsivity leads to constructive and prosocial responding, and that such positivity is possible primarily because of one s preceding mindful awareness.!! The third subskill, mindful effort, refers to engaging in intentional action. This means purposefully initiating and sustaining productive behaviors, particularly in the face of adversity. To couch it in student-friendly language, we operationalize this as doing hard things on purpose. As a first step, this subskill requires intentionally cultivating the two aforementioned subskills: mindful awareness and mindful responsivity. Because we often notice after the fact that we were attending to something or that we responded in a way that was beneficial to others, mindful effort requires doing these things purposefully. For the second step, practicing mindful effort requires persevering in a positive behavior even when the going gets tough. Often referred to as grit, such perseverance is especially beneficial for teachers and students dealing with

3 competing goals, such as carrying out class-wide instruction while managing student problem behavior or completing class assignments while maintaining friendships. Mindful effort could thus be practiced across a variety of contexts, ranging from students finishing homework, to teachers carrying out effective yet time-consuming school discipline protocols, to students mastering new social emotional skills. The key point here is that mindful effort is a subskill that helps teachers and students persist in mindful awareness and mindful responsivity, not that it is something entirely unique in itself.!! What Does The Research Say About Mindfulness? The empirical promise of mindfulness has been researched in two ways: by investigating the correlates of mindfulness measures and by evaluating the effects of mindfulness-based interventions. To begin, measurement research has proceeded by developing self-report instruments of mindfulness, such as the Mindful Student Questionnaire (MSQ; Renshaw, 2014) or the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (Brown & Ryan, 2003), and then investigating the relationships between scores on these measures to scores on other self-reported or informant-reported measures of adaptive and maladaptive functioning. For example, Renshaw (2014) found that students scores on the MSQ were substantially related to various risk factors, including receiving and perpetrating aggression, using substances, and experiencing somatic symptoms, as well as with several protective factors, such as receiving social support, participating in meaningful activities, and experiencing thriving affect. More specifically, he found that, compared with students with below-average scores (< 1 SD), those with above-average MSQ scores (> 1 SD) were more than 14 times less likely to consider or actually self-harm in the last month, and that they were over 17 times more likely to provide social support to someone who needed it in the last week. Similar trends in correlates have been observed across other mindfulness measures, with findings indicating that mindfulness scores are substantially related to life satisfaction, happiness, depression, self-esteem, impulsivity, and academic competency, among other things (Renshaw & O Malley, 2014). Taken together, such a variety of positive and negative correlates suggests that mindfulness is a pivotal skillset that, once learned, is likely to have many benefits.!! Mindfulness-based intervention research, on the other hand, has proceeded by training students and caregivers in formal practices (e.g., mindful breathing and mindful STOP, both described below) that target the development of mindful awareness, mindful responsivity, and mindful effort for the sake of decreasing problems and improving well-being. A few review articles have been written regarding the empirical status of mindfulness-based interventions with youth, which we encourage interested school psychologists to read fully (i.e., Burke, 2010; Harnett & Dawe, 2012; Zoogman, Goldberg, Hoyt, & Miller, 2014). The upshot of these reviews is that mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to be feasible and acceptable interventions for youth across a variety of settings, including schools, and that such interventions have demonstrated small positive effects for decreasing problems and improving well-being. Similar to the measure-development studies, intervention studies have looked at the effects of learning mindful skills in relation to a range of outcomes, including internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, academic competence, and relationship quality, all of which show promising improvement through intervention. More recently, these kinds of interventions have been researched with teachers and parents, with findings from a few, small randomized controlled trials showing that learning mindfulness skills has substantively enhanced caregivers competence, effectiveness, overall health, and relationships with the youth they care for (e.g., Jennings, Frank, Snowberg, Coccia, & Greenberg, 2013).!!! How Can Mindfulness Be Used In Schools? When considering the use of mindfulness-based interventions, school psychologists should think through a series of questions to determine which kind of intervention is most appropriate. First, who is the intervention target student(s), caregiver(s), or both? Second, what is the nature of the

4 presenting problem externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, academic or social skill deficits, lack of positive mental health, or something else? Third, at what level will the intervention be delivered universal (school-wide), secondary (small group), or tertiary (individualized)? Once these questions have been answered, school psychologists can determine the nature of the mindfulness-based intervention that will be most helpful within their specific context. At this point, we recommend perusing several preexisting mindfulness-based curricula. The MindUP curriculum (The Hawn Foundation, 2011) is geared toward universallevel prevention and classroom use, while the Learning to Breathe (Broderick, 2013) and A Still Quiet Place (Saltzman, 2014) curricula are oriented more toward group and individualized work. All of these curricula contain lesson plans with enough conceptual and practical material to make for a strong intervention at various levels of service delivery. However, depending on your needs, a fully developed curriculum might not be a good fit if, for example, you want to use mindfulness exercises as an adjunct to a preexisting behavioral intervention or as a simple classroom management strategy to help teachers and students self-regulate after lunch. For situations like these, we recommend pulling guided intervention instructions and worksheets from either the previously mentioned curricula or from other available workbooks, such as The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens (Biegel, 2009) or A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook for adults (Stahl & Goldstein, 2010).!! Additionally, if you do not have access to any of these resources, or cannot obtain access quickly enough to start a mindfulness-based intervention at your school (say, tomorrow), we recommend using the basic instructions provided below for two common mindfulness skill training exercises, which are known as mindful breathing and mindful STOP. The specific language and examples provided below could easily be adapted to better suit particular service delivery settings (e.g., class-wide skill training vs. individual counseling session) or clients of varying development levels (e.g., young children vs. adolescents vs. teachers). That said, as when teaching any skill, we recommend using a direct instruction approach to mindful skills training (or a Tell Show Do Respond Repeat method) that involves (a) explaining the rationale for and components of the practice, (b) modeling the practice, (c) doing the practice together, (d) providing feedback on and reinforcement for the client s practice, and (e) repeating these steps until the skill is mastered.!! Sample Script For Using Mindfulness!! Introducing mindfulness. There are a lot of things in life that may stress us out or be difficult for us: We may not do well in school, have trouble with others, or feel really sad or angry for no real reason. The good news is that there are skills we can learn to help us in tough situations, so that we can overcome challenges and be the successful people we want to be. When we talk about overcoming challenges, this doesn t mean that they go away. It just means that we re able to make good choices and do our very best, even when things are hard.!! Because we aren t born with skills, we have to learn them and once we learn them, we can improve them over time, with lots of practice. But we also have to make sure we keep using them, or else we might lose them. One especially good skill for helping us be successful in tough situations is called mindfulness. We can think of mindfulness as a super-skill that s made up of three small skills: (1) noticing the little things right now, (2) being friendly to yourself and others, and (3) doing hard things on purpose. In other words, mindfulness is paying attention to what s going on right now, while also being kind to yourself and those around you, even when it s really hard to do so. To help you learn these three little skills, and to see what it looks like when you put them together, we re going to practice two mindfulness exercises: mindful breathing and mindful STOP.!! Practicing mindful breathing. Mindful breathing is a practice we can do every day to help us grow our mindfulness skills, so that they re ready when we need to use them. You can think

5 of it like practicing running around a track every day after school to prepare for a big race on the weekend. When we do mindful breathing, we pay attention to our breath in the here-and-now and are kind toward whatever we notice along the way. Because this is not always an easy thing to do and we might get distracted, another big part of mindful breathing is to gently bring ourselves back to noticing our breath every time we realize we re distracted. I m going to try the practice with you to show you how it s done, and because it s helpful for me to grow my mindfulness skills too.!! First, sit comfortably in your chair with both feet on the floor, your hands in your lap, and your eyes closed. Take three deep breaths. Now, see what you can notice about your breath feel the air entering your body from your nose or mouth. Feel your stomach going in and out as the air comes and goes. This is how we practice noticing the little things happening right now. [Practice silently for 30 seconds.] While we do this, it s normal to get distracted, either by noticing noises around us or by noticing our thoughts about school, family, friends, fun things, or problems. This happens to everyone. When this happens, be kind to whatever you notice, and then gently come back to your breathing. This is how we practice being friendly to ourselves. [Practice silently for 30 seconds.] You might get distracted over and over again and that s okay. Just be kind to yourself and gently come back to noticing the little things about your breathing. When we do this, we are practicing doing hard things on purpose. [Practice silently for 1 minute.]!! When the mindful breathing practice ends, ask students to share their experiences what little things they noticed, how they were friendly to themselves, and how it felt to do hard things on purpose. Emphasize the importance of practicing mindful breathing every day as a way to grow mindfulness skills to help overcome challenges, and establish a classroom routine that allows for mindful breathing to be practiced for a few minutes each day, such as after reentering the classroom following lunch.!! Practicing mindful STOP. Although mindful breathing is helpful for growing mindfulness skills, we need a different kind of practice to use when we are faced with challenges in real life. If practicing mindful breathing is like running around the track to get ready for the race, practicing mindful STOP is like actually running the race. Practicing mindful breathing helps us to be ready to practice mindful STOP when it really counts. STOP is an acronym that helps us remember the steps of practicing mindfulness when we re in a tough situation. To start with, S is for Stop! When we realize we are in a tough situation, the first thing we do is stop what we are doing. Then we move onto T, which stands for Take three deep breaths. This helps us relax so that we use our mindfulness skills better, and it also helps remind us of mindful breathing. Next, O is for Observe what s happening right now. Once we re calm, we can notice the little things in ourselves and others, like what we re feeling or thinking or wanting to do, just like we practiced noticing our breath during mindful breathing. Lastly, P stands for Proceed positively. Now that we are more relaxed and have taken time to notice the little things, we can make good choices by being friendly to ourselves and others.!! After guiding students through the mindful STOP practice, role play a few examples of how the practice could be used in real-life situations, such as when feeling nervous before a test or when feeling angry after hearing someone say something mean or untrue about you. It can also be helpful to visually display the STOP acronym in a prominent location in the classroom and to review it with students daily, at the beginning of each class. When classroom problems arise, such as disruptive behavior during instruction or a peer altercation during partner work, the STOP acronym can be referenced to prompt students to use mindfulness skills to improve their behavior.!! Conclusion: The purpose of this article was to offer a skills-based understanding of mindfulness that would be useful to school psychologists for improving the well-being of

6 students and caregivers. We have accomplished this by describing the nature of mindfulness as a teachable skill, summarizing what the research says about its correlates and intervention effects on well-being, and then describing how it can be used in schools, both generally and specifically. Although mindfulness is certainly not a panacea for all school problems, our personal experience, along with a growing body of research evidence, suggests that it is indeed a pivotal social emotional skill that, once learned, can be used to improve many aspects of student and caregiver functioning. We therefore recommend that you take a closer look at the research we have mentioned and try the practices we have described to see if mindfulness might be a helpful skill for improving well-being in your schools.! References!!Biegel, G. M. (2009). The stress reduction workbook for teens: Mindfulness skills to help you deal with stress. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.!!Broderick, P. C. (2013). Learning to Breathe: A mindfulness curriculum for adolescents to cultivate emotion regulation, attention, and performance. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.!!Brown, K. W. & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, doi: / !!burke, C. A. (2010). Mindfulness-based approaches with children and adolescents: A preliminary review of current research in an emergent field. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 19, doi: /s x!!daly, E. J., Martens, B. K., Skinner, C. H. & Noell, G. H. (2009). Contributions of applied behavior analysis. The handbook of school psychology (pp ). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.!!Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D. & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of students social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82, doi: /j x!!Felver, J. C., Doerner, E., Jones, J., Kaye, N. C. & Merrell, K. W. (2013). Mindfulness in school psychology: Applications for intervention and professional practice. Psychology in the Schools, 50, doi: /pits.21695!!fleming, J. L., Mackrain, M. & Lebuffe, P. A. (2013). Caring for the caregiver: Promoting the resilience of teachers. Handbook of resilience in children, New York, NY: Springer. doi: / _22!!gutkin, T. B. (2009). Ecological school psychology: A personal opinion and a plea for change. The handbook of school psychology, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.!!Harnett, P. H. & Dawe, S. (2012). The contribution of mindfulness-based therapies for children and families and proposed conceptual integration. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 17, doi: /j x!!the Hawn Foundation (2011). The MindUP curriculum: Brain-focused strategies for learning and living New York, NY: Scholastic.!!Jennings, P. A., Frank, J. L., Snowberg, K. E., Coccia, M. A. & Greenberg, M. T. (2013). Improving classroom learning environments by cultivating awareness and resilience in education (CARE): Results of a randomized controlled trial. School Psychology Quarterly, 28, doi: /spq !!renshaw, T. L. (2014). Measuring school-specific mindfulness: Development and validation of the Mindful Student Questionnaire.Manuscript submitted for publication.!!renshaw, T. L. (2012). Mindfulness-based practices for crisis prevention and intervention. Handbook of school crisis prevention and intervention, Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.!!Renshaw, T. L. & O Malley, M. D. (2014). Cultivating mindfulness in students. Handbook of positive psychology in the schools (pp ). New York, NY: Routledge.!!Saltzman, A. (2014). A Still Quiet Place: A mindfulness program for teaching children and adolescents to ease stress and difficult emotions. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.!!Sameroff, A. J. (2009). The transactional model of development: How children and contexts shape each other. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.!!Stahl, B. & Goldstein, E. (2010). A mindfulness-based stress reduction workbook. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.!!Zoogman, S., Goldberg, S. B., Hoyt, W. T. & Miller, L. (2014). Mindfulness interventions with youth: A meta-analysis. Mindfulness.Advanced online publication. doi: /s !!tyler L. Renshaw, PhD, NCSP, and Anna C. J. Long, PhD, are assistant professors in the school psychology at Louisiana State University, where Sarah J. Bolognino and Sarah P. Fletcher are doctoral students.