Among all school-based factors, teachers have the largest impact on student achievement. The teacher-student relationship accounts for much of this influence. Although many teacher education programs provide knowledge about effective teaching behaviors, few target for development the skills teachers’ employ to enact what is known. Bridging the gap between knowing about and being able to …
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Critical Neuroscience and the Politics of Mindfulness Interventions for Youth: A Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Working Group
Adolescents bear the burden of complex global challenges head, yet as recent events have shown, they are also drivers of change. Youth mindfulness programmes (YMPs), now increasingly prevalent in educational and juvenile justice settings, are thought to promote resilience and emotional skills, drawing on neuroscience to inform interventions. Moreover, neurobiological ideas are frequently incorporated into …
Mindfulness Practices as Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Strategies for Preparation, Implementation, and Assessment
This Think Tank will convene a team of teaching and mindfulness experts to explore the science, the benefits, and potential risks of using mindfulness as an anti-oppressive pedagogy—an approach that helps students recognize the ways that most people are variously privileged and oppressed, understanding how both relations perpetuate suffering for others and for oneself. The …
An investigation of the impact of mindfulness training on the development of attention and working memory in children
The PI will recruit a mentor teacher (with a minimum of 5 years of teaching experience and 1 year of practicing mindfulness) from a school where at least 10 classroom teachers are willing to be assigned to a mindfulness or control condition. The mentor teacher will collect data from computerized measures on attention and working …
The effects of mindfulness meditation training in early childhood
This project is investigating the effects of mindfulness training during early childhood. Because the neural networks supporting cognitive control and executive function are undergoing major developmental change during this period, implementing mindfulness training during the preschool years may be especially beneficial. However, given that young children have a very limited ability to focus for extended …
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Mindfulness-based education in the elementary school classroom: Individual and joint effects of a teacher and student program on children’s classroom behaviors, peer relations, classroom hierarchy, and stress reactivity
The purpose of my study is to investigate the single and joint effects of a mindfulness education program for children (MIndUp) and a mindfulness-based stress reduction program for teachers (SMART-in-Education) on elementary school children’s social and emotional well-being, classroom behaviors, and stress reactivity, and academic achievement. This study will contribute to the question of whether …
Relational processes in learning mindfulness: An action-theoretical perspective
The interpersonal processes of learning mindfulness were explored by analyzing the transcripts of the teacher-student interactions in the Dialogue and Inquiry periods of the MBSR course, informed by video-assisted process recall interviews of teacher and students. The purpose of the study was to describe and understand the process of learning and teaching mindfulness as a …
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Educating the Heart: Cultivating Compassionate Global Citizens
This Think Tank explores how Critical Pedagogy and Social and Emotional Learning can be synthesised through an Ethics rooted in Compassion. The intention is to develop innovative pedagogy for a ‘Global Education Curriculum’ for students aged 8-15. Traditionally, Global Education nurtures competencies in line with Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy. It is proposed that the nurturing …
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Establishing Contemplative Studies Programs: Practices, Priorities and Problems
This weekend workshop for contemplative educators explored practical information about how to establish undergraduate programs in Contemplative Studies. Featured topics included definitions of key terms in the field including multi-epistemological models, balancing the humanities and the sciences, including issues of ethics and social justice, how to incorporate contemplative practices into the curriculum, fund-raising, and how …
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School-based mindfulness training in middle school and college students
The aim of this multi-investigator award was to assess the effects of school-based mindfulness training in two different educational settings: college students and middle schoolers. Because common emotional disturbances are already present in the college sample, and ameliorated with meditation practice, it is feasible that teaching these skills before the onset of emotional disturbance may …
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