Part III provides insights into improving students’ learning, memory, attention, and reasoning abilities and implementing empowering community-building strategies within your schools. Because the greatest and most lasting gains will be made with collaborative community building within schools, this final section of the book also offers an opportunity for you to learn from mindful leadership experts about what it means to be a mindful leader, and why mindful leadership is important to transformational change.
At the beginning of each chapter, you will find a key principle that highlights one essential point from that chapter. At the end of each chapter, you will find mindful reflection questions to help you connect the information to your own circumstances and experiences, as well as space to record your answers or any other thoughts you have during your practices or while reading this book. These questions, which are available as free reproducibles at go.SolutionTree.com/behavior, may also be useful for those of you who meet in small groups to study, learn, and practice mindfulness. You can easily form specific study groups for population groups, such as teachers or parents. The group might even provide an opportunity for parents, teachers, and staff to learn about mindfulness as a part of your larger school community.
Whether you are a teacher, parent, or community member, you may find it worthwhile to approach this book in three dedicated blocks of time—(1) setting aside a few hours for part I, (2) reading and practicing the exercises in part II over a period of several weeks, and (3) then reading and reflecting on part III when you are ready to advance broader collaborative use of the suggested techniques. While there are many reasons to approach this book sequentially, reading it front to back, if you want to know more about trauma or neurobiology, or have an interest in a specific technique, then you may opt to hone in on specific chapters. If you are an administrator, you may be most interested in part III—particularly chapter 9, which includes practical advice from a former school superintendent and several principals. Please note that chapters 4–6 (part II) are linked and that reading that set of chapters together can help you gain more complete information.
Let’s get started on your journey toward mindfulness, and prepare for creating, and being a part of, a heart centered community.
PART I
THE URGENCY OF NOW
In part I, we build on the first of three streams of research that guide our work toward creating mindful, compassionate communities: pediatric neurobiology research on the impact of toxic stress and trauma (Ford & Courtois, 2009; Zelazo & Cunningham, 2007) on brain development. This research suggests that toxic stress and trauma are particularly damaging for preschool and elementary-age children during their early developmental years, and those early years are an important time for helping children recover from trauma due to the brain’s neuroplasticity.
Chapters 1 (page 13), 2 (page 21), and 3 (page 37) provide context for the reader regarding the importance of changing the conversation and narrative of how we educate and the importance of beginning now. These three chapters provide the urgency for implementing mindfulness as the foundational practice for cultivating caring, compassionate school communities as a direct response to combat the escalating prevalence of trauma and toxic stress in our students’ lives and in those who teach and lead. As we begin the journey toward healing, we also provide foundational information on developmental trauma and neuroscience, and information regarding the underlying structure of the brain that teachers must consider in developing classroom-based interventions, introducing mindfulness, and building caring, compassionate school communities. Note that chapter 3 contains overarching sections that explain the connection between our brains, our emotions, trauma, and stress.
We believe that by engaging in schoolwide mindfulness activities and creating caring, compassionate school communities, educators have a vehicle for strengthening executive functioning (EF), accelerating personalized learning, advancing student interest and strengths, and helping students heal from trauma.
CHAPTER 1
The Need to Care
I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.
—Pablo Casals
key principle
Mindfulness practices can stimulate the paradigm shift in schools and the new societal mindset needed to overcome the impact of trauma and stress.
Children live with nightmares. Whether it is the trauma of living through a hurricane or earthquake, feeling uncertain of where one’s loved ones are, or living in a neighborhood of poverty or neglect, their trauma surrounds us today. Whether it is domestic abuse, school shootings, or graphic displays of killing on television and in video games, violence is all too prevalent. All too often for young children living with fear, anxiety, or violence, their experiences and unvoiced reactions create layers of damage (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2014).
Trauma touches the lives of children of all ages. It may be pre-traumatic, post-traumatic, or recurrent. It is not limited to youth who are in gangs or those who are of a certain age. While violence may not be the source of trauma for all children, the trauma could be related to abuse, or neglect, or simply losing a friend. While the impact of a traumatic event will not affect everyone equally, the impact of trauma resulting from each of these experiences could be significant. Sometimes teachers will be aware of the traumatic event the student brings into their classroom. We as teachers may hear about the death of a grandparent, for example. At other times, all we may see is that Christopher did not finish his homework or that Latosha seems to have withdrawn. Traumatic experiences are not left at home. Children come into classrooms and the school community every day carrying their school bags and the weight of their traumatic experiences.
There Is a Mounting Urgency