Topic 7 - Mindfulness and Well-Being for Educators

What is It?

As educators, we strive to be engaged and invested in students’ social, emotional, and academic growth. Yet teaching demands a “withitness” that requires an ongoing in-the-moment awareness of ourselves and our students. Mindfulness, as both a practice and a way of being, can help us slow down in the face of time pressure and be more present to ourselves and our students.

Mindfulness is the awareness that arises when we intentionally pay attention in a kind, open, and discerning way. When we are mindful, we focus on the present moment non-judgmentally. Researchers link mindfulness with CASEL’s five social and emotional competencies (especially self-management and self-awareness), and daily mindfulness practice can help us find greater day-to-day well-being.

So, what is “well-being”? Researchers have studied it for decades, and there isn’t a common definition. However, most agree that teacher well-being is a multidimensional construct—a response to the social, emotional, and cognitive conditions of the profession related to both occupational flourishing and languishing.

Researchers who measure teacher well-being often consider these three areas as protective factors (for flourishing) in light of stress, overwhelm, and burnout:

• social well-being (including one’s sense of connectedness and inclusion)
• emotional well-being (the proportion of pleasant to unpleasant emotions experienced)
• workplace well-being (the level of purpose, meaning, engagement, and sense of accomplishment experienced at work)

Why Is It Important?

The fact is…teachers everywhere are experiencing burnout and demoralization—feeling dispirited, losing confidence and hope. The top words they’re using to describe their feelings are anxious, fearful, worried, overwhelmed, and sad. In fact, teacher burnout has increased since the pandemic with job-related stress becoming the top reason for teachers leaving the profession. While no one wants our stress to be contagious, this predicament can affect our students.

Researchers recently found that students’ cortisol levels (indicating stress) were higher in classrooms where teachers experienced more burnout, or feelings of emotional exhaustion. Another study suggests that some students demonstrated fewer gains in executive functions when their teachers reported high levels of stress.

With these challenges in mind, we are learning that mindfulness holds a lot of potential for reducing stress and improving the emotional lives of teachers—and ultimately shifting classroom climate and school culture.

A growing body of research suggests that teachers are experiencing positive, measurable outcomes from practicing mindfulness. Here are some examples:

• Mindfulness helps us focus. Teachers who practice mindfulness may experience an increase in awareness, focused attention, and working memory capacity.
• Mindfulness helps us become more adaptable. Studies demonstrate that teachers who practice mindfulness experience an increase in both emotion regulation and resilience.
• Mindfulness is good for our mental health. Several mindfulness studies with educators indicate that a few weeks of practice may result in a reported decrease in burnout, stress, anxiety, and depression.
• Mindfulness improves our physical health. Educators who have participated in mindfulness studies also report benefits to their physical health, including better sleep quality and lower blood pressure.
• Mindfulness enhances our relationships with students. Regular mindfulness practice may ultimately influence the way teachers view and relate to their students. After nine weeks of mindfulness practice, some teachers report that they are more likely to positively evaluate challenging students and that they have a greater tendency to forgive them.
• Mindfulness can make us better teachers. With all of these positive outcomes in play, mindfulness practice may also help teachers to navigate the sense of “time pressure” they feel in their classrooms while enhancing their sense of efficacy in the classroom—which can positively influence teaching effectiveness.
• Mindfulness makes us feel better. Educators participating in mindfulness interventions report greater well-being and self-compassion as well as an increase in positive emotions.

Further, when considering well-being more broadly, studies suggest that there are a number of positive sources for teacher well-being including positive relationships (e.g., teacher-teacher, student-teacher), job satisfaction and engagement, health and sleep quality, self-efficacy and choice of teaching methods, physical safety, and support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In these modules, we will explore ways to enhance your social and emotional well-being (as well as your students) as we consider a range of character strengths (e.g., purpose, self-compassion, courage, humility, etc.) that can also strengthen your instructional repertoire while enhancing school relationships.