Guest blog by Zettie Taylor, Teacher of English & Mindfulness at Princes Risborough School 

One of our Year 7 students told me: “Me and a friend went to our lockers to get our laptops out for our next lesson and the locker doors would not open. We were trying as hard as we could but the doors were not opening so we went to the office but no one was there – we were freaking out! So we did petal practice and finger breathing and it worked! Turns out that the key was the wrong way. Our minds were clear which meant that we could look at the key a different way.”

I love this anecdote. By unlocking new perspectives, mindfulness offers us different ways of approaching life. I have reams of feedback from students in my school, reporting on the many ways that mindfulness ‘works’ for them. Nine out of ten of our Year 7s have said that it helps, so it came as a shock to hear the results of the MYRIAD study. As I have reflected on the gap between the data at our school and the MYRIAD project, I wonder whether perhaps something about the study itself was somehow ‘turning the key the wrong way’.

Where did it all start?

I feel fortunate to have stumbled across the MYRIAD project at the start of my mindfulness journey. With their funding, we were able to offer fifteen staff members an MBCT for life, and train four of us to teach the .b (pronounced “Dot Be”) 11-18 year olds course to our students.

Learning to teach mindfulness was the hardest thing I’d done since training as a teacher ten years previously. It requires a shift in perspective and expectation, and a delicate balance to maintain between classroom management and personal freedom. I was so keen, so passionate about sharing these fantastic techniques to help our students to self regulate, yet so inexperienced – the mistakes I made on our MYRIAD study students were, well, myriad. I tried so hard to get it right! The training, which was designed to protect the integrity of the study by ensuring that individual teachers didn’t deviate too far from the MiSP script, was definitely gold standard – yet in some ways it held me back. The limitations imposed by the study overrode my professional instinct to respond to different students’ needs, and it’s taken the last seven years of teaching Dot Be and Paws Be at PRS for me to develop my authentic ‘voice’.

I’ve learned from my mistakes over time, letting go of the need to control the outcome and relaxing into a more invitational style of teaching. I learned early on that appearances can be deceptive: quiet students who seem to be engaged can be thinking all sorts of mutinous thoughts, while the disruptive ones often (secretly) report the most gains. One lively student succinctly summed up their experience of mindfulness as “boring as f**k but I still want to do it”! The traditional teacher in me might jump on the swearing; the newer one embraces the honesty in this, and the courage. We can learn to ‘turn the key’ in different ways for different students, with acceptance, humour and respect for each student’s perspective

Developing mindfulness to suit our students

Over the years I have adjusted the delivery of mindfulness in the PRS curriculum to better suit our students. We have moved from teaching the .b course to Year 8s through Wednesday afternoon Enrichment, to teaching the Paws b 7-11 year olds course to our Year 7s within the PSHE curriculum. I’ve shared the .b course with parents, and taught it to Year 11s keen enough to attend after school on a Friday. Some decisions are practical, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts regarding what approach will best meet the needs of our young people.

While I remain true to the intentions and outcomes of the MiSP courses, I now deliver them in my own ‘voice’. As my personal practice develops and changes over the years, I find myself offering more choices. “If you don’t find the breath a helpful place to rest your attention, you can always tune in to your hands or feet instead.” After the death of my father in 2020, I better understand how trauma can affect someone practising mindfulness. For a year afterwards, turning inwards felt like peering into an abyss; it was frightening – and I finally understood why some children might prefer to disturb others rather than sit quietly. I learned to be gentle with myself, and bring that outlook to the classroom too. A belief that teaching mindfulness to young people is a process of planting seeds helps. If presented with a light touch, a student may rediscover mindfulness in later years when challenges arise.

Mindfulness has benefitted me too

Teaching mindfulness has benefitted me, too. Working with young people keeps it fresh. A daily practice helped me to balance my roles as a mother and a teacher by understanding my own stress signature. I discovered that the more busy I was, the less in touch I became with my own body. I learned to spot the signs of overwhelm much earlier. Mindfulness was the process by which I came to know myself better – and then it gave me the strength to hold steady when everything changed.

For over two years now I have lived with Long Covid, and I have come to embrace both the limitations and the possibilities of this chronic condition. I regularly tune in to my body and accept what I find, responding to fatigue and pain with compassion rather than denial. In the darkest days, when I was unable to teach, I knew I had a toolkit of practices and experience – I could ‘turn the key a different way’ and unlock a new perspective. Now I am grateful for the freedom Long Covid has given me to create breathing space in a life that had become increasingly overloaded. I know myself better, check in regularly, and make wiser choices about where I direct my energy.

So, where next?

I am keen to expand the breadth of mindfulness practice across our academy trust. I have successfully embedded an introduction to mindfulness within our Year 7 curriculum at PRS with the Paws b course. We sometimes start department meetings with a brief practice to help us change gear, which is always well received – but currently I am the only mindfulness teacher in the school. My recent absence from work has reminded me that there is strength in numbers.

I have delivered a taster session at a recent wellbeing conference run by Insignis Academy Trust, and I am trained and ready to offer an 8 week adult mindfulness course (.b Foundations) to other staff within our cluster of five schools. Offering mindfulness to adult stakeholders could start to weave a mindful way of teaching and being into the wider fabric of the school communities, perhaps leading to more teachers training to teach our students. More practitioners would enable us to offer interested students a chance to revisit mindfulness with the .b course in Key Stage 4 and 5 as the exam pressures build.

I am learning to embrace the fact that I can’t do it all myself, and that change takes time. I regularly remind school leaders of the positive impact of mindfulness on our students, using my growing bank of feedback gathered via Google forms through optional mindfulness homeworks and an end of course assessment. I need to be flexible and creative in finding ways around the restrictions of school budgets, and time. With more trained staff, we can bring mindfulness training to parents and other stakeholders, too. I dream of a team of mindfulness teachers modelling a slower, more considered way of living and working – and reaping personal rewards through the process.

I’m grateful to the MYRIAD project for giving me the start I needed on this journey. So many of the young people in our school tell me that mindfulness techniques have helped them to overcome their daily challenges in a world of increasing uncertainty. Our current education system seems to be hard to access for so many students.

What if mindfulness is part of the answer? It certainly helps us to ‘look at the key a different way’.

Read the Princes Risborough Case Study here

The post Unlocking Potential: MYRIAD and Mindfulness appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.

On 20th September 2023, we held a webinar where Chris Cullen and Richard Burnett, MiSP’s co-founders, shared the early days of Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP) – what gave them the idea to set up MiSP, where their personal mindfulness journey started from and where has it taken them to this point…

You can watch the full recording by clicking the image above. If you are particularly interested in the MYRIAD research, we would suggest watching from 29:06 where Chris speaks to this specifically. Also, below is a transcript from this part of the session.

In brief, I think it’s really important to get clear about precisely what question the researchers were investigating?

It wasn’t the question – ‘is mindfulness beneficial for children and young people?’  Although the fact is that the outcome data that they got clearly suggests the answer is, yes, it is beneficial for children and young people – showing that the children who actually did mindfulness practices experienced clear benefits.

And what’s more the teachers benefitted from teaching it and from learning mindfulness themselves.

And… the school environment benefitted from the introduction of a school mindfulness programme.

But that wasn’t the question – if that had been the question, the answer would have been yes, for those who actually do it and engage with it.

But nor was the question ‘Can mindfulness be effectively taught in schools using the .b curriculum?’ Though again, looking carefully at the outcome data, the answer is ‘yes, mindfulness can be taught effectively using the .b curriculum’ and when it is well taught, again the children enjoy it and they practice it at home.

Those two questions, that weren’t asked and didn’t inform the design of the trial but if they were asked, the data show that mindfulness is beneficial and .b is an effective way of teaching it and of course, that’s in line with the previous research studies that had been done into .b.

If you look closely at the research design, the question was ‘Is mindfulness in schools scalable as a universal intervention?’

And the particular model that the researchers chose was to take 650 teachers whose only qualification had to be that they had not done any personal mindfulness training recently nor had trained to teach mindfulness, they didn’t even need to show any interest in mindfulness…and let’s remember that the 100 schools were given incentives, as happens on these trials, to nominate a teacher to take part, who didn’t even have to be interested in mindfulness.

And I do not know about you Richard, but I am really glad my teaching was not assessed on the second time I delivered it within weeks of establishing a mindfulness practice myself. It’s not surprising that the Myriad team themselves said that only a few of the teachers could be rated as having taught the course well but the design of the trial meant that whether it was those few that were teaching it well or those that were graded incompetent, all of those results fed into the final outcome.

For me then, it’s not surprising they got the results they did for that big trial, particularly as it’s notoriously difficult to do big psychological research in schools. Some big international programmes for wellbeing in schools, score either no results or negligible results when tested in the realities of secondary schools and so viewed with the wisdom of hindsight one can see that there was a kind of inevitability with that, and Richard had the foresight to see that there were really serious concerns we had about the dosage levels. Now, we did feel and we were persuaded by the researchers… and it was that way round, the researchers persuaded us by saying, ‘look, previous research on .b is really promising and this is a hypothesis worth testing and you’re getting constant feedback from pupils and from teachers that they really enjoy this so this is just going to be a learning experience for us all’ was how it was presented to us ….and it has been (a learning experience).

I have personally had some concern and surprise by how some of the research team have spun these results, some but not all but I do think this needs to be set in the context of the larger trajectory of research of the benefits of mindfulness with children and young people. I really do commend the MiSP response to Myriad, also Richard [Burnett’s] piece, and [Professor] Katherine Weare’s [Mindfulness Initiative] piece. She wrote a really good piece for the Mindfulness Initiative that has to be read alongside any of the press releases or information coming from Myriad.

I really commend the steadiness and commitment of MiSP at this time and I think history will prove to show that you have made the right choice.

In response to Emily’s question about how best to respond to any negative comms:

• We’ve been through hype cycles with mindfulness in general. I think a steady commitment to doing what you’re doing as well as you can through all the ups and the downs, I think that has served the larger mindfulness community well, informed with the knowledge that if teachers introduce it to schools with enthusiasm and experience, you get a sense of how much the children benefit.
• A great ornithologist Audubon used to say ‘If the bird and the book disagree, trust the bird.’
• Whatever the Myriad research might say, as a teacher in school with the kids in front of you, you know some of the kids benefit from this enormously and let that keep your heart inspired to be doing this incredibly important work.
• The fact that MiSP is committed to introducing, developing and maturing mindfulness practitioners in this really important field is just the way to go. We need a body of competent mindfulness practitioners and those of us that are mindfulness teachers are always in training and it’s a lifetime’s journey and we teach from that.

Chris Cullen is a trainer for the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, teaching on the Master’s programme in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy at Oxford University. He has a psychotherapy practice in Oxford, and is also on the team at the University of Oxford Counselling Service.

Previously he taught in secondary schools, and, with Richard Burnett, co-founded the Mindfulness in Schools Project in 2007. Between 2013 and 2020, he ran the mindfulness teaching programme in the UK Parliament, and co-founded the Mindfulness Initiative.

The post Chris Cullen’s reflections on MYRIAD research and its subsequent presentation appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.

By Emily Slater, CEO, Mindfulness in Schools Project

As I approached my second anniversary as CEO of MiSP, I found myself reflecting on the great privilege it has been and also some of the challenges of these times.

People across the charity and education sectors have shared with me that they cannot recall a time (in their working lives) when resources were so scarce, and the cumulative impact of Covid lockdown years, the cost-of-living crisis and political uncertainties are taking a toll. Additionally, we are facing the reality of the eco-crisis, with even the weather carrying a heaviness, and global conflicts that make our hearts ache to new depths.

Despite the many overlapping challenges, I find that mindfulness has personally allowed me to dig deeper and find a sense of ‘groundedness’ that seems to expand as I practice. Working for MiSP has allowed me to see the impact of mindfulness on so many young people’s lives, even years after being introduced to it. Though I appreciate it is not a quick fix for all that we and our young people face, in my experience, mindfulness can be a stabilising force that can support and ground us as we rise to the challenges of our times.

Mindfulness in schools

These two years have coincided with the publication of the MYRIAD research results, as well as the death of Brianna Ghey, and her family’s tireless efforts to fundraise for teachers to train with MiSP. Both MYRIAD and the inspirational efforts of Brianna’s mum, Esther, have influenced me enormously.

For all the nuances of the research (question) and its design, MYRIAD underscores the importance of humility – we cannot currently expect mindfulness to be a quick fix, at scale, for all challenges our young people and schools face. It can help many when we practice but does not take away the need to acknowledge and address real issues impacting young lives – from social media and exam pressures to poverty and social justice questions.

Esther’s work and passion for mindfulness, as well as her direct experience with children, reminds me that whilst it is not a magic wand, mindfulness can be life affirming and a source of tremendous strength.  It also raises for me an urgency to MiSP’s work – to sharing mindfulness skills and approaches with others in our wider school communities as quickly and effectively as possible.

From the many testimonies I have had the privilege of hearing in this role, it is clear the benefits of mindfulness often come about gradually – or as my colleagues have taught me – ‘in horticultural time’. For instance, the seed planted years previously that becomes deep roots to return to when life is on shaky ground.

Looking ahead, I am excited about MiSP’s direction of travel, and looking forward to sharing more hopeful human stories with you. As an organisation, we will continue to do all we can to ensure increasing numbers of people – from all walks of life – are introduced to the concept of mindfulness-based wellbeing at a young age.

For if the seeds of mindfulness are planted as early as possible, the roots will surely have maximum time and possibility to grow. 

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