How to start a Mindful School Year with School Counseling. Read below to find my 3-Step process for incorporating focus, attention, and presence in your school.

Ummm… where did summer go? I feel like it blew past me all too fast! We were ending the school year, there were lots of fun and games, and it was finally time for me to spend my mornings snuggling my own kiddos. Then….. BAM! It’s back to school time!

But, I sure am glad I absolutely LOVE my job and all the people I work with. It really does make the transition way easier. I mean, that’s why we became School Counselors, right? We love doing what we do!

So, with that being said, how can we start the year promoting and developing a culture of being mindful?

Let’s Get Started…

We can start by incorporating these 3 simple things…

1. Understand the benefits and differences in mindfulness vs. meditation.
2. Set up a way to implement mindfulness.
3. Start your mindful year off with a bang!

If you set up awareness about how the body and brain work together… kids will grasp the concept and start to realize when they are feeling heavy emotions. For example, I had a little guy who often got worked up about stuff in his classroom. Once I did a lesson on how our brains work and what it makes our body do, he started to realize before it got to the point of explosion. He started to recognize when it was time to take a break.

Now, is every kid going to be like this? Absolutely NOT!

So, let’s look at some ways to start incorporating mindfulness into your school counseling program effectively.

Step #1: Understand the Differences in Mindfulness vs. Meditation and the Benefits

I often hear the terms mindfulness and meditation used interchangeably. That is because they are very alike! Meditation is the formal practice of being mindful. It’s like mindfulness on steroids! Mindfulness, on the other hand, is explained like this… “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; On purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

At school, I notice some children find it very difficult to pay attention and retain the information given. Mindfulness is the ability to be in the present moment and being able to focus your attention to something specific. Doing this, allows the person to become non-judgmental and have the ability to look at things from a different perspective.

Do you see where I’m going here… have kids not paying attention? Well, here’s your answer, mindfulness helps teach kids how to focus and pay attention!

You might be thinking this sounds hard even for adults because it is! However, I have seen young children be curious, kind, trustworthy, and accepting by nature, so having kids put aside their sillies, they do take to it naturally. On the child’s level, it would look like finding their natural breath and refocusing their attention to find a sense of calmness within them.

It takes a lot of practice to master or obtain these skills. I think introducing it to students early in life can enhance their coping abilities for later on. I believe with instruction and practice, children can benefit from daily mindfulness practices.

So… what DOES it help with?

For starters, it helps activate certain parts of the brain…

• Amygdala – Run, freeze or fight
• Hippocampus – Stores your memories
• Prefrontal Cortex – Helps you make smart choices

My students love learning about their own brains through the MindUP Curriculum. It really does a fantastic job making it kid friendly!

On a side note… this is some research showing how mindfulness can change the pathways in our brains, through practice.

“Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change itself.  SPECT scan studies, MRI studies, and EEG have confirmed that mindfulness practice actually changes the structure of the brain and brain functioning. An example of how neuroplasticity functions is a worn path in the grass from having been walked on repeatedly.  The neuronal pathway gets stronger and stronger with repetition.  Repeated trauma builds pathways to the brain.  These pathways typically function in unhealthy ways (anxiety, anger, etc). Practicing mindfulness builds healthy pathways in the brain to replace unhealthy responses, but it takes repetition.”  (Burdick, 2014)

Also, recent research indicates that mindfulness can make a positive difference in the lives of students in the following ways:

• Increased emotional regulation
• Increased social skills
• An increased ability to orient attention
• Increased working for memory and planning and organization
• Overall increased self-esteem
• Increased sense of calmness, relaxation, and self-acceptance
• Increased quality of sleep
• Decreased test anxiety
• Decreased ADHD behaviors-hyperactivity and impassivity
• Decreased negative affect/emotions
• Decreased anxiety, decreased depression
• Fewer conduct and anger management problems

Step #2: Set up a way to Implement Mindfulness within your School Counseling Program

When I was a classroom teacher, I liked to use a chime instead of a song or chant for transition time. We practiced several times, silently listening to the sound of the chime, while we transitioned. Over the course of a month, the transitions in my classroom started to become less chaotic. Transitioning from one activity to the next started to take less time… in return, increasing my instructional time and increasing student knowledge!

There are many different ways to teach mindfulness in your school. You can do a school-wide focus, individual student help, and/or classroom lessons. Here are some quick ways to implement…

Whole-School: Use 10 min. at the start of school for every class to practice, build time into your character assemblies to have a moment of silence, do mindful walks to and from other classes.

Individual/Small-Group: Read scripts (kidsrelaxation.com), listen to mindfulness CDs, do GoNoodle.com or Mind Yeti, use the app OMG! I can Meditate, or do mindful coloring.

Classroom Lessons: Teach about the brain from the curriculum MindUp!, do belly breathing, use a chime and spend time focusing on one thing, or use the games mentioned above. In Kindergarten, I like to bring beanie babies to sit on their bellies. While they breathe, the students can watch the beanie babies go up and down with each breath.

Step #3: Start Your Mindful School Counseling Year

With all this information… you have lesson ideas to do. But, what about showing results? You know…data?

This type of implementation can easily fall into one of your action-research plans for the year. Plan out how you are going to implement by using some of the suggestions above. Write out a plan (if you don’t have one you can check out my Simply Perfect Planner for School Counselors) and start collecting pre-data. How many office referrals, detentions, attendance, etc.?

Follow the examples below to start an Action-Research Project for your School Counseling Program!

1. Conduct in-service training for your teachers, describing the positive effects of incorporating mindfulness. Start faculty meetings with a short mindfulness activity or offer to conduct 15-minute mindfulness groups for teachers before school in the mornings. The teachers who feel the benefits personally will be more likely to utilize the activities in their classroom.
2. Use existing data (benchmarks, SRI Scholastic Reading Inventory, DRA, etc.) to evaluate the effects of mindfulness activities. For example, do an end of quarter comparison measuring test scores or office referrals when mindfulness curriculum is incorporated to a quarter where it is not.

Mindfulness in school does not have to be a huge production or take up a lot of time. These are simple transition activities that can be used throughout the day. Once kids get used to doing them, they will likely start practicing them on their own when they need to.

Before I forget….. A FREEBIE for YOU!

I love my brain worksheet! I usually print this out in black and white… than have my students color the three different parts we talked about in our lesson.

Do you utilize mindfulness in your school? If so, how? I would love to find out more!

 

Looking for more FREEBIES?? Check out… Small-Group Counseling Freebie!