Cultivating mindfulness

Twenty squirmy kindergartners sit in a circle on the floor of their classroom with their teacher, Scott Fisher.

“When I ring the bell, what I want you to do is listen to the bell,” he says. “And what else do I want you to do?”

“Listen to it for as long as you can,” a child pipes up.

“Yes, listen to it for as long as you can,” Fisher agrees. “Listen to the bell and don’t do anything except listen to the bell. See how long you can hear this sound as it gets softer and softer until it fades away.”

He rings a shiny brass hand bell and the children grow still: not a giggle or a whisper. After perhaps half a minute, Fisher inhales slowly, looks around the circle at each child … and smiles.

One breath at a time

Fisher, who’s in his fifth year of teaching, is part of a team at Isaac Dickson Elementary School that’s exploring mindfulness strategies for improving the school experience of students and teachers alike. The team’s work is supported by a grant from the Asheville City Schools Foundation, which began investing in the program last school year. Fisher, fellow kindergarten teachers Leslie Blaich and May Castelloe, and special education teacher Mary-Ann Bolton are introducing mindfulness practices in their school and sharing them with other teachers in the system.

The grant has supported various training courses and activities for the team members and their co-workers. This year, local mindfulness guru Scott MacGregor is offering Isaac Dickson teachers an eight-week stress-reduction course at a reduced rate. About 20 teachers are participating in the class, which meets weekly at the school.

Mindfulness is about observing one’s reactions to situations in a nonjudgmental way. “Selfishly, it’s way more about me than it is about the students,” says Fisher. “The more resilient I can be, the more mindful I can be, the more I can benefit my class because they don’t have a teacher that’s freaking out.”

Fisher uses himself to model mindful practices. “I’ll say, ‘Did you guys see what just happened to me right now? Did you hear my voice, and did you see my eyebrows? I just flipped my lid,’” he reveals with a laugh. “And I can be like, ‘Now I’m going to take a breath. You can take one with me if you want.’ I just sort of run this stream of consciousness out loud for the class.”

Building resilience

Back in Fisher’s classroom, a student named Ari is explaining the concept of resilience. Referring to a graphic projected on a screen, she describes a person’s “resilient zone.”

“When you are mad, you come out of it up here,” Ari says, pointing to an area above the zone. “And when you are sad, you’re somewhere down here,” pointing to an area below the zone. “If you are happy, you’re here, or here, or here,” Ari concludes, indicating spots within the resilient zone.

Fisher asks, “If you get upset, you can get … what do we call it?”

“Bumped out,” answers Ari.

“That’s right,” says Fisher. “You can get bumped out of your resilient zone. We’ve also learned that this going up and down, this charge and release, is something that happens to every single human, every single day. It’s not about being good or about being bad: It’s just about how all humans work.”

Using models like this to help students understand their experiences in a nonjudgmental way, Fisher and his teammates say, can be the first step in increasing their ability to engage with school.

Proof’s in the pudding

According to Mindful Schools, which provides online and in-person training for educators across the U.S. and around the world, a significant body of research suggests that using mindfulness practices in educational settings improves attention, emotional regulation and compassion while reducing anxiety and distress. The Emeryville, Calif.-based nonprofit cites a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2015 that found that kindergartners’ social skills predicted long-term educational, employment and mental health benefits.

Teachers who receive mindfulness training, the organization’s website maintains, report lower levels of stress and higher job satisfaction, while independent observations note improved teacher effectiveness and classroom organization.

The training she and her teammates have received, says Castelloe, “has had a huge impact on us as people.” And for her, that hasn’t just been true in the classroom, but “as a mom and a wife and a friend and a teacher — all of it.”

April Dockery, the principal at Asheville Middle School, says the Dickson teachers have been invited to talk to her faculty as a possible prelude to implementing mindfulness practices there.

Blaich, however, sounds a note of caution. “Mindfulness has become a word that’s used a lot, but it’s not something that can just be read about and learned intellectually — it has to be practiced and embodied,” she explains. And before these strategies can be implemented throughout the district, she believes, some “preconceived notions and misconceptions about what mindfulness is” need to be put to rest.

Putting it into practice

It’s too soon to draw conclusions, but the Dickson kindergarten teachers believe mindfulness practice has tremendous potential for helping narrow the racial achievement gap.

“At the beginning of the year,” notes Castelloe, one African-American student “would just cry, shut down and lose academic time regularly.” But thanks to mindfulness training, “I’ve known how to help her. I ask: ‘What’s happening? What do you notice? Let’s try some things and see what helps you come back.’ And now she knows that when she feels those hot tears coming, she can go get a sip of water and then come back and work. And so she loses maybe two minutes instead of 30 to 45 minutes.”

Every student, Castelloe maintains, “wants to learn and be engaged.” Some children, she explains, struggle because their resilient zone is narrow or particularly fragile. They need to learn to recognize when they’re bumped out of their zone and what they can do to recover.

But mindfulness, notes Blaich, can also help teachers and administrators become aware of their own implicit biases. “My responsibility as a kindergarten teacher is to be completely open to any possibility that a 5-year-old has,” she says. “If mindfulness increases that openness by 10 percent, then that’s a start.”

And on a broader level, “I honestly don’t see how we can move forward without starting there — without bringing the unconscious into our awareness,” Blaich concludes. “That’s a pretty important place that I’ve arrived at with this practice, and I think it’s going to be important to Asheville.”