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Does Meditation Have a Place in the Classroom?
The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded a major grant to help fund teachers’ training in contemplative practices such as meditation. Known as Cultivating Awareness and Resiliency in Education (CARE), the program that received the grant uses mindfulness meditation to help teachers recognize emotional patterns–both their own and their students’–so that they can more skillfully respond to classroom social problems like bullying.
According to Patricia Jennings, the director of CARE, “Surprisingly, there has been very little research into what is required to be a good teacher in terms of the psycho-social skills needed to run a good classroom and foster a healthy class climate and good student-teacher relationships.”
So far, teachers in Denver, San Francisco, and Philadelphia have received CARE training, and the grant will be used in part to judge the effect of CARE on classrooms. Jennings hopes that the field of contemplative education will one day be an integral part of American schools.
I can certainly think of many teachers from my grade-school days who would have benefited greatly from this kind of training, either because years of teaching had beaten them down to the point that they were mentally checked out all day, or because they clearly were overwhelmed and stressed by maintaining discipline, being either too lax or too strict as a result.
Perhaps the most tangible benefit meditation could have in schools would be with introducing meditation practice to kids, teaching them to spend a few minutes calmly observing their own thoughts and emotions in a purely secular way. It’s widely accepted that children need physical exercise scheduled into their day in the form of P.E. Why not contemplative practice, too? Meditation could be a unit in gym class, just like volleyball and ballroom dancing. (Yes, we actually had to pair off and practice ballroom dancing under the basketball hoops in middle school. Oh, the horror.)
How would you feel if meditation were added to your child’s curriculum in some way?
Photo: davincimethod.com
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Madeline Holler commented on Sep 11 09 at 6:08 pmI think this is great! My third-graders K-8 school does a few minutes of mindfulness/meditation/breathing every morning, right after 15 minutes or so of chorus. The young ones have a hard time sitting still and sometimes it’s really hard to tell that mindfulness/meditation/whatever is going on. But when it goes well, you can hear the music teacher telling the kids to think about how they will be in their days, what they can except, etc., etc. and there are many scrunched up little faces doing exactly that.
I laugh at meditation in general, particularly when it involves a special line of clothes and $40 mats. But the idea behind it — it’s aim — I think is really, really great. I would love to see the results of any studies.
David Hodgson commented on Sep 12 09 at 10:51 amI often wondered why this didn’t take off long ago. When I went to high school (New Jersey in the early 70’s) we did have a program like this although not mandatory in any way.
It’s important that children have both physical and mental exercises to fully develop to their full potential and the evidence is clear that meditation does help to increase the cognitive function of the brain.
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