Teachers Need Mindfulness Too
By Christina Torres
Print rosters. Decorate classroom. Send follow-up emails. Update class website. Email tech about getting access . . .
It is the day before school and, looking at my to-do list and everything else in my life, I am overwhelmed. My chest flutters and I have a hard time seeing straight. I know this feeling — panic. I’ve been managing anxiety since I was a kid and I’ve learned the warning signs. I stop what I’m doing, close my eyes, and take a few deep breaths, counting to four each time. The tension in my chest relaxes and my heart rate eases as I slowly come back to my body.
Taking a mindful moment to refocus has been a tool in my arsenal for many years but is new to my work as a teacher. When mindfulness first entered my life, it was through yoga and therapy — not ideas I brought to work. “Mindfulness” is mental and psychological practice that asks participants to be physically present and focus on breath, body, and the world around them. It also encourages practitioners to acknowledge and accept their feelings and thoughts without dwelling on them in favor of focus on being present.
More recently, mindfulness has become a common topic in education. Administrators bring mindfulness up at meetings, teachers tout its benefits with their students, and plenty of apps are taking advantage of its increased popularity in education conversations. In a classroom, this can look like meditation, yoga, or manipulatives to help students focus on the present moment.
Yet, for all the talk of mindfulness in our classrooms, an important group is often missing from the conversation: teachers. Teachers are shown methods and given ideas for how to implement these ideas in their classrooms, but we rarely discuss how teachers themselves can bring mindfulness into their personal educational practice and lives. Seeing teachers as professionals who deserve mindfulness tools for themselves — and not just their students — is a powerful way we can support their mental health and help increase their success in the classroom.
This is important for us, but it is also essential for our students as well. First, mindfulness can allow us to reflect on our practice, make more thoughtful and positive choices with our students, develop better relationships, and can even help us work through our own biases. Second, practicing mindfulness allows us to positively model self-care for our students as well. Our students don’t learn just content from us but life skills from interactions with each other and by watching what their teachers do. In being open and upfront about taking care of ourselves, we can model for our students how important it is to practice mindfulness in our lives and ensure they have a healthy understanding of checking in with themselves.
Here are some ways we can support and take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness for teachers.
Provide resources, professional development, and time for mindfulness. Professional development is normally time spent giving teachers training as a way to benefit their teaching practice. This should extend beyond traditional understandings of “practice” to include the overall mental well-being of teachers as well. Districts and schools can offer programs to educators that help them implement mindful practices, such as yoga, meditation, and mindful breathing, into their everyday lives.
Use your time for you. It’s easy to use our prep periods, breaks, and lunches to do everything except take care of ourselves — plan, run copies, add some new sense of sparkle to our classroom. While this is well-intentioned, it forces teachers on a never-ending treadmill of work that doesn’t allow us to check in with ourselves and our needs, sometimes until the end of the day. It may seem hard, but occasionally closing our doors at lunch and making some quiet time to stretch, do some basic yoga, or just close our eyes and listen to some soothing music can ensure we are taking care of our own mental health throughout the day.
Create a “mellow” or “relaxation” space in your classroom. We know the space we make for our students can have a huge impact on their experience in our classrooms. This idea is important for teachers too. Create a little space in your classroom that you and your students can use when you’re feeling overwhelmed. You can have a plant, some simple relaxation spray (you can sub those smells for peppermint too, which helps revive the mind!), and perhaps a soothing photo of nature to focus on while you take a second to check back in with yourself.
Put words to paper. Sometimes there are so many thoughts floating in our minds throughout the day, the only way to sort through them is to get them all down. Mindful writing is a great way to use writing as a meditative practice to better acknowledge our emotions without judgement by getting them down. This is especially helpful for teachers, as doing this at the end of the day can allow us to create a record of our emotions so we can better reflect on our experience as educators.
Do some reading. As mindfulness becomes more popular in American society, there are a number of great texts about the practice that can help provide more insight and context, including books specifically designed for educators. Taking the time to really understand the roots of mindfulness and having a deeper connection to what it means in our classrooms can help turn a habit into a lifelong and important part of our lives.
It’s easy to assume that if we’re practicing mindfulness with our students, we are also practicing it ourselves. While practicing with our students is helpful, it’s important to remember we have an identity and sense of self outside our classrooms. By cultivating some of these practices early, we can move through the year practicing healthy habits and hopefully starting a lifelong process of self-care for us and for our students.
Christina Torres is an English teacher at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. A graduate of the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University, she previously taught for two years in Los Angeles. She loves laughing and learning with her students, living in Hawai‘i, running marathons, reading books and eating cheeseburgers. She can be found at christinatorres.org or @biblio_phile.