Mindfulness: Why a Little R&R Has Never Been More Important
Detention, suspension, “time-out.” These are the places “bad” kids go to learn their lesson, right? When a child misbehaves, the thinking goes, they must be reprimanded in order to learn that there are better ways to handle situations. So they’re forced to sit in a classroom — no studying, no social interaction, and no growth.
“I see how detention was originally implemented to force troublesome students to sit and really think about what they’ve done wrong. The fear of punishment, or detention, is what’s supposed to prevent bad behavior. But this method lacks intention to help the student be better,” says Manda Sias, 5th grade teacher at Ridgemoor Elementary School in the Menifee Union School District in California. The point of detention should be to better the students so those things don’t happen again. If they’re forced to sit and stare at their hands, are they really learning any lessons?
“Disciplinary actions are different for everyone,” says Olivia Orichiella, senior education student at Drake University. “It aligns with [the school’s] teaching philosophy and how the teacher manages her class. Some school have a required system for discipline but ideally we work more towards positive affirmation.”
“What a lot of research is telling us at the moment, and what I know from my own experience and from the kids that I taught, is that our mental health and happiness are profoundly shaped by what we do with our attention,” says Richard Burnett, co-founder of Mindfulness in Schools and director of a highly acclaimed 10-week mindfulness course. Burnett has given Ted Talks on mindfulness as an education tool, as well as published his findings in a 2009 journal called Mindfulness in Schools.
“Why do we teach English, math, geography, chemistry, biology, physics, languages … but we never — or very, very rarely — teach young people to use the lens [through] which all of their experience, both at home and at school, is being filtered? And that is the faculty of their attention.”
Burnett goes on to talk about how children have smaller attention spans, thus it can be more difficult to teach a child in elementary school than an adult who made the decision to learn about mindfulness. But by implementing small mindful lessons into classroom curriculum, he believes children will be more apt to trying new things and seeing the positive changes — without having to sit in detention.
One school in Baltimore has discovered an incredible alternative to detention: meditation.
“It’s amazing,” Kirk Philips, the Holistic Me coordinator at Robert W. Coleman, told Upworthy. “You wouldn’t think that little kids would meditate in silence. And they do.”
Rather than punishing students or sending them to the principal’s office, children who misbehave are sent to what the Baltimore school calls a “Mindful Moment Room.” Kids not only talk calmly though what happened, they also learn practices like breathing, yoga and meditation that allow them to slow down and center themselves. The room’s aesthetic helps with that too — warm lamps and fluffy pillows take students to another place and help them de-stress. It’s like the opposite of detention — and the success has been overwhelming.
Since they began the program at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, there have been zero suspensions — that’s an entire year and a half without one school suspension. Meanwhile, a nearby high school, Patterson Park, has had lower suspension rates and increased attendance, very possibly due to their mindfulness programs.
“Kids, and even adults, act out because they want attention. And the reason they want attention is likely because they aren’t getting it at home. If they are being given something like [meditation] to do, I think they perceive it as somebody is caring about them,” says Marlene Stewart, retired nurse and self-proclaimed spiritual.
“I relied on tools like [mindfulness] when I worked as a nurse, and absolutely when I was raising children,” Stewart says.
Coleman Elementary partnered with the Holistic Life Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has offered mindfulness programs for more than ten years. An after school program called “Holistic Me” gives kids from pre-K through fifth grade the tools to practice mindfulness exercises in their everyday lives. The organization has implemented these programs in more than 14 schools near Baltimore, and they interact with nearly 5,000 students per week, teaching classes and workshops.
“There are some children who have anger management problems,” Carlillian Thompson, the Principal at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School, told the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF). “The yoga program has enabled those children to do meditation techniques and instead of them reacting and getting angry, they’ve learned how to meditate and redirect their anger.”
Although it is impossible to know for certain, the HLF argues that these positive changes likely stemmed from the ban on detentions and the introduction of meditation. And they aren’t only school related improvements.
“We have had numerous parents and families come forward and tell us about [the improvement in] their children… Kids teaching adults, showing them what they’ve been learning through our programs,” says Andres Gonzalez, the Holistic Life Foundation co-founder. “We had a young lady in our program in fifth grade, and she would never take part in the after school yoga. One day, we saw her grandma in the neighborhood. We asked her, ‘Will you tell her to come do the yoga?’ and the grandmother was like, ‘You must have the wrong girl. Just the other day, I came home and she taught me some breathing.’ And we couldn’t believe it.”
While it’s important to keep in mind that this is only one study, it should also be noted that there are other scientific studies that prove the benefits of meditation.
Richard Burnett and his team completed a series of case studies where they taught children how to use calm meditation as a tool in their everyday lives. The results they received from one of their very first studies at two schools, Tonbridge and Hampton in England, suggested that students truly benefitted from mindful practices. In their feedback, the students said things like, “I think it’s good in the modern day hectic society to have some time to sit and be calm,” or “it helped me to relax and concentrate, also I did not get wound up so easily in the boarding house. It has also made me less nervous about exams and cricket matches” (Burnett 20).
At the school where Sias teaches 5th grade, they don’t use detention unless they face cases of “extreme behavior.”
“There has definitely been a shift in discipline at our site and within the district over the last few years,” Sias says. “We use PBIS — positive behavior interventions & support.”
Following the PBIS framework, faculty and staff introduce and model positive social behavior in both the classroom and outside areas like the playground or hallways. The overall goal is to create a climate school-wide where positive social interactions are normal and acting out is not.
“We want to reward students for following positive behavior rather than waiting to punish them for misbehaving,” Sias said.
Under this system, students are divided into three tiers. Tier one is universal; teachers take a look at every student and model appropriate behavior before it becomes a problem. Tier two gets narrower. They keep an eye on the current cases of bad behavior and try to place more focus on those students. Tier 3 has the least number of students and is the most focused — these are the students that have more severe cases, in which they have a difficult home life or socioeconomic status. These students sometimes enter into programs similar to Holistic Me, which teach them ways other than anger to deal with their emotions.
With the rise of mind-body meditation, it’s no surprise that college students studying education have heard about the mindfulness practices some schools have began adopting.
“I think it’s great,” says Orichiella, who is entering into her final semester in the education field. “A lot of schools are aiming for [a mindful approach]… We’re told in classes to focus on the positive and not constantly give the negative behaviors attention.”
Orichiella is an avid meditator and yogi. She has discovered the benefits that mindfulness can have for a stressed out college student.
“I try to make time every day to be mindful — whether that’s doing my breathing exercises, listening to a guided meditation, lighting incense, you know, things like that. I think mindfulness is something anyone can benefit from, not only kids,” Orichiella says.
And she’s not wrong. According to the 2012 National Survey of College Counseling Centers, 92% of counseling centers on college campuses have seen increasing numbers of students each year. Additionally, about 50% of students report significant levels of anxiety and depression and 16.5% report a history of suicidal or self-harm behavior. Mindfulness-based programs have the potential to change these numbers (Greeson).
“My parents used a lot of mindful discipline and conversation in order to solve problems at home,” says Lily Sandberg, who is studying sociology, religious studies, and peace studies at the University of New Mexico. Sandberg grew up attending a spiritual school that taught meditation exercises at an early age. Now, at age 21, Sandberg sees how learning mindfulness at a young age changed her life completely.
“Mindfulness reemphasizes the belief that we have the ability to control our emotions and reactions, and therefore have control on reality,” Sandberg said.
“Unity [my spiritual organization] is definitely a foundation in my belief of this, but I see this viewpoint of mindfulness reciprocated as more than just Unity folks, and that’s pretty cool.”
As a woman who was raised to address problems using breathing and meditation, Sandberg hopes that this movement continues to grow in schools across the world, including college campuses. As young adults trying to navigate their existence and discover who they are, mindfulness plays a bigger role than ever. Children aren’t the only ones who see the benefits.
Joselin, a student from Baltimore, told the creators of the Holistic Me program, “The best thing I learned from [the HLF] was loving others. Not to hate each other … I will always remember.”
Photos via the Holistic Life Foundation
