Professor leads effort to bring mindfulness curricula into schools

By Stephanie Koons

Deborah Schussler, professor of education (educational leadership) in the Penn State College of Education, is part of a group of researchers who have demonstrated that school-based mindfulness programs (SBMPs) have benefits for students’ psychological, cognitive, behavioral and physical development. However, there has been relatively little research on the school structures that impact these outcomes for different students in diverse settings and on the role that teachers play in implementing mindfulness curricula.

To address those issues, Schussler forged ties with a group of national and international scholars and school-based practitioners. Schussler hosted a conference, “Mindfulness-based intervention implementation and sustainability in diverse school contexts” Feb. 4-6 in Philadelphia. The conference, which was funded by a Spencer Conference Grant of just under $50,000, convened international scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines studying or implementing mindfulness-based interventions in K-12 settings in different sociocultural and geographic contexts. Participants, who joined both in person and via Zoom, represented educational institutions from the United Kingdom, Israel, Canada and across the United States.

“The purpose was to talk about supports and challenges to implement school-based mindfulness and how it occurs in different contexts,” Schussler said.

Schussler, who received the Spencer Conference Grant in spring 2020, facilitated the conference with co-principal investigator Julia Mahfouz, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Colorado Denver, who received her doctorate from the Penn State College of Education in 2017, and

Sebrina Doyle, a doctoral candidate in educational leadership in the Department of Education Policy Studies.

Schussler and colleagues examine mindfulness-based programs from the teacher’s perspective in a new paper, “Shifting to Embodiment: a Longitudinal Qualitative Investigation into the Experiences of High School Teachers Teaching Mindfulness.”

The purpose of the researchers’ qualitative investigation was to explore how teachers experienced implementing an SBMP over time, including their embodiment of mindfulness. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews spanning 12 to 20 months with three 11th-grade health teachers to capture their perspectives at three to four time-points during their professional development and implementation of Learning to BREATHE (L2B). L2B, which was developed by Broderick, is an SBMP developed for adolescents that has been implemented in a variety of contexts.

While the researchers found that the L2B program aligned well with the teachers’ overall teaching beliefs and values, they discovered some tensions that implementing L2B elicited. One of those tensions, Schussler said, is that mindfulness is supposed to be invitational while school, for the most part, is directive. As part of their L2B training, teachers were encouraged to ask students if they want to participate in a mindfulness activity but if they decline, to give their classmates space to do it.

A major takeaway from both the study and the Spencer Conference, Schussler said, is that mindfulness-based curricula should be a holistic effort that involves not just students but also teachers, educational leaders and community members.

“When (mindfulness practices) are part of the fabric of school, the ways of being of a school as a whole, it’s much better.”

Photo provided A conference hosted by Deborah Schussler drew mindfulness scholars and practitioners from around the world.