Bay Area nonprofit Mindful Schools recognized as a leader in the worldwide movement
EMERYVILLE, Calif., Feb. 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — "The Mindful Revolution" cover story in TIME magazine's February 3, 2014 issue introduces the rapidly growing mindfulness movement to its widest audience yet. By purposefully bringing awareness to one's sensory experience, thoughts, and emotions, mindfulness enables us to objectively notice our experience—allowing us to change habitual reactions to wiser, more skillful responses. Backed by a rapidly growing volume of neuroscience and research, secular mindfulness practice has found its way into many parts of society, including mental health, education, medicine, and business.
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Mindful Schools (www.mindfulschools.org) is honored to have been included in the article as the representative of mindfulness & education:
"Educators are turning to mindfulness with increasing frequency–perhaps a good thing, considering how digital technology is splitting kids' attention spans too. (The average American teen sends and receives more than 3,000 text messages a month.) A Bay Area-based program called Mindful Schools offers online mindfulness training to teachers, instructing them in how to equip children to concentrate in classrooms and deal with stress. Launched in 2010, the group has reached more than 300,000 pupils, and educators in 43 countries and 48 states have taken its courses online."
Source: "The Mindful Revolution" – TIME Magazine February 3, 2014 Issue
"All of us at Mindful Schools are grateful to our course graduates worldwide, who are working tirelessly to bring mindfulness to youth of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds around the world," said Randima Fernando, Executive Director of Mindful Schools. "This heartfelt, widespread impact underscores the deep commitment Mindful Schools has to making secular mindfulness increasingly accessible to the world's diverse population of educators, children, and adolescents."
Mindfulness has four major benefits in the classroom:
- Educators who practice mindfulness cultivate a powerful tool to manage their own attention, anxiety, and general stress levels – reducing burnout and increasing their resiliency. This helps them personally as well as professionally.
- Extensive quantitative and qualitative research shows that mindfulness improves student behavior, giving teachers a highly effective classroom management tool. In addition, our trainings equip teachers with other critical facilitation tools, including principles and practices for working with emotional and behavioral resistance.
- For children who regularly face turmoil inside or outside of school, mindfulness helps to regulate their emotions and increase their aptitude for learning.
- Increased focus helps counteract the constant shortening of children's attention spans trained by the media and the proliferation of digital devices. The ability to focus is a crucial factor in completing any meaningful project, whether in academics, music, sports, or beyond.
An increasing number of schools are realizing the tremendous value of mindfulness training for their staff and students. "As a teacher and an educational leader, I've found mindfulness to be an amazingly cost-effective way to cultivate impulse control, attention, and empathy. It has been so useful at McLean School that we are adopting it school-wide. It has been a pleasure collaborating with Mindful Schools, who are training our staff through their Mindfulness Fundamentals and Curriculum Training courses," said Michael Saxenian, Head of School at McLean School of Maryland.
ABOUT MINDFUL SCHOOLS
Mindful Schools is a non-profit organization that provides multi-tiered online courses for educators, parents, school psychologists, and youth service organizations to learn mindfulness and teach it to children and adolescents from grades K-12. Group rates, Continuing Education Units (CEUs), and need-based scholarships are available.
Learn more at http://www.mindfulschools.org.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Parties interested in writing articles or generating other media coverage should contact Randima Fernando, Mindful Schools Executive Director at 510-858-5350 or email.