Creating a mindful classroom: Tips for teachers on how to have a peaceful transition into the 2024-2025 school year

Teacher mindfulness doesn't begin on the first day of classes in the late summer or early fall. It is an invaluable skill that can be practiced and perfected all throughout the year, especially when teachers are on summer break. 

Leigh McLean is an an associate research professor in the School of Education and Center for Research in Educational and Social Policy at the University of Delaware. In her program of research, she investigates how teachers’ emotions and emotion-related experiences including well-being impact their effectiveness.

Her work particularly focuses on how teachers’ emotions impact their instructional practices, and the role that early-career teachers’ emotions play as they transition into the career. She holds expertise in quantitative, mixed-methods, and longitudinal study design and implementation, multileveled data analysis, and classroom observation.  

Below she gives a few tips on how teachers can begin preparing themselves – and by extension their future students – for all the ups and downs of the upcoming school year. 

Engage in restorative rest this summer. 

One of the ways to prepare for the upcoming school year is to get restorative rest. It's important to let your brain disengage for a short time, but it's also beneficial to set aside time, before the school year begins, to think about the past school year. What went well? What might you want

to do differently?? What techniques are you hoping to improve in the coming school year?

As we as a society still reel from the COVID-19 pandemic, meaningfully reflect on the past four years and ask yourself what you've see with your students. What might they need to succeed this upcoming year? How can you facilitate an environment where students are getting supports for the unique challenges that the pandemic created? 

Incorporate mindfulness into your daily habit. 

A mindfulness practice is a daily regime of awareness, contemplation, and processing of all the things going on both within and outside of you. Mindfulness is a key skill when it comes to the larger goal of emotional understanding and regulation, and it has been shown to be a particularly

helpful practice for teachers. However, you cannot expect to dive into mindfulness on day one of a new school year, it take practice.

A great place to start is to pay attention to your emotions and work on emotional awareness in the weeks leading up to the school year. Shift your thinking fromo "emotions are noise that get in the way" to "My emotions are important signals that I have to pay attention to." This type of shift can be difficult to do for the first time in the heat of teaching so summer is a great time to practice these techniques. 

As educators, teachers experience the full range of human emotions every day, and they are usually the only adults in the room. While this might at the outset seem intimidating, teachers have the unique opportunity to use their emotions intentionally as cues for their students to pick up on.

Dr. Jon Cooper, Director of Behavioral Health for the Colonial School District in New Castle, Delaware noted: "We want teachers to be the emotional thermostat, not the thermometer," and "We want them to intentionally set the emotional tone of the classroom."

During the summer, think about how to set classroom norms and expectations to be responsive to your emotions and those of your students in a way that will create a more mindful classroom all around. 

This could look like including a classroom norm stating that aAll emotions are ok, even the bad ones. It could also look like acknowledging in your classroom management approaches that there is a difference between emotions and behaviors; so while all emotions are ok, not all behaviors that come from those emotions are ok.

Take yourself through a school day and anticipate the needs of your students. 

One major mindfulness practice is taking yourself through a typical school day and identifying parts where students are most likely to have difficulties. Do students have challenging moments during small groups? Is there a lot of math anxiety going on in your class? Try structuring your day, approach, even your expressions so that you set yourself and your students up for success during these moments that are more likely to be challenging.

Utilize mindfulness websites and apps. 

There are websites and apps teachers can use to further incorporate mindfulness into their daily lives, including:

The Center for Healthy Minds

UCLA's Free Mindfulness App

For more tips...

McLean is available for interviews and can expound on the ways teachers can set themselves – and their students – up for success. Click on her profile to connect.