Featured Post from University of Delaware

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

Education expert Leigh McLean offers guidance to teachers as they reenter the classroom this fall

Aug 2, 2024

4 min

Leigh McLean

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. 


CaptionResizeWrap TextRemove

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. 

Connect with:
Leigh McLean

Leigh McLean

Associate Research Professor, Education

Prof. McLean investigates how teachers’ emotions and emotion-related experiences including well-being impact their effectiveness.

Developmental PsychologyInstructional PracticesTeachers and TeachingWell-BeingClassroom Behavior
Powered by

You might also like...

Check out some other posts from University of Delaware

2 min

The science behind the blood moon: Understanding this lunar phenomenon ahead of march's event

March's celestial event – a blood moon – is just around the corner. This captivating lunar spectacle isn't just a cool sight to behold; it has some neat science backing it up. The blood moon phenomenon happens during a total lunar eclipse. "During a total lunar eclipse, the only light that reaches the surface of the moon is refracted through the Earth's atmosphere, which essentially acts like a lens. Light is a wave, and every color of the rainbow has a different wavelength – red the longest and violet the shortest," said Bennett Maruca, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware.  What adds to the excitement is the rare nature of total lunar eclipses. While partial eclipses occur more frequently, a full blood moon isn't an everyday event. Depending on where you live, the blood moon may only grace the night skies a few times a decade. "One of my favorite things about total lunar eclipses is that it's hard to know ahead of time quite what it will look like. The moon can take on a color ranging from burnt orange to red to grayish brown," he said. "The closer the Moon passes to the center of Earth's shadow, the darker the color will be."  Maruca is available to speak about the event, which takes place in the wee hours of March 3. He can discuss when to wake up to see the phenomenon and how to best capture it.  "For photographing the moon, I would recommend a camera with some optical zoom – the moon is only about 0.5 degrees across. Because of the low lighting conditions, a tripod or other support would be helpful since a longer exposure time will be needed," he noted.  He has appeared in a number of outlets including Mashable and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He can be contacted by clicking on his profile.  ABOUT BENNET MARUCA Bennett Maruca serves as an associate professor in the University of Delaware's department of physics and astronomy. His research focuses on the sun, the solar wind and other space plasmas. He is a recipient of the Antarctic Service Medal and NASA's Silver Achievement Medal. He also serves as an associate director of the Delaware Space Grant Consortium and is currently mentoring over twenty undergraduate students developing experiments to fly into space to observe Earth's ionosphere.

2 min

Solving for X: Expert highlights importance of algebra in middle and high school

Math educators agree that Algebra is a critical course for middle and high schoolers, often serving as a gateway to more advanced math courses and influencing students’ academic trajectories in STEM pathways. Yet, many students struggle in this important course. Since May 2025, University of Delaware Associate Professor Erica Litke has partnered with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the School District of Philadelphia in a $5 million, three-year initiative to improve algebra teaching in the district. The project offers algebra teachers professional development through a year-long fellowship. With expertise in improving instructional quality in math and supporting algebra teaching, Litke leads the design and delivery of the professional development with Penn GSE experts. Close to 80 teachers participated in the first cohort of the fellowship, which includes a four-day summer institute. Litke’s research in math education has connected instructional quality to broader policy issues in education and focused on teacher knowledge and professional development. “The focus on algebra content and key features of algebra teaching that support students in learning algebra content helps teachers translate their learning from the fellowship directly into their teaching practice,” said Litke. “Being able to translate my research findings into usable knowledge for teachers and contribute to the design of this kind of comprehensive professional learning has been really exciting.” Litke can speak to her role in the Algebra Fellowship project, the importance of Algebra 1 in the trajectory of students’ STEM education and strategies for supporting teaching learning at the school and district levels. ABOUT ERICA LITKE Erica Litke is an associate professor specializing in mathematics education in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on understanding and improving instructional quality in mathematics for students in the elementary and secondary grades. Her research has described and analyzed instructional practice in mathematics using observation instruments, connected instructional quality in mathematics to broader policy-related issues in education, and focused on teacher knowledge and professional development. She has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily Pennsylvanian and other publications. To speak with Litke or to learn more, email mediarelations@udel.edu.

2 min

Discovery pinpoints potential Achilles’ Heel in HIV, opening new frontier in drug development

Scientists have long known that detecting HIV early is crucial in slowing and treating the virus. During the acute stage of infection, a single human cell can produce as many as 10,000 new HIV particles. A discovery led by the University of Delaware's Juan Perilla offers hope: A new drug target early in the virus's life cycle that could save millions of lives. In the surprising discovery, published Feb. 18 in Nature, Perilla and collaborators in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, have revealed a previously unknown role for the viral protein integrase. Scientists already knew that integrase helps HIV insert itself into human DNA. But this new study provides the first direct evidence that integrase plays a critical structural role earlier on in HIV’s life cycle — when the virus matures into an infectious force. Using high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), the research team – which also included UD doctoral student Juan S. Rey – found that integrase proteins form gluey filaments that line the inside of the capsid. Each segment of the filament slots neatly into the capsid’s hexagon-shaped tiles, while gripping tightly to HIV’s RNA genome. This zipper-like arrangement organizes and packs the virus, preparing it to hijack a cell and start making copies of itself. “Integrase plays a structural role inside the HIV capsid — nobody expected that,” Perilla said. “This protein forms filaments that anchor the RNA to the capsid. Without these filaments, the virus is non-infective.” Seeing inside HIV is no small feat. The capsid is only about 120 nanometers wide —roughly 1/800th the thickness of a human hair. It is incredibly small, fragile, densely packed and constantly changing, Perilla said. To reveal its hidden architecture, the researchers relied on deep collaboration and a combination of sophisticated microscopy, molecular modeling and experimentation. Read more about the science behind the study here. “The thing with HIV is that people are chronically living with it,” Perilla said. “Treatments are effective, but patients always need new therapeutics. We want to help develop the next generation of inhibitors and hope to have a significant contribution.” To reach Perilla directly and arrange an interview, visit his profile page. Interested reporters can also email MediaRelations@udel.edu.

View all posts
Powered by