Developing Students' Mindfulness Practice to Support Engagement, Self-Regulation, and Achievement

Course Description

Mindfulness, or paying attention to the present moment without judgment, has been shown to support students to meet the academic demands and pressures of an increasingly stressful and challenging world. Understanding the diverse needs of students requires educators to employ a variety of intentional strategies to support student academic and social-emotional needs. This course will teach teachers to understand and use mindful strategies to become more responsive to their students’ social-emotional and instructional needs.  Educators learn to implement simple and effective mindfulness activities into their classroom on a daily basis.

Participants will learn:

• About the emotional and academic demands students face and the impact it has on their nervous system and executive brain functions.
• The effects of stress, anxiety and trauma on learning and health.
• How students’ physiological and emotional changes affect their behaviors and ability to learn as they continually seek for find their way in a world that is ever more complex, increasingly interconnected yet often isolating.
• How mindfulness awareness practices can help students focus and remain in the moment.
• How mindfulness practices support Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Differentiated Instruction.
• How to implement mindfulness into the classroom, using guided audio and video recorded practices and other resources to facilitate mindfulness activities.
• How their colleagues are experiencing the information and implementation of mindfulness activities in the classrooms by interacting with them in Discussion Boards.
• To create a Final Project in which they design an action plan using mindfulness practices and activities in their own classrooms to support:
• Student Learning
• Social Emotional Intelligence
• 21^st Century skills, such as collaboration, communication and global awareness
• Focus and Engagement.