An eighth grader recently noted that he’d been watching the presidential debates and that the candidates weren’t doing a good job of listening to one another’s perspectives.Īnd this more human approach hasn’t stopped at the classroom door. She says discipline referrals have dropped and students are using their mindful seeing practice in classes like English, art and science to make better observations. The switch to thinking about every interaction and learning moment in the school day as one of mindfulness has dramatically changed the tone of the school, according to Penley. “These are the ways we treat each other and that happens all the time throughout the day,” Penley said. Gradually the practices in the MindUP program became part of how the school operates. In this low key environment, the teacher is taking roll and checking in on students. Now, teachers greet kids at the door and play soft music with the lights down they talk about the practices the whole school is working on at that moment. Students were having a hard time learning that way because they didn’t feel settled or safe. Penley described how kindergarteners used to come into their classroom for free breakfast while their teacher was already directing them to look at what she’d written on the board. The middle school has breathing exercises after passing periods. Teachers now start class in the morning with a few breaths to help students feel present. Penley says the real shifts in school culture came when they started implementing the program school-wide. “Imagine all of us hearing about gratitude and asking ourselves how we can integrate it throughout everything we do.” A Marysville class doing three minutes of mindfulness. “Everyone is in a classroom except the custodian and secretary,” Penley said. As a staff they decided to teach the MindUP lessons concurrently, at the same time every week, so there would be a sense of synergy. “After our first year we began to think about how we could bring this to the overall health of the school,” Penley said. Soon teachers started coming to Penley, asking to teach the class themselves, as part of their regular classes. Penley and her staff soon realized that when the counselor taught the class, students were getting the benefit, but teachers weren’t. “We’ve seen this huge shift in the overall tone and civility of the school culture,” she said. Several programs teach mindfulness in schools, including Mindful Schools.Īfter implementing the MindUP program at Marysville, Penley saw the difference. The program is a blend of neuroscience, social and emotional tenets like empathy and perspective taking, and mindfulness, a practice which many schools have already started exploring. Students practice doing random acts of kindness and reflect on how that makes them feel. Towards the end of the sequence the lessons expand outward, asking students how they can contribute to the community, how they can be better citizens. There’s a section on choosing to approach the world with optimism and discussions of mindfulness in all the senses: seeing, listening and eating. The program then moves into mindful breathing exercises, meant to help students feel present in their bodies. 'We've seen this huge shift in the overall tone and civility of the school culture.'Īt first they implemented the program using a counselor, rotating between classes, teaching the 15-lesson sequence that starts with explaining to students how their brains work and what’s happening when they are stressed, scared or angry. When the school reopened, Penley and her staff started using the MindUP curriculum, developed by the Hawn Foundation (founded by the actress Goldie Hawn), to try to address underlying trauma both from the fire and from the daily poverty that many students face. “We were already a school that struggled, and then adding on top of it, we really thought we needed to find a social and emotional curriculum that connects to the heart to overcome our trauma,” Penley explained. The 460 students and 50 staff members of the K-8 school relocated to a vacant school building in another part of Portland, displaced from their school site for three years as the district rebuilt the Marysville building. The fire that traumatized students and staff alike was in 2009, when Lana Penley was in her second year as principal. Teachers quickly herded their students out of the building to the sports field behind the school as the old colonial-style building burned. It was lunch time at Marysville School in Southeast Portland when the fire broke out.
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