Middle-School Mindfulness Action Research

Any school’s first priority should be developing the knowledge and skills to better understand the world today and be successful in the future. We should pay attention to best practices from the learning sciences to help achieve that. Alongside academic, school's should pay attention to how happy their kids are. Wellbeing and the so-called ¨soft-skills¨ that will help students be successful now and in the future are increasing in importance and profile. How can schools ensure they are developing academically successful students and healthy, happy students who have confidence in themselves? 

This year we have revitalized our advisory program to consider the “whole child”, placing particular emphasis on student wellbeing. Monday’s have been dedicated to wellbeing and students have written gratitude journals and engaged in random acts of kindness. To complement this, in the third quarter students engaged in a two-minute mindfulness meditation every day for around two months. 

Action research is defined by the association for supervision and curriculum development as a “disciplined process of inquiry conducted by and for those taking the action. The primary reason for engaging in action research is to assist the school in improving his or her actions.” We adopted such an approach when we implemented this mindfulness intervention and this blog gives a brief overview of the results. It's far from an academic study! It’s always important to see whether what we do has the impact we want! The data and questions are available to anyone who would like to see them. 

The intervention was quite straightforward, for one quarter all students were expected to participate in mindfulness meditation for two minutes during each advisory period. Teachers had three one-hour professional development sessions on mindfulness to enable them to facilitate this. The mindfulness meditation involved students being alert, yet in silence, and using their breath to anchor their attention. When their mind wandered, they brought their attention back to their breath. The intention was that this happened every day from January 15th to 14th of March, so a total of 50 sessions approx, allowing for some interruptions. We used questions from mental health charities and mindfulness organizations to get a baseline. We ended up combining some questions from different organizations. Below are the questions we chose.

1. I can focus my attention on what I want without being distracted 
2. I’m aware of what I am thinking and feeling
3. I worry a lot about things that will happen in the future or have happened in the past 
4. I use positive self-talk 
5. Sometimes I feel like I am running on Auto-Pilot 

For each question, students needed to answer using a 1 - 5 scale with one being the “lowest” and 5 being the “highest”. Below we show the average results from the pre-survey: 

The lowest value is the one associated with the students' ability to "live in the moment" without worrying about either the past or the future. Worrying is associated with anxiety. Student's ranked themselves most highly for "self-awareness". They said they know themselves well and are aware of what they are thinking and feeling.

Below are the results of the same survey after the intervention. 

As you can see, if we look at these figures it seems like doing the mindfulness intervention actually reduced students ability to focus, be aware, demonstrate positive self-talk and avoid auto-pilot with only a small and insignificant effect on worrying about the future! We had been expecting there to be some increase after the intervention. However, remember the question about how seriously students had taken the intervention? 13.5% of students expressed that they never took the practice seriously. 

What happens to the figures if we consider only those students who said they took the practice “sometimes” or “always” seriously? 

When we exclude those who didn’t take the practice seriously we are left with some reasonably significant results. They show a 4% increase in focusing attention and running on auto-pilot with a 15% increase in reducing worrying about past and future events. Given that stress and generalised anxiety is associated with the inability to control events or feeling that life is "out of control" this encourages me to think that mindfulness could potentially help students deal with anxiety. We need to be cautious of course, the data is interesting but this is a school-based, amateur study without a control group.

We also need to consider whether those who said they never took it seriously significantly pushed the results down as they had a strong dislike of the experience. When we look at the pre-survey there are no children who put themselves as a “1” on all the measures however on the post-survey there were three. These are the same students who considered that they "never" took the experience seriously.

Some cautious conclusions: 

1) There is a need to get students to take the practice seriously in order to get a true picture of the impact. When they take it seriously there is potential for positive change. 

2) More specificity in terms of how seriously students took the experience would improve the data. 

3) Tracking individuals would improve the data although the lack of anonymity could change the results. 

4) There is potential for mindfulness to help students worry less and increase their ability to focus attention, in particular.