Got stress? Do you feel overwhelmed often? Are your students dealing with stress, adverse childhood experiences and trauma? Being an educator is both one of the most rewarding jobs and at the same time one of the most challenging. As an educator you have to be able to be really skillful and competent at managing your own emotions and experiences and simultaneously navigating the emotions of 25-35 students in your classroom. On top of all this we are seeing youth struggling more than ever with anxiety and depression. We also live in a society where stress is the norm and suffering often happens in isolation. The foundation of being a thriving human is mental and emotional well-being. So here is where mindfulness in education is a game changer, actually a life changer! More and more research is coming out showing that the key to mental and emotional well-being is having daily practices of mindfulness, gratitude and compassion. At Mindful Life Project, we began by focusing on the youth in our small group regular school day pull out direct service program, Rise-Up, but quickly realized that teachers needed the practices as much as the students. We then created Mindful Community, our whole class push-in program where students and teachers both are receiving the lessons. From here we saw more and more that educators were yearning for more and created our in person training programs.
Mindfulness is a transformative life changing science based practice that gets individuals to experience life in the present moment through a nonjudgmental lens, where one can notice emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, and all of life’s experiences in a healthy non-reactive way. Mindfulness has been scientifically proven to improve the brain’s optimal functioning. Studies show that mindfulness rewires the brain and specifically decreases activity in the area of the brain most affected by stress and trauma, “MRI scans show that after an eight-week course of mindfulness practice, the brain’s ‘fight or flight’ center, the amygdala, appears to shrink. This primal region of the brain, associated with fear and emotion, is involved in the initiation of the body’s response to stress. As the amygdala shrinks, the prefrontal cortex – associated with higher order brain functions such as awareness, concentration, and decision-making – becomes thicker. Mindfulness literally changes the architecture of the brain so it can provide mental and emotional well-being.
Our Training Programs:
Mindful Educator Trainings:
Mindful Educator Trainings provide mindfulness essentials for personal well-being and simple trauma-informed mindfulness best practices to implement in classrooms. This multi session training has been extremely impactful as school staff are able to gain a deep understanding of mindfulness, experience the benefits of daily practice, and gain confidence in bringing mindfulness into their own lives after the training is completed.
Mindful Life Project Curriculum Training:
This training provides schools the opportunity to receive training on MLP’s TK-2nd grade curriculum and 3rd-5th grade and 6th -8th grade curriculum. Included in this training are teaching best practices: MLP’s innovative mindfulness creating a safe and trusting space, engaging ways to get classrooms to focus, culturally relevant mindfulness pedagogy, daily practice activities, mindfulness games and much more! Our curricula has reached over 35,000 students and has proven to weave mindfulness and social-emotional learning with a deep sense of empowerment. We follow up the trainings with class demos and implementation coaching
Mindful Leadership Training:
This multi part training provides attendees an in depth understanding of what mindfulness is, the brain science, trauma informed best practices, and an emphasis on how to lower stress and reactivity. The training creates an overall understanding of how stress impacts the individual and how that can impact student learning. Attendees learn science based practices that increase mindfulness, compassion, trust, and safety between all. Included in this training, our team focuses on how to improve leadership through mindfulness, specifically in building transformative relationships, communication, non-reactivity, and learning how to be sustainable in the work.
Custom Trainings: At MLP we know that each school and classroom is its own ecosystem and we create trainings that are specifically created to fit the needs of the youth and the partner school. We do this so that students are able to gain the practice from a relevant and engaging place and the staff feel deep ownership over mindfulness.
Other offerings!
MLP Assemblies: MLP assemblies are an amazing way to launch mindfulness at your school. We hold 45 minute to 1 hour long assemblies for different grade levels that include building relevance, excitement, engagement through an interactive assembly that includes mindful hip-hop performances and more!
Family Night: MLP hosts extremely engaging Family Nights that include mindfulness to bring home, mindful hip-hop performances, and resources for families! These are normally one hour to one hour and a half long.
MLP Impact
Over our seven years of providing programs we have made a deep impact on students and school communities. Some of this impact is represented by our data:
- Suspensions have declined on average by 54 percent at our partner schools.
- 86 percent of classroom teachers have reported that our programs have created 21 minutes of additional quality academic teaching time per day.
Percentage of teachers who saw improvement in their students due to MLP programs in…
- Self-awareness 88%
- Ability to pay attention 79%
- Ability to settle down 83%
- Impulse control 78%
- Relating to one another 84%
Are you interested in partnering with Mindful Life Project? Please reach out to our Founder and Director, JG Larochette, at jg@mindfullifeproject.org.