Mindful Teacher, Mindful School: Improving Wellbeing in Teaching and Learning

If there is hope for deep societal change, it surely must rest on rethinking and recreating our industrial-age education system. It is within this context that we need to view the growing interest in mindfulness in schools, which could, potentially, help guide us toward a system of education truly oriented toward human development. But it could also end up as just another in a long line of educational fads. Work like that of Kevin Hawkins - based on the science and practice of cultivating mindfulness and grounded in extensive practical experience in schools - could tell the difference.

This book is written for teachers, by a teacher. Kevin truly understands the joys of teaching and the desire to make a real difference to students' lives, as well as the challenges and risks of burnout that most teachers experience on a daily basis. It provides teachers with the essential skills for self-care that will allow them to thrive in their professional and personal lives. It also offers a straightforward, natural progression: from being mindful, to teaching mindfully and engaging students, to teaching students mindfulness, and finally developing and sustaining a mindful school culture. Mindful Teacher, Mindful School is an excellent resource for those who want to begin, or to deepen, their own personal mindfulness practice, and to share their practice with students and the wider school community.

This book is indispensable for anyone who truly wants to understand what is involved in bringing mindfulness to K-12 education around the globe. Rather than seeing mindfulness as a set of classroom activities to be inserted into the status quo, Kevin Hawkins makes the case for the power of mindful awareness to be part of a much larger transformation of what and how we teach.

Proposing that we broaden the aims of education to include physical, mental and emotional well being, Hawkins situates mindfulness - first for adults and then for students - as a catalytic tool within this larger frame. Mindful Teachers Mindful Schools not only offers everything that someone new to the field needs to get up to speed but he also pinpoints deeply important truths for those of us already active in the field. This is a must read!

This is a book clearly written by an educator who knows mindfulness in schools from the inside. The strongest evidence for this is that Hawkins never gets carried away. He recognises that mindfulness is not a panacea, that to implement it successfully in schools is a slow and steady process, and that above all it must begin with the teachers themselves. But Hawkins also recognises how transformative mindfulness can be, having experienced it so profoundly himself as an educator in many different contexts. His anecdotes give it plenty of colour (my favourite is 'Billy and the Mosquito'), whilst the practical guidance - Chapter 7 on implementation for example - makes it of tremendous practical value.

This book is elegant. For all of us aspiring to be educators it is an enduring reminder of our deep inheritance - what the great 13^th century teacher, poet and mystic, Jalaludin Rumi, described as two kinds of intelligence : one acquired, the other already complete and preserved inside you. Surely, both these intelligences are important. With humility and wisdom, Kevin Hawkins, a long-time educator, middle school principal and mindfulness practitioner, helps us remember the bounty of the already completed and the ways what is innate informs what is acquired. With substance and grace, the lineages of education, psychology, and neuroscience converge as Hawkins illuminates the critically important role that mindfulness plays in the education of our children, their teachers, and we, their parents.

This would be a useful read for anyone who is interested in promoting teachers' or students' positive mental health - from an NQT, wanting to improve their own or their children's wellbeing, to a senior leader who might consider implementation on a whole-school level. It's particularly interesting for anyone with pastoral care responsibilities and PSHE leads, as well as any teacher who wants to consider what they can do to support their own wellbeing.