Mindfulness in the New Year

Mindfulness in the New Year

There is a great mindfulness in education movement underway. With growing distractions and the need to engage students in learning, mindfulness provides a key for educators. Not only does it create a stronger awareness but the benefits to brain development are many.

“The picture we have is that mindfulness practice increases one’s ability to recruit higher order, pre- frontal cortex regions in order to down-regulate lower- order brain activity,” she says. In other words, our more primal responses to stress seem to be superseded by more thoughtful ones. 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 pre- frontal cortex – associated with higher order brain

functions such as awareness, concentration and decision-making – becomes thicker.

The “functional connectivity” between these regions – i.e. how often they are activated together – also changes. The connection between the amygdala and the rest of the brain gets weaker, while the connections between areas associated with attention and concentration get stronger. –Tom Ireland

Read more: What does mindfulness meditation do to your brain? Resources: http://danielrechtschaffen.com/mindful-classroom/

NKCES has Mindfulness Resources you can review to see how this strategy can strengthen student learning. Of course, let’s not forget what these strategies can do for educators who are caught in a fast-paced world ....check out whil.com or headspace.com for an easy to use mindfulness tool!