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Meditation can help teachers build a greater sense of presence, purpose and compassion, but it won’t address the structural causes of stress and burnout in the workforce.
Meditation can help teachers build a greater sense of presence, purpose and compassion, but it won’t address the structural causes of stress and burnout in the workforce
Published 10 October 2024
There is growing evidence that mindfulness-based training programs may support teacher wellbeing and resilience. This clearly sounds like a good idea, in the current context of alarmingly high rates of teacher stress and burnout.
However, as critics have pointed out, a narrow focus on using mindfulness to address teacher burnout could potentially obscure the systemic and structural causes of stress in the teacher workforce.
These causes include excessive workload, increasingly complex and diverse classrooms, insecure employment and ongoing inequities in both funding and student outcomes.
Furthermore, the wellbeing focus fails to capture what may be the most educationally interesting, and indeed powerful, impacts of meditation practices for teachers.
Our work, as well as a long history of philosophical thinking about contemplative approaches to education, shows how meditation practices can:
Strengthen interpersonal care and connection
Enhance classroom presence and responsiveness
Bring deeper meaning and purpose to teachers’ work
Given how essential these attributes are to good teaching, and not just ‘surviving’ the stress of teaching, we think there is a strong case for greater integration of meditation practices into pre-service and in-service teacher education.
Contemplative practices enable teachers to identify why they teach and who they are as a teacher. This aspect of professional formation goes to the heart of teaching practice.
We know that positive relationships are the bedrock of strong classroom cultures that support high-quality academic learning.
A recent analysis by Professor Pasi Sahlberg from the Faculty of Education demonstrates how positive student-teacher relationships are associated with a 60-point improvement in mathematics in the PISA assessments.
A teacher’s ability to create classrooms where learners feel safe and can thrive enables greater student curiosity (81 point increase), perseverance (61 points) and a sense of belonging (26 points).
Beyond merely learning to focus attention on the breath, mindfulness-based training supports teachers to actively cultivate compassion towards self and others.
A compassionate orientation can provide a window to viewing all students, even those with the most challenging and complex circumstances, with unconditional positive regard.
Practices of bodily awareness including the body scan technique support enhanced awareness and insight into teachers’ own emotional states and patterns. This, in turn, supports teachers to self-regulate, and co-regulate with students, during the natural ups and downs of school life.
How the teacher comes into the classroom and how they connect with their subject matter and their students, is enriched by their ability to intentionally create space for curiosity about themselves and the work they do.
In one study, we worked closely with seven beginning teachers, each of whom had a significant commitment to meditation practice.
Through the cultivation of present-moment, non-judgemental, embodied awareness, meditation practices supported these teachers to gain insight into their own practice in a way that went beyond familiar practices of professional reflection.
Mindful awareness of thoughts and embodied emotions, from moment to moment during teaching can also help teachers to ‘get out of their own way’ or ‘put the ego aside’.
This provides an opportunity for a person to notice when their habits, attachments or reactions might be obstacles to a clear perception of what is really going on right in front of them. This way of seeing and being in the classroom can help the teacher to make wiser decisions.
Robust, ethically grounded contextual judgement is enhanced by staying in touch with the lived moment of teaching, rather than being distracted by frustration, preconceptions or past habits.
As one of our research participants put it, it’s about “being with the students, not with the plan”. Combined with a compassionate orientation, this approach can lead to a greater sense of joy, spontaneity and presence in teaching.
Meaning and purpose in teachers’ work are so often deferred, especially in the context of a crowded curriculum and heavy reporting and accountability demands.
It’s too often about ‘getting through’ the curriculum, about ensuring students meet desired outcomes or about planning for the next unit. The present-moment focus of meditation practice supports teachers to keep their focus on the richness of the present moment as a source of connection and fulfilment.
Additionally, traditions of meditation often come with teachings that encourage a distinctly holistic and egalitarian vision of human flourishing.
This orientation helps to provide a rich sense of educational purpose that is holistic, and not limited to narrow concerns with academic excellence.
In our research, it was this anchoring sense of purpose, and the possibility of seeing teaching work itself as a kind of contemplative practice, that helped the beginning teachers navigate some of the highly challenging early experiences of teaching with clarity and resilience.
Deep, transformative reflective practice requires self-awareness, courage, honesty and a willingness to be vulnerable.
Meditation practices create space for this curiosity and inquiry, through which teachers can reflect on their developing practice and professional identity.
They can set meaningful goals that keep them connected to their purpose, and manage the many complex demands placed on them in their day-to-day work.
Mindfulness is now a school-based wellbeing practice for Australian school students, but it’s time the attention was turned towards our hard-working teachers.
Meditation and mindfulness practices for teachers can help to infuse care and compassion into their work, enhance presence and responsiveness as well as bring important clarity, meaning and purpose to daily classroom life.
Practically, this all means that there is a strong case to design some form of meditation training, at least as an option, into pre-service teacher education and ongoing professional development.
This case is quite separate from any arguments about whether mindfulness practices may reduce rates of teacher burnout.
The attempt to address teacher wellbeing via individualised interventions like lunchtime yoga or meditation sessions should come with a strong warning.
Offering these activities to teachers, without addressing the systemic, governance or cultural issues that may be contributing to poor wellbeing may have unintended consequences, including cynicism and alienation if teachers perceive that leadership is not addressing their real, underlying concerns.
However, combined with honest efforts to address structural causes of stress, developing a contemplative practice could build greater resilience, self-awareness and agency – core aspects of leadership literacy – that will guide teacher career development and the choices of where they work.
Of course, any meditation training for teachers needs to be done with the guidance of experienced teachers and facilitators, using principles and practices with a strong research base.
For those who want to get started on their own, there are also many easily accessible resources and a good place to start is with these pointers from the University’s Contemplative Studies Centre.