Middle School Mindfulness, Made Practical

In this episode, Amy Edelstein shares a practical, developmentally appropriate guidance on teaching mindfulness to middle schoolers. She describes how to adjust practices to this age group, with a focus on structure, repetition, and emotional intelligence. 

Paying attention to their emerging selfhood, a teacher can guide that emergence while recognizing that students are still very group oriented. 

Short, tactile practices, playful competition, and thoughtful repeated transitions help students build mindfulness habits that will last.

Tips and Guidelines in this session:

• modeling calm, order, and consistent routines

• keeping practices short and repeating for depth

• focusing on emotional intelligence over abstract discussions around the thought process

• focusing on emotional intelligence through role play

And other activities will help you design a session and a set of classroom activities that will build your students' self knowledge, resilience, and happiness. 

Chapters

• 0:09 Framing Conscious Classrooms
• 0:51 Why Middle School Needs Structure
• 2:41 Emotional Intelligence First
• 4:18 Games, Rewards, and Repetition
• 5:12 Three-Part Breathing Routine
• 8:58 Mindfulness as Mental Hygiene
• 11:46 Emotional Charades Observation
• 14:14 From Noticing to Nonjudgment
• 16:00 Guided Breathing Practice Demo
• 22:03 Gentle Closings and Reentry
• 23:19 Final Encouragements and Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom Podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive, and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to the conscious classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein. Today I want to do something that we haven't done for a while. I want to talk more practically about how to work in the classroom and specifically how to work with middle school students, how to scale in a developmentally appropriate way, how to work with them, how to meet their interest and curiosity at the same time as continuing to give them practice with the mindfulness tools. Students in middle school years, sixth, seventh, and eighth, but particularly seventh and eighth, are still developing their sense of self. They're just beginning to individuate and still very much working in a group context. They are still forming basic social skills, forming basic habits. And they're not yet independent in their own thinking and their own ability to discern. They take their cues very much from the adults around them, even more so than from their peers. How we model as teachers of mindfulness for middle schoolers is very important. How we model calm, order, ritual, consistency, stability, guardrails, all those things are very important for middle school students. They thrive when there's a sense of framework and structure. It doesn't mean that they can't go out and go wild on recess or play games and get lost in the excitement. But the general environment needs to be one of order and consistency and repetition. It's also difficult for them to objectify the experience of thought. So mindfulness needs to be more tactile. It'll be difficult for them to talk about thoughts as separate from themselves. In the middle school years, it's helpful to focus a lot on emotional intelligence, learning to understand emotion, identify different emotions, articulate their emotions, and work on their communication skills with one another and oneself. What I've found in working with middle school is that they're interestingly without filters. They will share very freely about themselves, their experience, and sometimes they'll share things that may be inappropriate in a classroom context, maybe too self-disclosing, but they don't seem to be aware of that. So your questions, you want to be thoughtful about how you phrase them, so that you're helping them learn and you're responding to their experience. And you're also recognizing that they don't have a ton of filters. So some questions they may lead them to be too self-disclosing in a large group. The middle-age years, they respond well to healthy competition and games with big rewards like stickers. They just enjoy the fun of pushing their edges. And it lifts their energy and their excitement. At the same time, practice is really important. They're already doing a lot of activity in their other school subjects. So practice is important, and yet we find that middle school students really you don't want to do longer than three or five minutes of a mindfulness practice with them unless it's mindful movement or body scan. So, how do you do that? The best way to do that is, for example, if you're leading a mindful breathing practice, spend a long time on the posture, getting them into their right posture, taking time over it, and then guiding them through a mindful breath practice for several minutes, three to five minutes. And then when you finish the practice, allow them to sit and invite them to just notice their experience. Without engaging them in discussion, it'll be a little bit hard for them to articulate what they feel right away. Just let them observe their experience and then guide them into a second repetition of the practice. So doing the same practice of the mindful breathing, staying with the waves of the breath as they roll in and the waves of the breath as they roll out. And again, letting them sit for four or five minutes. Keep your eyes open and keep alert. Notice if some students are getting antsy and start to exhibit, you know, some fidgetiness that indicates that you should bring the practice to a close. The repetition is going to be more important than the length. And again, invite them to notice their experience. Maybe notice if their body feels more settled or more tired or more calm. Notice if their emotions feel like they settled, like the snow in a snow globe. After they've had a moment to regulate and normalize and move around, bring them back again into a third form of mindful breathing practice. And this time you can change it up a little bit. You can do breathing hands, you can do star breath, tracing the fingers, you can trace circles on the desk or on the back of the hand. So again, they're doing one more practice. It's the breathing that they've already done, but it's slightly different, so it keeps their attention. And then when you release the practice, invite them to just write a few things in their mindfulness journal, maybe a limerick or a haiku about the practice, what it was like. Inviting them to do, to express their emotions in a form that they already use in language arts can be helpful to help them find words or ways to think about their experience. An open-ended, how did you feel? What did you notice for that age group may be a little bit difficult. When you're talking with the middle school students, that grade band from sort of 12 to 14, the way you want to describe the mindfulness is in ways that they can understand. So objectivity on thought or even space from thought will probably be a reach for them developmentally. You can talk to them about mindfulness as a way to enhance their creativity and exercise their imagination by seeing things in a new way, shifting how they see and how they pay attention. Through being still and seeing their emotions, they'll also be able to develop their friendship skills, which are very important to them. They're learning how to be better friends instead of taking for granted, as they did in grade school, that you're just friends with everyone, and everyone gets a Valentine, everyone gets invited to the birthday party. Middle school, they're starting to form groups, and they worry about their friendship skills. And you can also talk with them about how the mindfulness and these tools that we're practicing can help calm them when they feel upset, when they're angry or sad or anxious or overwhelmed. One of the ways to communicate these tools and make them a habit for them is to invite them to remember what kinds of habits of hygiene they learned when they were little. Washing their hands, brushing their teeth, combing their hair, taking a shower, cleaning their rooms. All the things that they learned about being clean and healthy, good hygiene keeps them from getting sick. So good hygiene for the mind is part of what mindfulness practice helps them enact. So their mindfulness practice is a hygiene of the mind and the emotions habit, and they want to start practicing it. So if they only wash their hands once a week, they're not going to get all the germs off. So washing their hands every day is several times a day is very important, as we all learned during the pandemic. People develop better habits of cleanliness and hygiene. So same with mindfulness. Practicing on the bus for a few minutes, practicing an advisory or home room for a few minutes, practicing when you're lying in bed as you fall asleep. Making it a habit or a ritual or a training or a workout will help you develop these mental and emotional hygiene habits. One of the exercises that I like to do in the inner strength program is to have them do emotional charades, where you divide the class in half, you tell one half of the group a specific emotion, whether it's being happy or proud, being lonely or wanting to be left alone, being frustrated, angry, or contented or peaceful. Those all work very well. And have that group walk down the hall, expressing that emotion, not in an exaggerated way, but as if they were feeling that emotion on a regular day and walking down the hall. How would they look? And then the other half of the class has to observe and guess what emotion are they expressing? What were the physical cues? How did they hold their hands and their head and their eyes and their shoulders? Is that how each one would communicate that emotion, or would you walk down the hall different? How can you tell the difference from being lonely, wanting to connect, and being wanting to be left alone? That's interestingly a distinction that the middle school students are very good at. And they're often very kind. They say, Oh, when I see a person who wants to be left alone, sometimes I just walk next to the hall, next to them in the hall. So I just walk down the hall with them. So I'm not invading their space, but I'm with them. They can be very kind and observant that way. Then you want to relate this to the mindfulness itself. So we notice these things sometimes, but we don't really pay attention to what we're noticing. We take in these cues, and when we're really practicing mindful observation, we're looking without judgment. So we're watching those students walking down the hall expressing a certain emotion. And we're not judging whether we think they do it well or they don't do it well, or we like them or we don't like it. We're really in an open way picking up all the cues that we can. Being, you know, closely observant, you know, as if you were a nature observer watching animals in the forest or Jane Goodall studying her chimpanzees. She just sat and watched and learned, without expectation of what she was going to find. And when we observe mindfully our surroundings, we're able then to react and interact better and more kindly, more accurately. So if you're practicing that mindful observation, you can really see the difference between the student that's lonely or wanting to be left alone. Or you can see the difference between the student that's just happy and the student who's proud. And the student who's proud, you can say, you can find out what happened, what did you accomplish, what gave you this feeling, what did you achieve, and really connect with them over what big milestone they might have just celebrated. Which is a little different when a student's having their birthday and they're just happy because it's their birthday and they're going to celebrate. So you start engaging the students in that sense that being calm and settled in ourselves enables us to have more bandwidth for the world around us. And the good way to see the middle school years is they're emerging. They're like uh caterpillars who've uh gone into the cocoon, and they're about to emerge as these butterflies. They're going through a transformation and they're peeking out and they're beginning to come out in their new selves, their new bodies, their new emotional life, their new individuation. So we don't want to pull them out before their time. But we want to keep helping them to emerge. The practice itself with the mindfulness is similar to high school students. In a way, there's not that much you need to adjust. The practice is a base, you know, they're all basic practices with basic cues. You simply want to adjust your expectations. And so let's do a short mindful breathing practice, as we would with our middle school students. So come into your best mindfulness posture. Scoot forward in your chair so you can feel the ground underneath your feet. Press your toes into your shoes and feel the solidity of the floor. Press your heels into your shoes and feel the stretch in your calves. Feel how you're glued to your chair. Gravity is pulling you down. And how your back rises up tall. And your head balances on top of your neck. You can adjust your head a little bit so it feels like it's almost floating, and you feel very tall, very straight. You can imagine a string going from the top of your head to a star straight above us. Simply holding you up so your posture is easy and tall. Notice where you're resting your hands. Maybe they're on your lap, maybe they're on your desk. Notice what you're touching. Is it cool and soft or hot and hard, smooth, or textured? Now find a beautiful shape or color to rest your eyes on, or you can rest your eyes on the desk or the floor in front of you. Or you can close your eyes if you'd like. Take one deep breath where you feel like you're filling your whole lungs. When your lungs are completely full, your lungs go all the way up to your collarbones, let all of the air out. And in your own time, take two more deep breaths, filling your lungs all the way up and letting out all of the air. On your next breath, start paying attention to the way that the air goes in and the air goes out. Let your breath be natural at your own pace. It might be slow and shallow, or it might be quick. Whatever your natural rhythm is, is fine. See if you can feel the air rolling in in your nose. Every time you get distracted and start thinking about the noise you heard in the hall, or something you're gonna do after school, or lunchtime. Put your attention back on your breath. Letting all of this static calm down. Start stretching your fingers and stretching your toes, putting your attention, moving it from the breath to the familiar objects in the room around you and the people next to you. And we can bring the practice to a close. You can always close the practice with a chime. I encourage you to allow those cues of stretching the fingers, shifting the attention so that they reorient into that shared space and away from their internal exploration. As adults, using a bell simply to cue as we complete a practice is not so startling. But for younger students, they can get a little disoriented, and so inviting them slowly to reconnect with the movement in their bodies, stretching, no longer paying attention in the same way, reorienting to the familiar objects in the room, and then closing with a chime or with a verbal cue will help them feel at rest and connected. So I hope this is helpful to all of you who work with children in this age band. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments and any tools that you found useful, please share them with me. And I encourage you to keep practicing. Keep your students practicing. These are really basic, fundamental, foundational, and helpful habits of mind that can last a lifetime. So enjoy and enjoy your teaching, enjoy your practicing, until next time. Thank you for listening to the conscious classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on InnerStrengthFoundation.net for links and more information. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.