mindfulness – Page 2 – Education & Teacher Conferences

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Teens Who Recognize Their Emotions Manage Stress Better. We Can Help (Maybe).

Andrew Watson

August 15, 2019

Teens Who Recognize Their Emotions Manage Stress Better. We Can Help (Maybe).

Why are teens so adolescent?

Why are they so infuriatingly wonderful? So wonderfully infuriating?

Researchers have offered an intriguing suggestion:

Children can tell you what they’re feeling with confidence. They believe they can experience only one emotion at a time, and so they label it with certainty.

Adults can also tell you what they’re feeling with confidence. They know they can experience many emotions at once, and they have lots of experience figuring out the combination that they feel right now.

Adolescents — sometimes — don’t really know what they’re feeling. Like adults, they know they can experience many emotions. But unlike adults, they don’t yet have much experience describing combinations. And so, unlike children, they’re uncertain what they’re feeling.

We’ve blogged about this research here.

Individual Differences Matter

So, adolescents don’t distinguish among complex emotions as well as adults do.

Of course: individual teens develop along different paths. Some differentiate among emotions better than others.

Researchers at Emory wanted to know: do those differences have meaningful effects?

In particular, they asked this intricate question: does a teen’s ability to distinguish among negative emotions have an effect on their experience of depression?

In other words: do the hassles and stresses of life lead to depression more often among teens who distinguish among negative emotions less skillfully?

To answer this question, Dr. Lisa Starr and her team interviewed 225+ teens, and then had them fill out online diaries for several days. They then followed up with those teens up to a year-and-a-half later.

In other words, they got LOTS of data spread out over LONG periods of time.

Given all the variables at play, it’s not surprising that the results here are complex: probably too complex to explore in detail. (Click the link if you want the nitty-gritty.)

But the headline is clear: teens who distinguish among negative emotions effectively can manage life stress better than those who don’t.

To say that the other way around: teens who struggle to distinguish among negative emotions are likelier to experience depression as result of life’s hassles and stresses.

What Can We Do?

Students benefit from skill in distinguishing among negative emotions. In fact, those who lack those skills face a higher chance of depression.

So: what can we do to promote those skills?

I’ve asked lead researcher Dr. Starr that question. She pointed me to this study, which suggests that mindfulness training might have some benefits.

That suggestion lines up with this recent meta-analysis, showing that mindfulness can indeed help people manage depression.

Of course: we shouldn’t rely too heavily on just one study. I hope this question leads to greater exploration soon.

Given the scary numbers about adolescent depression, we should do all we can to manage this problem.

Today’s Unpopular Research Finding: Potential Perils of Mindfulness

Andrew Watson

May 11, 2019

Today’s Unpopular Research Finding: Potential Perils of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has a great reputation.

Students and teachers can start meditation programs quite easily. And, we’ve heard about its myriad benefits: reduced stress, greater concentration, enhanced classroom cooperation.

If we can fix so many school problems for (essentially) no money, what’s not to love?

Today’s Headline: “Particularly Unpleasant” Experiences

We’ve heard about all the good things that mindfulness can produce. Does it lead to any bad things?

Several researchers in Europe wanted to know if it led to “particularly unpleasant” experiences: “anxiety, fear, distorted emotions or thoughts, altered sense of self or the world.”

In particular, they asked if these experiences occurred during or after meditating.

They surveyed 1200+ people who had practiced meditation for at least two months. (The average experience meditating was, in fact, six years.)

Amazingly, more than 300 of them — 25% — reported a “particularly unpleasant” experience.

And, their findings are in line with two earlier studies (here and here), which reported 25% and 32% of meditators had such experiences.

The rate was lower for religious meditators, and slightly higher for men than women. The kind of meditation mattered somewhat. And (surprisingly for me), the rate was higher among those who had attended meditation retreats.

Lots of other variables didn’t matter: for instance, years of meditation experience, or length of meditation session.

Classroom Implications: Don’ts, and Do’s

Don’t Panic. If you’re currently running a mindfulness program, you don’t need to abandon ship.

Keep in mind:

This study asked respondants one question. We can’t draw extravagant conclusions from just one question.

The study focused on adults, not K-12 students.

We can’t draw causal links. That is: we don’t know, based on this study design, if the meditation led to the “particularly unpleasant” experience. We don’t even know what that rate would be for people in a control group.

We’re still VERY EARLY in exploring this question. We’ve now got 3 studies pointing this direction. But, we need more research — and more consistent ways of investigating this link — to know what to make of it.

Do’s

First: Use this research to improve the mindfulness program you have, or the one you’re planning.

That is: If you’ve got such a program, or have one under consideration, ask yourself, do you see signs that your students have unpleasant experiences?

Are you giving them permission and opportunity to say so?

Do the people running the mindfulness session know what to do if they get that kind of response?

After all, this research team isn’t asking schools and teachers to stop meditating. Like good scientists, they’re looking at both potential benefits and potential detriments.

Second: More generally, let this research be a healthy reminder. Almost all school changes lead to both good and bad results.

While mindfulness breaks might have lots of benefits, they might well have some downsides. So too with everything else.

We should always ask about the downsides.

When doesn’t retrieval practice help? Being outside might help some students learn something, but could it hamper others trying to learn other things?

When we actively seek out both the good and bad in the research-based practices we adopt, we’re likelier to use them more thoughtfully and effectively.

Avoiding Extremes: Common Sense in the Middle

Andrew Watson

November 02, 2018

Avoiding Extremes: Common Sense in the Middle

Teachers feel passionate about our work. As a result, we can advocate exuberantly — occasionally too exuberantly? — for a particular position.

Advocates for (or against) Social-Emotional Learning can make zealous claims for their beliefs. Same for PBL, or direct instruction. Or for flipped classrooms, or traditional ones.

Of course, given the variety of teachers, students, schools, curricula — and the variety of societies in which they all operate — we perhaps should hesitate to make absolute claims.

Today’s Shining Example

I recently rediscovered a marvelous example of comfort with the ambiguous middle ground.

In this EdSurge post, Art Markman explains how mindfulness can help. And: how it might not help.

He explains the benefits of a growth mindset. And: its potential detriments.

When asked “if schools teach the way students learn,” he doesn’t scream “OF COURSE!” Nor does he bellow “NEVER!”

Instead, he offers this answer: “Sometimes, but often not.”

In other words: we’re not all spectacular successes or hideous failures. Contrary to much of the rhetoric you hear, we live somewhere in between.

I hope you enjoy reading this interview. And, that Markman’s sensible example offers guidance on moderation and nuance.

I myself look forward to reading more of his work.

3rd Graders Beware! The Perils of Mindfulness Research

Andrew Watson

May 11, 2018

3rd Graders Beware! The Perils of Mindfulness Research

In our frantic, stressed-out, technology-addled world, it just makes sense: we should all take some time to rest our brains.

And: what better way than mindfulness?

We’ve all heard so much about the benefits of focused breathing. The energy that derives from specific poses. The insights that come from curious attention to our bodies.

So: what’s not to love about mindfulness?

Yoga and Mindfulness in 3rd Grade

In 2016 and 2017, researchers worked with high-anxiety 3rd graders at a school in New Orleans.

20 of these students went through a combined yoga and mindfulness program. This program has good research behind it, and was led by an experienced professional. As the researchers describe it,

The session content included breathing exercises, guided relaxation, and several Vinyasa and Ashtanga poses appropriate for third graders.

And, the school devoted real time to this program. Students met before school 10 times, for forty minutes each session. 400 minutes shows real commitment!

Researchers also kept track of 33 other high-anxiety 3rd graders who had been randomly selected as the control group.

Both before and after the yoga/mindfulness program, the students answered a list of questions that measure physical, emotional, and social quality of life. (It’s euphoniously called the PedsQL.)

So: did those 400 minutes help?

The Benefits of Mindfulness

In part, it seems the program helped.

For example, the 3rd graders who participated in yoga and mindfulness saw an increase in their emotional PedsQL score of more than 18 points. Given that the scale ranges from 1 to 100, and that they started with an average score of 52, AND that the control group’s average fell by just under a point — that’s a dramatic improvement!

Researchers also found a statistically significant improvement in their psychosocial PedsQL score.

In a parallel track of this investigation, researchers offered a professional development session on mindfulness for the school’s teachers.

As a result, they found that more teachers used mindfulness and yoga with their students during the class day. Depending on how you count, teachers roughly doubled the number of sessions they used in their classrooms.

So far, so good.

The Perils of Mindfulness Research

Despite all these measurements, I remain unpersuaded by this study.

Three concerns jump out at me.

First: the study includes a control group…but the control group didn’t do anything different from their normal routine. (They were treated for anxiety in the school’s usual way.)

So: the benefits described above might have resulted from the yoga and mindfulness. But, it might just have well resulted from doing something different. Maybe these students would have scored higher on the PedsQL if they’d gone hiking. Or, made music. Or simply arrived at school 40 minutes early and done something relaxing.

We just don’t know.

Second: the students did score higher on the emotional and psychosocial PedsQL, but those are only 2 of the 6 measures on the test. Their scores on the other scales — school, social, physical, and overall — weren’t statistically significantly improved.

In fact, if you look at table 2 instead of table 3, it seems that only the emotional and not the psychosocial scores improved. (Table 3 shows the results of more sophisticated statistical modelling.)

Even in the best case, then, the yoga and meditation helped students on some measures. On 2/3 of the measures, however, it didn’t make a measurable difference.

Third: in this study, classroom teachers started doing additional yoga with their students as well.

So, perhaps the change we saw resulted from the special yoga and mindfulness intervention. Or, perhaps it resulted from the additional classroom yoga. Or, perhaps from the combination.

Again: we just don’t know.

The Perils of Mindfulness Research: The Big Picture

My point here is not to criticize this study. I am, in fact, quite glad that researchers are working with students in schools.

In fact, these researchers — quite helpfully — asked teachers about the biggest impediments for having a mindfulness program in the school.

Instead, I want to highlight how difficult it is to be confident about cause and effect.

In truth, I really want to be persuaded. I want to be able to tell teachers that we’ve got a sure-fire solution to real school problems.

But, my desire to be persuaded means I must be especially vigilant about the research I rely on.

In fact, as noted before on this blog, research in this field isn’t improving as fast as we’d like it to.

Ultimately, if we’re going to tell students to come to school early, if we’re going to ask them to spend 400 minutes doing something, if we’re going to create new programs and hire more staff, we need to be sure that this cause produces this effect.

As of today, I don’t think we’re sure enough.

Investigating Mindfulness: How Do We Know Its Benefits?

Andrew Watson

February 22, 2018

Investigating Mindfulness: How Do We Know Its Benefits?

Does mindfulness truly benefit people?

On the one hand, the obvious answer is “yes.” We’ve all heard that meditation reduces stress, improve concentration, deepens sleep, and whitens teeth. (I think I made that last one up.)

Some of you reading this post may have embraced mindfulness, and perhaps tell your neighbors and friends about its healing powers.

This sort of evidence–coming from personal experience–can be powerfully persuasive.

Other Ways of Knowing

On the other hand, if we want to know about mindfulness in a scientific way, we’d like some research. Please.

Research on topics like these typically follows a predictable pattern. In the early days of Mindset theory, for example, Dweck worked with a few dozen people for an hour or so.

When these studies showed promise, she then followed larger groups of people for longer periods of time. In one study, for example, she and Lisa Blackwell followed hundreds of 7th graders for over 4 years.

One recent analysis I saw looked at Mindset data for 125,000 grade-school students. Yup: 125,000.

This trajectory–from small test studies to large and rigorous trials–makes sense. We can’t fund huge investigations of every idea that comes along, so we need to test for the good ideas before we examine them in depth.

But, once an idea–like, say, mindfulness–shows promise in early trials, we’d like to see larger and more rigorous trials as the years go by.

So: is that happening? Are we seeing better studies into mindfulness?

Investigating Mindfulness

Sadly, not so much. That’s the conclusion of a recent study, which compared early mindfulness research to more recent examples.

We would like to see studies with larger sample sizes, active control conditions, longer-term evaluation of results and so forth. This study finds some positive trends, but overall isn’t impressed with the research progress over the last 13 years.

Of course, their conclusion doesn’t mean that mindfulness doesn’t help.

It does mean, however, that our evidence isn’t as strong as it might seem to be, because we haven’t yet “taken it to the next level.”

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By the way: you’ll have the chance to learn more about mindfulness, and about the ways that researchers investigate it, at the upcoming Learning and the Brain conference in New York.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 78(1), 246-263.

Goldberg, S. B., Tucker, R. P., Greene, P. A., Simpson, T. L., Kearney, D. J., & Davidson, R. J. (2017). Is mindfulness research methodology improving over time? A systematic review. PloS one, 12(10), e0187298.

Andrew Watson

March 28, 2017

Brain Wandering

We’ve posted quite frequently about mind-wandering on this blog (here, here, and here — to pick just a few). This post introduces a comprehensive article about the brain activity that correlates with various mind-wandering states.

As John Leiff (M.D.) notes, when you just lie still and think about nothing in particular, your brain isn’t quiet; a well-defined set of neural networks is firing. This group is called the Default Mode Network (DMN, or DN), and it has gotten a lot of research love in recent years.

Lieff’s article explores — in detail — the relationships between different parts of the DN and different kinds of mind-wandering and meditation.

This comprehensive review doesn’t offer any immediate teaching implications. However — and this is a big however — if you’re interested in mindfulness, and want to use brain research to make you case to your admin team, you will benefit from knowing the information that Lieff offers you here.