You may have heard of mindfulness and how it helps people, and you may even be familiar with the Center for Mindful Living, but do you know what the Office of Innovation and School Choice at Hamilton County Schools is? Well, think teaching to kids the way they want to learn vs the way things have historically been done from the top down. This is important for many reasons, but most importantly teachers and students are back in school in the midst of a pandemic.
Everyone is struggling to make sense of this new life. Teachers are stressed, students are stressed, you’re stressed. That extra stress adds to the daily stress that students in these schools typically face, calling for them to be even more resilient than they already are. Mindfulness will help to mitigate some of the extra stress by providing an atmosphere that acknowledges the stressful parts of life, as well as, a helpful solution to soothe the emotions that go along with coping in chronic stress…not to mention elementary and middle school.
Our $1,700 grant will kick off a partnership between the Center for Mindful Living and the Office of Innovation and Choice for Hamilton County Schools. Teachers running innovation classes at Howard Connect (middle school), Battle Academy and Brown Academy (elementary schools) will get training on how to use mindfulness to be more successful in the classroom at bringing calm and focus to them and their students.