Mindfulness-Based Programming for Students and Teachers in Public School Settings: Present Findings and Future Directions

School-based mindfulness programming (SBMP) has become increasingly common in K-12 school settings. In parallel with this growth, there has been rapidly increasing research into this new topic of scientific inquiry. To illustrate the pace of research exploring the utility of SBMP with student populations, using the PsycINFO electronic database and keywords “mindfulness” and “school,” as of summer 2024 there were 140 studies involving youth (i.e., subjects under 18 years of age) that have been published in academic peer-reviewed journals. Restricting this search to articles published since 2019, nearly half (46%; n = 65) of the extant literature has been published in only the last five years. This emerging area of scholarship generally indicates that SBMPs are beneficial for students, with outcomes including enhanced self-regulatory ability, decreased anxiety and depression, and improved health and interpersonal relationships (Roeser et al., 2023). Research also indicates that SBMPs may also benefit teacher well-being (Klingbeil & Renshaw, 2018). However promising, the current enthusiasm for implementing SBMPs appears to have outpaced rigorous evaluation efforts (Felver et al., 2016; Roeser et al., 2023), as currently, we do not fully understand for whom and under what conditions SBMPs yield effects (Emerson et al., 2020; Feagans Gould et al., 2016).

Providing programming in community-based social environments, including school systems, is a highly complex endeavor involving the relations between individuals and diverse contexts. To fully understand the effects of SBMP requires careful consideration of persons (e.g., students, teachers), interpersonal relationships, and the ecological context of schools, all interacting with myriad programmatic features over time (Felver et al., 2023; Roeser et al., 2023). Research in this domain is no small undertaking and a daunting task for the applied researcher seeking to elucidate the impact of SBMPs. In response to these complexities, scholars have called for careful consideration of these diverse implementation factors in the study of SBMP, including program design, details on all persons involved, contextual elements, and clear descriptions of program delivery (Baelen et al., 2023).

This Special Issue offers a timely contribution to the field by exploring novel aspects of SBMP, including dimensions of SBMP implementation that have yet to be reported on in the literature to date. In the first paper of this Special Issue, Helminen et al. (2024) explore the role of stress as a potentially highly influential contextual factor in SBMP implementation. This research replicated an implementation of the Learning to BREATHE (Broderick, 2013) curricula in racially diverse high school classrooms (k = 5; n = 66). Although this study was conducted by the same research team, utilizing the same curricula and study protocol, in the same school building and classroom as a previous clinical trial (Felver et al., 2019), it failed to replicate intervention effects. The authors attribute these null results to students in the Felver et al.'s (2019) sample self-reporting higher levels of stress than in the Helminen et al.'s (2024) student sample. Findings are contextualized within mindfulness stress buffering theory (Creswell & Lindsay, 2014), representing the first time this theory has been applied to the study of SBMP.

In the second paper of this Special Issue, Van Doren & Roeser (2024) report the results of an 8-week SBMP, Stress Management and Relaxation Training (SMART) Program (Cullen et al., 2019) for teachers’ mental health. Study 1 showed that the SBMP yielded significant reductions to symptoms of depression at post-program and 3-month follow-up timepoints after accounting for psychopharmaceutical medication use. Study 2 showed a similar pattern of results for symptoms of anxiety. Comparative effects analysis demonstrated that teachers assigned to the SBMP condition resulted in greater reductions to internalizing symptoms relative to teachers who were only treated with medication. These findings are significant because teachers are a population at risk for mental health problems (Steiner & Woo, 2021), and because teachers comprise an essential element of the school contextual milieu; SBMP supporting teacher well-being may thus have important implications for student academic achievement and school climate (Emerson et al., 2017).

In the third paper of this Special Issue, Felver et al. (2024) report expert feedback on the ideal structure and dosage of a mindfulness-based program for youth. This research utilized Delphi survey methodology (Hasson et al., 2000) to survey identified expert scientists (n = 19) and mindfulness instructors (n = 21) regarding their perspective on the optimal mindfulness program structure across developmental time periods (Early Childhood, Middle Childhood, and Adolescence). Results indicated that mindfulness-based program structure should be progressively longer, and that more time should be allocated to didactic instruction and discussion (relative to mindfulness practice) as youth become older. This study is also the first to report specific time allocation for mindfulness-based programming sessions for youth based on consensus expert opinion, thus offering the first recommended dosage for mindfulness programming which has implications for the future study of SBMP.

In the fourth paper of this Special Issue, Razza et al. (2024) examine the effectiveness of a 12-week SBMP, Inner Strength Teen Program (Edelstein, 2016), for at-risk adolescent outcomes (n = 133). Results from this study indicated that students who received the SBMP demonstrated significant benefits to self-compassion and self-regulation relative to students in a control condition. This study also found a dose-response relation between the number of SBMP sessions adolescents received and their self-compassion scores, whereby students who received a single dose of SBMP demonstrated larger effects than students who received two doses of the SBMP. This study is significant for demonstrating SBMP effects in understudied at-risk adolescents, and for indicating that there may be diminishing returns for SBMP dosage in youth.

The aforementioned studies represent innovative contributions to the SBMP literature that move beyond simply evaluating intervention effects on students. This work points to essential features of context, the importance of teacher well-being, programming features and dosage characteristics, and the dose–response relation between program delivery and outcomes. In light of these findings, researchers should consider several directions for future study.

First, it is critical that more diverse participant samples be included and carefully studied in future implementation trials. This echoes recent calls for consideration of equity in SBMP implementation, as for example, students from more disadvantaged backgrounds may be unable to engage in home practices relative to their more affluent peers (Strohmaier & Bailey, 2023). This has implications for future investigation of the dose–response relation between mindfulness programming and outcomes, as scholars point to a distinction between the provision of programming (i.e., dosage) and the actual receipt of intended programming (i.e., uptake) (Baelen et al., 2023). Second, a more thorough description of programming features should be provided as SBMP represents a diverse array of programming. Recent scholarship has called attention to the need to define the core components of SBMP in order to fully understand any relation between programming and outcomes (Felver et al., 2023), and future research should consider reporting such features in their final manuscripts. Given the current historic teacher shortages facing many school systems, future research should focus on investigating supports for teachers to enhance health and thus reduce occupational attrition. School districts might, for example, choose to invest in different strategies for supporting teacher well-being, from meditation to medication (Van Doren & Roeser, 2024), based on evidence reported in this Special Issue. Lastly, future scholarship is strongly encouraged to report all implementation features in their final manuscripts. Baelen et al. (2023) detail several dimensions of SBMP implementation that may, and arguably should, be reported. Future scholars will be well served by more detailed reporting of implementation features, as this will support future systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and SBMP evaluation research.

The implementation of SBMP continues at breakneck speeds, and research needs to keep pace with implementation. The field does not need more pilot studies of novel programming; the literature clearly indicates that there is a signal between SBMP and potential benefits. What is needed is a careful examination of implementation factors and the application of rigorous study designs to understand for whom, and under what conditions, SBMP is beneficial. Mindfulness offers great potential for improving the context of K-12 education, and now is the time for the application of implementation science to this emerging field of scholarship in order to advance the science, and ultimately, student and teacher outcomes.