How Calmer Choice teaches mindfulness in elementary schools

Declining mental health for kids is a growing problem in the U.S. The surgeon general has called it the crisis of our time. But what can schools do? A Cape Cod-based program called Calmer Choice is taking a hands-on approach, helping teach a mindfulness curriculum in the classroom. To learn about how it's working, GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel talked with Sarah Manion from Calmer Choice and Principal Derek Thompson of Henry Burkland Elementary School in Middleborough, which is using the program. This transcript has been lightly edited.

Sarah Manion: What we do is provide evidence-based mindfulness education, training and mentorship. And the reason for this is we're trying to build resilience, foster compassion and natural well-being for all people in our community.

Jeremy Siegel: And so what does that exactly look like in practice? Derek, I'll ask you about your experience at your school in just a second. But Sarah, how do you take those sort of, you know, big, lofty ideas of we need to improve mental health for children and actually put it in a classroom?

Derek Manion: Absolutely. And even mindfulness is kind of a lofty idea. And so what we do is we have a specific eight-week program based on a curriculum that we bring into schools. We have trained instructors who will go in twice a week to K-5 elementary schools and deliver 20 minute lessons that help support kids to learn about mindfulness and the techniques that they can use to build their own internal capacity for resilience.

Siegel: So, Derek, you have incorporated some of this into your school, Henry B. Burkland Elementary School in Middleborough. What's been your experience?

Thompson: It's been great actually. To me, what Calmer Choice is about is teaching awareness for the kids. So we talk a lot about how it's like an inside out approach. Teachers teach, and we talk a lot, about being respectful or what empathy is, but this is about teaching kids how to ground themselves and just be more present and aware. And so it's a little bit different of an approach than just telling kids what the expectation is. We actually start to teach them how to recognize what it might feel like in that self-awareness that comes along with a practice of mindfulness.

Siegel: How have you seen mental health challenges play out as a problem at your school? I imagine noticing that all of this is a problem was sort of the first step of deciding to do something, like have help from Calmer Choice in your school. What are you seeing from your kids?

Thompson: It's been interesting seeing what I think has been a slow decline in social skills, in interaction skills. Sometimes for some of our kids, the only place that they're really interacting with other kids is in the school. And the stress that comes along with learning how to be a friend and how to get along with people and how to navigate social media has really taken a toll on kids. I think we have certainly seen an increase in kids' acting out behavior, kids struggling to regulate their emotions. We've seen an increase in family problems, in families in crisis over the years. So yeah, there's a lot of layers to that.

Manion: Yeah. And I will be the first one to say that mindfulness is certainly not a cure-all. However, what I do think is really exciting about mindfulness in particular is that it's not an external skill. It's really just teaching kids, and adults as well, as Derek pointed out, how to reconnect with our inner capacities that are already there, that we're born with. We know how to connect with each other. We know how to tap into our emotions. But when there's so much coming at us in our modern world, it's disconnection from others, be it the challenges that we're facing at home, be it social media, it is easy to forget.

Siegel: Principal Thompson, does this work for kids?

Thompson: Yeah, it does. To just piggyback on what Sarah was saying, it's such an important layer to what we're trying to do with the kids. Adding a layer of mindfulness on top of it is about practicing it. It's about noticing what it feels like and it looks like, just slowing down for a minute. You know, I tell my teachers all the time that we need to go slow sometimes in order to get where we want to go, and we'll go faster if we just slow things down. We're just in such a rush to get through so many standards and so many expectations and so many lessons throughout a day that this is about taking some time to just slow down, check in with yourself, see where you are. And through that process, we start to bring a lot of what we're trying to teach our kids to reality.

If you have a hard time regulating your emotions, this is what it feels like. Kids have a hard time paying attention and staying focused; this is what it feels like or what it looks like. And I feel like without it, so many kids have a hard time actually putting those lessons into practice. So it's important to understand that this is a compliment to a lot of the other pieces that we're doing in the school on a day-to-day basis.

Siegel: I'm curious: From both of your experiences, is it something that's at all hard to get kids on board with? Just imagining myself in a classroom years and years ago as a young kid, I can imagine some kids maybe being like, well, I don't know, I don't want to take a moment out of my day to breathe or whatever. You know, not necessarily taking it seriously. Is that ever the experience? How do you get kids truly on board with something like this?

Manion: I have a really great story about this because you never know what's going to touch your kids. And I was doing an interview a few months back and we had a young man call into the radio program, and he was in college and he had received Calmer Choice. And so as an elementary school kid, he said, I did not care for Calmer Choice. I did it, it wasn't my thing. I was kind of bored during the lessons. But he said, you know, as I went into middle school and then high school and the stressors of those environments really started to affect me, I started having a lot of anxiety and it was then that I actually recalled my Calmer Choice lessons back then, fourth and fifth grade, and I remembered my five finger breathing. I remembered how to take a deep breath and it was really helpful for me.

And that was such a good reminder because you don't always know. It might be that not every kid is super engaged, but I think that again, we're planting seeds to create a foundation later in life when those anxieties become very intense and the behaviors can have a greater impact later.

Thompson: Even kids in a classroom who might not be super-invested in all of the strategies we're teaching, they do benefit and appreciate the calm moments.