Integrating Academics with Mindfulness and SEL

published February 7, 2020

Image by AkshayaPatra Foundation from Pixabay

by Catharine Hannay, founder of MindfulTeachers.org

“SEL is not one more thing on the plate. It is the plate.”

Lisa Xagas, Naperville 203 School District, Illinois

Source: CASEL, SEL Trends

One of my main goals here at MindfulTeachers.org is to make it easier for educators to find quality resources on mindfulness and values-based teaching. With that in mind, I've been updating the Mindfulness Resources page so you can quickly scan for breath-based practices, five senses activities, gratitude practices, teaching teens, teaching young children, and so on.

Today I'd like to focus on how K-12 teachers can integrate academic content with mindfulness and social-emotional learning.



If you aren't familiar with SEL:

CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, has a lot of useful information on their website, including:

• What is Social and Emotional Learning?

• the Benefits and Impact of SEL, with statistics based on more than two decades of research. This information is also available as The Case for SEL Powerpoint Presentation.

• guidelines for implementing a Schoolwide SEL program.

If you're wondering about the connection between mindfulness and SEL:

Renee Metty is the founder of a preschool specializing in mindfulness and social emotional learning. She explains,

Mindfulness is the doorway to any social emotional learning program. Social emotional learning programs are usually skill based and typically assume that the children already know how to pause.

Mindfulness helps us recognize what is happening internally with our own experience and not just knowing and identifying emotions externally at a cognitive level.

The practice of mindfulness also includes the key components of seeing your experience without judgment or evaluation and being able to shift focus away from the past or future while noticing and letting go of past behavioral conditioning.

(from Breathing Buddies and Vibratones: Mindfulness for Young Children.)

If you're looking for information about how to integrate SEL with your school's curriculum:

• CASEL has profiles/case studies of three school districts that are successfully integrating SEL with academics.

• Aspen Instute has more case studies and resources for integrating social, emotional, and academic development in the curriculum.

If you're looking for lesson plans and teaching tips:

• Collaborative Classroom has a couple of very useful resources:

  • their Lesson Planning Guide that focuses on both academic and social skills;

  • they also have list of specific Discussion Facilitation Techniques. (These are written for staff discussions, but I think they're equally useful for guiding student groups.)

• Here at MindfulTeachers.org, Ira Rabois, author of Compassionate Critical Thinking, has a number of guest posts, including:

  • teaching students how to participate respectfully in a discussion or a debate.

• integrating mindfulness instruction with academic content in English, Philosophy, Drama, History, and Psychology.

He also has specific suggestions for

• Body-Based Practices;

• Improvisational Activities; and

• Teaching Myths.

If you found these resources useful, you may also be interested in the following posts:

• 7 Ways to Bring Mindfulness Into Any Classroom.

• Mindful or Mindless? analyzing characters in books and movies; and

• Poems, Quotes, and Proverbs about Mindfulness and Compassion

• How Music Helps Kids with Social and Emotional Learning