Patricia A. Jennings: The Mindful School: Transforming School Culture Through Mindfulness and Compassion Guilford Press,
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BOOK REVIEW
Patricia A. Jennings: The Mindful School: Transforming School Culture Through Mindfulness and Compassion Guilford Press, New York, NY, 2019, 271 pp. Melissa L. Morton 1
&
Joshua C. Felver 1
Accepted: 12 September 2020 / Published online: 5 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Today’s youth face well-documented challenges. There has been an increase in mental health concerns among K-12 students in recent years, including increased rates of depression and self-harm, and declines in measures of happiness and life satisfaction (Keyes et al. 2019; Twenge and Campbell 2018; Twenge et al. 2018). These mental health challenges have been exacerbated by the additional stress that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. These troubling mental health trends in youth have prompted school personnel to seek strategies to meet the needs of today’s struggling youth. One such categorical approach has included the integration of mindfulness-based practices into school settings to help students and school personnel manage stress and cultivate prosocial qualities to support mental health (Meiklejohn et al. 2012). The emerging evidence in support of the utility of mindfulness-based programming for youth (Felver et al. 2016; Klingbeil et al. 2017) has elicited a surge of interest in deploying these practices more widely and systematically in school settings. Jennings’ edited volume, The Mindful School: Transforming School Culture through Mindfulness and Compassion, provides the reader with a compendium of research, strategies, case studies, and practical insights to guide schools in the implementation of mindfulness-based programming. This collection of chapters does not focus solely on how mindfulness may be directly taught to students; rather, it includes a diverse array of contributions highlighting multiple different service providers (e.g., administrators and school counselors) and school systems that may be directly affected by mindfulness programming to indirectly benefit students. The book introduces the reader to the idea that mindfulness may be a catalyst through which the skills and
* Melissa L. Morton [email protected] 1
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
perception built by mindfulness practice may be applied to systemic transformations in the entire educational system. The first section of the book provides an accessible introduction that frames the rest of the book’s content. Chapter 1 highlights the call for an educational transformation of schools that includes mindfulness programming and offers an overview of each section and chapter’s content in order to orient the reader to the material. Chapter 2 summarizes the current research on mindfulness-based programming for youth to support well-being. The authors provide an overview of many of the evidence-based programs currently being implemented and summarize the existing literature on the impact these programs have on student’s mental health, self-regulation, physical health, and academic functioning. This
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