Personal Mindfulness Practices and Educational Leadership—A Qualitative Study

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Remaking education: beyond the classroom

Proposal

There has been a marked increase in the presence of mindfulness programs in schools to address the needs of students in regards to improving their mental, emotional, social and physical health (Beauchemin, Hutchins, & Patterson, 2008; Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Flook, Smalley, Kitil, Galla, Kaiser-Greenland, Locke, Ishijima, & Kasari, 2010). Mindfulness-based approaches are becoming more common in education to promote myriad of outcomes including resiliency, wellbeing, emotion-regulation, self-reflection, and attention (Abenavoli, Jennings, Greenberg, Harris, & Katz, 2013; Broderick & Metz, 2009; Harrison, Manocha, & Rubia, 2004; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015; Schure, Christopher, & Christopher, 2008). Unfortunately, very little work has focused on the mindfulness practices of educational leaders (Brown & Olson, 2015; Wells, 2016) as part of their own personal mindfulness or how they implement mindfulness throughout their schools. Mindfulness yields benefits that support effective leadership by helping leaders gain perspective, be in the moment, become resilient and learn to thrive in the face of problems, all of which are crucial for an educational leader (Well, 2016; Boyce, 2011; Murphy, 2011). However, this is not a straightforward task to the nascent stage of contemplative science in education—a field with limited availability on best practices of implementation. Thus, the purpose of this empirical study is to explore the personal mindfulness practices of school and district leaders to determine whether these steps are having an effect on decreasing burnout, improved physical and/or mental well-being, and improved professional practice and to understand the challenges confronted by school administrators when they plan or attempt to implement mindfulness at their schools or districts.
In this study, we examine the following questions:
1. What are effective leaders doing to remain in the position, mentally and physically strong enough to handle the regular challenges of school leadership?
2. What practices are leaders adopting that are allowing them to recognize and manage strong emotions; address real-time issues that occur in their lives including stress and anxiety; and prevent “burnout”?
Based upon Karasek’s theoretical framework, we conducted a phenomenological qualitative study on the perceptions of school administrators on what elements constitutes effective leadership. Our preliminary findings show that our participants felt strongly about establishing their own definition of mindfulness and what it meant to them and their own personal practice.
Another important finding that was echoed by all of the participants was the importance of their mindfulness practice in regard to their own health. In some cases, leaders initially adopted their practice in an attempt to correct bad habits that had emerged in the course of their position. Not all participants, however, have had such consistent practice with ongoing success. This research addresses one component of the understudied topic of mindful leadership. We are hopeful that by sharing the experiences of current school and district leaders, we can provide insight into how a personal mindfulness practice may in fact have an effect on school administrators’ wellbeing and leadership.

Authors

• Dong Jin Kim, Washington State University

• Kerry Robinson, University of North Carolina Wilmington

• Julia Mahfouz, University of Idaho