South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Mindful moments
Broward students being taught tools for centering, focusing to manage stress
Pressure-filled times call for innovative measures to deal with them. And Broward County students are susceptible to the greater stresses of life today.
Stresses for teens in particular have been mounting over recent years, starting with the shooting in Parkland, racial tensions enhanced by the killing of George Floyd and the COVID19 pandemic. All of these realities have created an unusual amount of tension, on top of the usual worries about passing tests, social media and trying to get into college, according to teachers of mindfulness.
The definition of mindfulness has been described as “the practice of purposely bringing one’s attention in the present moment without evaluation, a skill one develops through meditation or other training”.
Broward County schools have implemented various techniques to find the right tools to help students to deal with the curve balls that life throws their way.
The Children’s Services Council of Broward County and Broward County Public Schools have been working with organizations like the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, along with Knellee Bisram, founder and CEO of AHAM Education to implement programs for both teachers and students to discover a better way of dealing with unpredictable life circumstances.
Teaching mindful ways
The AHAM Education organization is the primary vehicle for bringing the tools to the school district for teaching mindfulness to educators and students.
Broward County Public Schools created the Superintendent’s Mindfulness Initiative in partnership with AHAM. SMI is the first district-led program teaching mindfulness-based tools to youth in South Florida.
AHAM works with students, educators and parents on mindfulness tools that “build balance, resilience, compassion and empathy.” The project is meant to improve both academic and social-emotional results for children and families in Broward.
Bisram said mindfulness has
been slowly integrated into the school district over the last five years.
“We started our first pilot project in 2017 with the schools,” she said. “Then when the Parkland shooting happened in 2018, there was a sudden interest in mindfulness, primarily to help the kids and the families in Parkland to deal with the tragedy.”
The impact of the shooting on students in Broward was palpable and district leaders began looking for ways of helping them cope with the sudden stress that the
youth were experiencing.
Bisram said after the shooting the Children’s Services Council of Broward and the school district received a grant from Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, the wife of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that funded the first round. They brought in the Center for MindBody Medicine to start training teachers, counselors and the community.
“As a result of all of the training, AHAM created a Mind-Body Resiliency Coalition with the CSC of Broward,” Bisram said. “What
we do is to bring together all of the professionals and initiatives that are infusing mindfulness into the lives of children and families through the school system.”
Defining mindfulness
Bisram said she understands that there is some confusion and misunderstanding about what mindfulness means.
“Mindfulness is about providing tools that help people to cultivate awareness,” she said. “That, in turn, helps to cultivate everything from skills and stress management, self-regulation, empathy, compassion and focused attention.”
Bisram said for young people, mindfulness tends to be related to their ability and their readiness to learn to deal with their emotions. She said that the term most people are familiar with is emotional intelligence, but mindfulness goes beyond that.
“At the foundational level, it’s really building an awareness of your own experience in relation to your ‘self ’ and your thoughts,” she said. “It’s about dealing with the things that arise in you because of all of your experiences, which are ultimately happening within us. It’s also an awareness of how we feel and about our interactions with others and with the world.
Fundamentally, it’s about learning how to deal with life in general.”
Bisram said that at this point, there’s a lot of emphasis on dealing with stress, because of the pace of society, as well as the over-exposure of so many kinds to stimuli. Then, there are the obvious tragedies and events that can cause emotional trauma. Without proper training, people go into a reactionary mode, which can cause a lot of stress, she said.
“We are built to often go into that fight or flight response, even when we’re not in an emergency-type situation,” Bisram said. “What happens is that, if we haven’t prepared ourselves from a young age how to be in healthy relationships and to regulate our reactions, then that can cause problems for us.”
She also said that mindfulness helps with being able to bounce back from a stressor. If people are not able to come back from that, it can become chronic.
“With young people, we teach them the skills which help them to be able to pay attention, to
quiet the mind and to notice what they’re experiencing and how to deal with that,” she said.
Mindfulness practice helps young people in several ways, depending on the type of practices they do, Bisram said. There are two main directions that mindfulness is approached for youth.
“There is focused awareness and attention practice, which really helps us to cultivate the ability to come back to an anchor ‘place’ or to pay attention,” she said. “That practice is really just about training the brain to choose what you focus on.
“There’s another skill, which is basically the opposite of focused attention practice,” she said. “It’s about broadening or opening attention, where the goal is expansion. The goal is to create an awareness in the way where you can choose what you focus on. This awareness also helps you to catch even the emotion or the thought rising in you or even the thought arising in you. That’s what we call self-regulation.”
Bisram said that the expansive
method of mindfulness impacts children’s ability to relate interpersonally in a way so that there are fewer triggers for them. Then, for instance, there’s not going to be as much bullying happening in or out of schools.
Teaching mindfulness to teachers
One efficient way that mindfulness training is spread in classrooms is by teaching the teachers themselves.
“When we do teacher training, we always start with teaching them as if they’re going to have their own practice,” Bisram said. “So if the teachers themselves are never able to teach mindfulness in the classroom, they at least are able to be a model of that level of awareness. And it’s contagious being around people who are very ‘present’ in their life.”
She said that what they find in testimonials from teachers is that once they’ve learned a mindfulness
technique, they’re able to have a more creative way of working with children once they misbehave. That way, the teachers are not as stressed when they’re in the classroom and they’re able to really give more to the students.”
Nerissa Street, an interactive communications teacher in Broward, said she is a big believer in the efforts of the school system to bring mindfulness to the students.
“I have some space within my class time to use the techniques of mindfulness to help the students become more self-aware, and to have the capacity to deal with the normal educational frustrations that happen in high school,” she said.
As a teacher, Street said that she appreciates the way that the Broward School Board partnered with the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in training teachers who were interested in mindfulness. They didn’t make it mandatory, but they did make it available to
all of the teachers.
“Teacher training in mindfulness often leads to one technique of asking students to check in with how they’re feeling after we do a particularly rigorous lesson,” she said. “There’s a lot of science that validates incorporating ‘brain breaks’ into academics. It helps assist students to be more resilient, and to have more stamina for the lesson.”
Street said that she likes incorporating tools like having a “mindful moment” for the students, which is actually something that is a district-wide practice. Her mindful moment for students happens at the beginning of the day, as the students come in and settle into the class. Basically, she gives a bit of time to sit silently and reflect, to calm down and center themselves.
“Maybe they ran directly from breakfast, or the bus might have been late,” she said. “Maybe they forgot their student ID. What’s really great about giving them silent time, is that if the student has some sort of practice, whether it’s religious or secular, it gives a space for that as well.”
Street looks at mindfulness in the classroom as a way of “checking in.” She said they’re encouraged to ask themselves if they’re OK, or if they might be frustrated at something that didn’t go well.
“I just want them to examine what could be going on internally,” she said. “Then I want them to give themselves some space to clear that feeling or emotion so that they can be prepared for the day.”
Other than the classroom, Street runs a regular mindfulness session on Sundays for people to connect or reconnect with themselves on the beach. On one day, dozens of adults and some youth gathered at Dania Beach where Street guided them through conversation and mindful moments. The time there was capped off with participants gathered in a circle together in the ocean to share connections and thoughts about what’s going on in their lives.
The ongoing beach event is part of Street’s philosophy that it’s important to have mindfulness inside institutional settings as well as in their daily lives.
Children Services Council adopts mindfulness
The core mission of the Children’s Services Council is to provide leadership, advocacy and the resources necessary to “enhance the lives of the children of Broward County and empower them to become responsible, productive adults through collaborative planning and funding of a continuum of quality care.” When it comes to supporting the direction of mindfulness for youth they serve, the council has gone all in with the support.
Cindy Arenberg Seltzer, president and CEO of CSC Broward, said that ever since the nonprofit started working with mindfulness training several years ago to support youth, they have even adopted it within their own organization as well.
“We had been dipping our toe into the mindfulness world through a partnership with Knellee Bisram from AHAM Education around 2017,” she said. “Then after the shooting in Parkland, we were really looking for ways to help address the trauma of the students and their families.”
Seltzer points out that mindfulness training works with all socio-economic levels as well as all races and genders. This way, it’s not just for students who come from families with resources. It’s also a culturally neutral practice that works for students of any background.
“I went through the training and thought it was phenomenal,” Seltzer said. “We started out by training
people to become trainers to run groups. So the way that works is a five-day very intensive introduction and then a second fiveday intensive where you’re practicing running groups.”
Seltzer said she lives in Parkland and has experienced some of the vicarious trauma from the tragedy in 2018. She said the mindfulness training has been transformative for her.
Since the CSC doesn’t work directly in the classrooms, Seltzer said that they have been working to get mindfulness training deployed in after-school programs, especially those for middle school and high school students. She said they also work with elementary schools where they feel they can make use of it.
“We fund about 150 programs throughout the county,” Seltzer said. “Throughout our whole panoply of services, as well as trauma services, we have been training people on mindfulness who can run groups and deploy them to run groups in different nonprofits with young people.”
Seltzer pointed out that, although mindfulness is not a magic bullet, it is a good tool. It’s not just for the therapists to have but for an individual to use for themselves.
“When people feel out of control, and everything is random, that heightens your anxiety,” she said. “So knowing that you have the capability of doing something that you don’t need anybody else for, and that it’s completely under your own control, is empowering.
“You can use it anytime, in the middle of a class, as you’re walking or whenever,” Seltzer said. “You don’t need any equipment, except your own breath and your own brain. It’s a valuable gift for a young person to have.”
A parent’s perspective
Idelma Quintana is a parent of Ian, a 19-year-old in Hollywood who has been through mindfulness training. She has seen the positive changes that have happened for him.
“One of the things that I think is really fascinating about being a parent is that I learn lessons from my child every day,” Quintana said. “I see how he responds to stress in ways that are very similar to how we as parents respond to stress. It makes me really try to focus on myself as a role model.”
Quintana said that, during the last two-and-ahalf years, Ian was mostly at home because of COVID. Like a lot of kids, he was pretty much stuck in his room with the computer. Quintana said the experience did a number on him socially and emotionally being isolated like that.
“My husband and I were naturally stressed during that time as well,” she said. “For myself, I had to decide what I can do to figure out how to manage my stress, because I knew for sure that if I don’t develop some new practices that I was going to get sick.”
Quintana started out seeking a way to manage her own stress and she found out through her son’s teacher, Nerissa Street, that there was a group meeting at the beach that focused on mindfulness.
Quintana said she started attending the group to take care of her own health. Then she started noticing that it was making a big difference.
“I saw that in photos, I looked more rested,” she said. “I didn’t have big circles under my eyes and my physical appearance started to change. My son had a crisis of anxiety of his own, so I started bringing him with me to the beach group. Now, Ian and I go together most Sundays and practice mindfulness together.”
Quintana said that her son has been affected by the practice.
“Now he’s very open, and unashamed about his emotional experience,” she said. “That is different, since teenagers often have trouble doing that. They’re generally afraid of speaking about their emotions. Whenever he’s anxious, I can just remind him to take deep belly breaths and he knows exactly what that means. It gives me a tool to help him when they see him kind of spiraling into anxiety.”
For more about the practice of mindfulness, visit cmbm.org.