Writing, reading, math and mindfulness? That last subject is , as more young students in the United States , meaning focusing on paying attention to the present moment without judgment.

At Digital Pioneers Academy, the city’s first computer science-focused middle school, founder and principal Mashea Ashton recognized the toll the pandemic, hybrid learning and police brutality were taking on educators and the school’s predominantly Black and Latino students.

Beginning last September, through a partnership with , staff and teachers were encouraged to set personal goals, listen to their bodies and use deep breathing and meditation techniques to adapt to the stresses of the year. About half of the school’s staff also received individual, virtual coaching twice monthly.

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Each team member was paired with one class for the semester to build trust. Jacqueline Baron, one of the school’s social workers, said that having the key monthly lessons with a range of adults — beyond ���ٳܻ��Գٲ�’ usual teachers — enabled more staff-student relationships.

Each day at the academy began with a “mood meter” check-in, where students shared how they were feeling with words or colors. The meter gave teachers a moment to gauge ���ٳܻ��Գٲ�’ mental health that day and check in with specific students as needed, Baron said.

They learned and used deep breathing exercises, like stretching or counting, drawing, music and yoga to cope with stress, and talked through scenarios, like what to do to support a friend who isn’t logging into online school. Before last semester’s first math exam, they focused on managing anxiety for test taking.

“They already possess many of the tools that they need to be successful,” Baron said. “I think that the tools just need to be unlocked and built upon in practice.”

The homeroom advisory also offered time for students to talk freely about what current events might be weighing on their minds, and what it means to be a racial minority in America.

The conversations, Ashton said, encouraged scholars to “respect their identity, respect their culture, to be proud of who we are and who they will become — but also understand that the world is changing, and that they are impacted by what’s happening around them. We want them to ask questions, we want them to be curious, we want them to be innovative, and not feel victim.”

For rising eighth-grader Leila Graham, it was the first year she’d tried mindfulness exercises. She said she’s now made deep breathing a habit, something she can turn to in stressful or uncomfortable situations.

“It let me know that even though we are suffering, that they still cared about how we were affected by the pandemic,” she said. “Some people don’t have the opportunity to talk about their feelings at home that they would at school.”

Her mother, Lisa, said she and her daughter have always had open communication, but this year, conversations about her well-being have been different; Leila now has vocabulary to express herself more accurately.

“I just love that my daughter gets to experience this at such a young age — she doesn’t have to wait until she’s in her 30s, like me, in order to be able to get introduced to it,” Lisa Graham said.

This fall, Digital Pioneers Academy will enroll over 480 students in grades 6 through 9, and 40 percent of sixth-graders have siblings in upper grades. At a time when schools face historic declines in enrollment, the school is nearing full capacity, at about 90 percent of its enrollment goal for lower grades, and with a wait list for ninth grade.

Attendance averaged around 93 percent from the 2020-21 school year, . The mindfulness model, Ashton said, was key to keeping the community together and engaged.

Staff satisfaction increased from 80 percent at the end of 2020 to 95 percent at the end of this school year, and 97 percent of staff agreed to return for 2021-22. Just 56 percent returned after the first pandemic year.

Tarneil Miller, dean of social emotional learning, told The 74 that the 2020 school year was somewhat of a collective “whole year of bad days” for educators nationwide.

He said the trauma, emotion and fear of recent months needed to be acknowledged during the school day. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot, for instance, took place a few blocks away from the school.

“It’s a lot for us as adults. So you have to also think about scholars as well — they’re seeing the same thing we’re seeing,” Miller said. “Why not have this in place, to give them that space to at least feel like they’re seen, at the bare minimum. And to have something in place that gives them a moment to have both feet on the ground.”

Miller has kept practicing some of the mindfulness techniques he’s learned over the last year for his own well-being, including a daily reflection on what went well, what happened and how he can be better the next day. He also visualizes clearing his head space — comparing closing iPhone apps running in the background to scenarios or situations that may overwhelm him or cause anxiety.

The school will continue monthly mindfulness lessons in advisory periods in the 2021-22 academic year, set to begin Aug. 30, with most students returning in person. Staff already reconnected with a mindfulness coach in summer professional development sessions.

Baron said that the school is also considering ways to support students in smaller groups focused on issues such as social skills, grief and loss. Washington, D.C. ‘s 7th and 8th wards, where many students live, were among the neighborhoods hit hardest by the pandemic. As of February, they accounted for .

Some staff sessions have supported the school’s team in managing transferred and individual trauma. Like students, the academy’s staff are encouraged to use wellness tools, like small breaks, breathing, and psychological, emotional and physical self-assessments.

“That’s not selfish — to prioritize ourselves, too — because in order to do the work that we do, we have to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves,” Baron said.

Take mindfulness. Is it different from meditation? Is it appropriate for young children? Is it important for young children? Let’s start with ZERO TO THREE’s : intentional and non-judgmental present-moment awareness.

According to Maria Gehl, ZERO TO THREE’s project director of Mindfulness in Early Childhood, the benefits are clear for teachers and caregivers. “When adults are self-aware,” she says, “they are better at helping kids develop their social and emotional learning skills.”

For very young children, mindfulness always starts with the adults. In the pre-K classroom, there are also ways to engage children directly.

Here are six resources for educators who want to usher pre-K learners into the world of mindfulness.

1.  In this September 2020 Washington Post article, Brooklyn mom Steph Fairyington chronicles her efforts to quell her 4-year-old daughter’s anxiety. She reads by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, consults psychologist Phyllis Cohen and tries Scott L. Rogers’s . Fairyington arrives at a toddler-appropriate practice that “brings levity to our relationship and household that feels especially critical and urgent during this difficult and tender time.”

2. Words of Wisdom. This program of the David Lynch Foundation modifies Transcendental Meditation (TM) for younger practitioners. (TM works best for those 10 years and up; Words of Wisdom is for any child old enough to keep a secret—that is, the mantra that a meditator silently repeats.) While TM is traditionally practiced with eyes closed, Words of Wonder participants keep their eyes opened; they can also walk around or perform simple tasks while meditating.

Rena Boone of the David Lynch Foundation recalls how TM changed her life when she was a public schoolteacher in Long Beach, Cal., in the 1970s. Today, she partners with schools in Washington D.C. to bring mindfulness into the classroom. During the pandemic, they continue to work with educators and students. “People are looking for ways to heal this trauma and stress,” she says. More research into Words of Wisdom is called for, but are promising.

3. . The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created this resource. It works like this: twice a week for 20 minutes, children between 4 and 6 discover stories and practices for paying attention, regulating their emotions and cultivating kindness. that kids who had participated in the Kindness Curriculum earn higher marks in academic performance measures and show greater improvements in self-regulation and other measures than kids who had not.

4. writes and speaks about the “ABCs of Attention, Balance and Compassion.” She has created age-appropriate exercises, songs, games, and fables for children as young as four years. Her involves the whole family in mindfulness.

5. . This 30-lesson plan incorporates printable puppets to teach children between 2 and 6 years old about using their breath, along with movement, play and sensory activities. Helen Maffini, co-author of (2008), created the curriculum, which is used in schools across Asia.

6. . This simple curriculum of mindfulness exercises was developed for kids age 3-8 and their parents and teachers. It starts with learning about the brain and proceeds to skills of focusing and calming. (.) A key element of this program is “preparing yourself first” through breathing exercises, movement and paying attention to your five senses.

“One of the things that happens in human development,” Davidson says, “is that the prefrontal cortex matures as we get older. It’s an important part of the brain that enables us to do what psychologists call mental time travel, where we can anticipate the future and reflect on the past. But in preschoolers, where the prefrontal cortex is not so developed, they’re not worrying about tomorrow. Their future is maybe three minutes from now.”

Teaching children mindfulness is easy, he says, but must be done in an age-appropriate way that looks very different from how meditation practices are typically taught to adults. One strategy he recommends for preschoolers is to practice belly breathing where the children lie on their backs and a little stone or stuffed animal is placed on their tummies. They’re asked to simply observe the stuffed animal or stone moving up and down as they breathe for a minute or two.

“They are really easily able to do that,” Davidson says, “and they get it immediately.”

Another technique is to have the children sit and listen keenly while the instructor rings a bell or chime, and to raise their hands when they can no longer hear the sound.

“You can be in a classroom with 20 kids, and the quietness and stillness are palpable during that time. As soon as they stop hearing the sound, they start jumping up and waving their hands. But for at least that 10 or 15 seconds, they can really taste what stillness is like, and they love it. They frequently will ask for it because at a non-conceptual, visceral level, they know that it’s beneficial.”

Once a child has “tasted the stillness,” Davidson says, they can return to it again and again and it becomes a useful strategy in learning their own self-regulation. Mindfulness isn’t just a way to get fidgety little ones to be quiet for a while; it serves as a means for them to be in charge of themselves — to learn to calm themselves and modulate their thoughts, behavior and emotional responses to their environment — skills that studies have shown to be robust predictors of success in multiple major life outcomes, from physical wellness and financial success to the likelihood of avoiding substance abuse or engaging in antisocial behavior.

“A large body of longitudinal data show that kids who have a better capacity for self-regulation at age 4 or 5 do better in life. If we can teach those skills early in life — and we can — they will have multiplicative effects as the children develop.”

Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the founder and director of the . He came to the topic of mindfulness and the study of healthy minds by way of a question he couldn’t answer: Why are some people vulnerable and some resilient? He was already a neuroscientist in 1992 when he first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with whom he is now a close associate and friend, who issued a challenge that altered the direction of Davidson’s career and led to his groundbreaking investigation of emotion and the brain, for which he is now recognized as a global authority.

“You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to investigate anxiety, fear and depression,” the Dalai Lama said. “Why can’t you use those tools to study kindness and compassion, to study the positive qualities of life?” Davidson says that simple challenge was a wakeup call that led him to focus on well-being and healthy qualities of mind and ultimately to the establishment of the Center for Healthy Minds. More recently, the Center has launched a “Kindness Curriculum” aimed at promoting social, emotional and academic skills among preschoolers.

It all starts with mindfulness, which is foundational in answering Davidson’s question about resilience. He defines resilience as the rapidity with which one recovers from adversity. To paraphrase the bumper sticker, he says, “stuff happens.” No one can lead a life completely buffered from adversity. Resilience is about how we bounce back from the stuff.

“And it turns out that the simple skills of mindful awareness can help us return back to that baseline more quickly. We can measure this objectively — it’s not based on self-reporting but actually measured in behavior and physiology, and in the brain. We have shown that through the increased practice of simple mindful awareness techniques you can actually learn to become more resilient and to recover more quickly from adversity.”

“This is not only at the core of our psychological well-being, but our physical health as well. Some of those systems that need to recover are the stress biology systems; for example, the stress hormone cortisol. Researchers have measured cortisol levels following an acute stressor and know that people differ dramatically in how quickly they come back to baseline. This has tremendous applications for physical health because when cortisol remains elevated beyond the point where it is serving a function, it can have really deleterious effects on the brain and the body.”

Developing an acquaintance with mindful awareness, Davidson says, is one of the “Four Pillars of Well-being” that the Center has identified. The next, which builds on mindfulness, is connection, the qualities that promote healthy social relationships such as kindness, compassion, appreciation and gratitude. The third and fourth pillar are insight and a sense of purpose, but Davidson says those really begin to take on significance in the early teen years. Kindness and connection start very early.

“We have done randomized, controlled trials on simple practices designed to cultivate kindness and compassion in both kids and adults and the practices translate into real behavior,” he says. “In one trial we did with preschool children with our Kindness Curriculum, we found that compared to a randomized control group, the kids who received our curriculum behaved more altruistically on a hard-nosed measure of altruistic sharing compared to their classmates who received a standard curriculum. These and other findings indicate that with practice kindness can be learned, which has led us to a simple but very radical conclusion, which is that characteristics like kindness — and well-being more generally — should be regarded as skills.”

The good news in this finding is that skills, unlike qualities which are innate, can be taught, practiced and learned.

“We all have various kinds of early predispositions, genetic and environmental, and have a starting place. But these characteristics can be further nurtured and developed. The way we now think about kindness and compassion is very much like the way scientists think about language. We all come into the world with a biological propensity for language, but we know that if we’re not raised in a normal, linguistic community, language won’t develop normally.

“Similarly, kindness and compassion are part of what it means to be human, and there are good data showing that the vast majority of young infants, when given a choice, behave in a prosocial, altruistic way.”

The default response for humans is to help others, not to be selfish, he says. But in order for those seeds to grow, they have to be intentionally cultivated. And they must be, he says. As the news of the day continues to underscore, humans have to learn to get along more cooperatively and compassionately: The flourishing of humanity and the planet are at stake.

It all begins with mindful awareness, and if you want to get started learning on your own, it’s easy. Just put a stuffed animal on your belly and breathe.