Praise for the book!
The Mindful Teacher’s Toolkit is full of engaging classroom activities, ideas and practices but it is much more than a simple toolkit; it provides a profound rationale for why this work is needed in the world. Awareness-based wellbeing is about raising consciousness for all - teachers, students, parents and school leadership - and this book is a highly accessible guide to doing just that. This ‘Toolkit’ is a real gift for any educator interested in finding practical approaches to the promotion of wellbeing and positive mental health across the whole school community.
Judson Brewer MD PhD
New York Times Bestselling Author of Unwinding Anxiety and The Craving Mind
The Mindful Teacher's Toolkit is an essential resource for mindful educators. It's chock-full of hard won insights, and there's love and rigor in every page, practice, and lesson. Given the adversity so many are facing, this is a book that's made for the moment.
David Treleaven, PhD
Author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing
At a time when we are all more distracted than ever, Burke and Hawkins skillfully communicate how the combination of Mindful Awareness Training (MAT) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) create the foundation for Awareness-based Wellbeing (ABW). This book is a treasure trove of resources for a whole span of ages--everyone can find a relevant and useful practice and activity in this book. This invaluable resource nurtures the mind as well as the heart.
Meena Srinivasan
Author of SEL Every Day: Integrating Social and Emotional Learning with Instruction in Secondary Classrooms (Norton, 2019) & Teach Breathe Learn: Mindfulness In and Out of the Classroom (Parallax Press, 2014)
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Kevin Hawkins and Amy Burke, longstanding leaders in the global mindfulness movement, share the best of their wisdom in ways that are both practical and inspirational. This book is a treasure for educators and students alike.
Dr. Chris Willard, faculty at Harvard Medical School, author of Alphabreaths
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Drawing on the latest research and at the leading edge of best practice, The Mindful Teacher's Toolkit is a fantastic resource for all educators and anybody working with children and young people. It brings together a wide variety of practical activities as well as providing a deep rationale for the importance of this work. Thoroughly recommended!
Michael Bready, Founder & Managing Director, Youth Mindfulness
I applaud Amy Burke and Kevin Hawkins for undertaking the writing of such a comprehensive mindfulness-based toolkit for PreK-12 educators. Written with the educators’ needs in mind, the wide-ranging selection of SEL activities, mindful awareness practices and teaching tips offered have the potential to change student well-being during these challenging times.
Theo Koffler, Founder Mindfulness Without Borders
There is much going on in the world in the name of education that has hardly anything to do with education. Much too is going on in the world in the realm of teaching that is all but mindful. The result is the state of the world we are in today. But education is based on the principle of hope and of possibility.
Here is how.
Written by passionate educators who live out their deep beliefs about education, the role of teachers, and the consequences of mindfulness in teaching, The Mindful Teacher’s Toolkit fills a yawning gap in the most important mission in the world – teaching. Awareness-based well-being in schools, cultivated mindfully and pursued intentionally, can restore integrity to teaching and help discover meaning in learning.
The Mindful Teacher’s Toolkit combines uplifting vision with practical pathways to guide the process of teaching to make it purposeful and fulfilling both to the giver as well as receiver of the experience called learning.
I commend the distinguished writers for their valuable contribution to restoring faith in this most important of public professions by being mindful, teaching mindfully, and teaching mindfulness as the basis of the teacher’s engagement.
Thakur S Powdyel
Former Minister of Education, Royal Government of Bhutan
The Mindful Teacher's Toolkit has arrived at the perfect time. It offers simple and accessible ways for educators to lower stress and anxiety for their students and themselves. The need for this book has never been greater, as we witness great upheaval in the world. Kevin and Amy offer a step by step guide for bringing mindful awareness into school, after-school and community environments to help children learn and thrive. They share that mindful awareness is foundational to creativity and peak performance, as well as to compassion and collaboration. This combination of skills would benefit every single child, and in fact, will help them address the challenges they will inevitably face with greater understanding and ease.
Laura Bakosh, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Inner Explorer
As educators themselves, Amy Burke and Kevin Hawkins, know what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. In The Mindful Teacher’s Toolkit they have drawn on the breadth and depth of their personal experience of leading social-emotional and mindfulness initiatives in schools to provide teachers with a comprehensive and highly practical classroom guide.
The authors understand the importance of teachers themselves embodying the qualities that they seek to develop in their students and underline the key message that shifting the focus of our school systems starts with the individual and gains momentum when supported by school leaders that understand the deep value of this work. Burke and Hawkins also address the broader context of this work and highlight the imbalance in how schools generally tend to develop the IQ but neglect EQ. This book contributes to redressing that imbalance through equipping teachers with practical ways of cultivating social and emotional aspects of learning.
Chris Ruane, Mindfulness and Wellness in Politics practitioner,
Former U.K. MP who is helping introduce Mindfulness to governments around the world
The Mindful Teacher's Toolkit is an essential resource for teacher's wishing to embed mindfulness and greater awareness into their school communities. Packed with wisdom and practical activities, this is a book you'll keep coming back to again and again.
Adrian Bethune, teacher, author and Education Policy Co-lead at The Mindfulness Initiative
This is a subtle and clever book. At the most obvious level, through its eye-catching title and early chapters, it meets the felt need of busy teachers to have at hand a treasure trove of mindfulness and awareness practices that they can use immediately with their classes, helpfully organised according to developmental levels and supported with teaching tips. But, written by highly thoughtful and experienced educators, this book is far more than that. Both gently and authoritatively it guides teachers into some of the most vital issues, complexities and nuances around mindfulness in schools. It is adamant about the primary need to start with the cultivation of the teacher’s own mindfulness, presence and awareness, without which mindfulness for students is a hollow vessel. It provides a grounded vision of the transformative potential of mindfulness within education, using relatable examples from practising teachers and educators to help schools to see clearly how they can start to expand the place of mindfulness from where it can often stick, as a marginalised one-off intervention to ‘fix’ mental health problems, and into a foundational role in the mainstream of school life.
Using copious real-life illustrations, it moves through the most obvious curriculum areas of social and emotional learning, sports and the arts into the potential for mindfulness fundamentally to shape the wellbeing, attitudes and ethos of the classroom and the whole school environment. Finally it addresses the role of mindfulness as key to urgently needed educational transformation to help address our current cultural and environmental challenges - reminding us, as my co-author Thich Nhat Hanh emphasises in our book ‘Happy Teachers Change the World , that ‘the way out is in’. Quietly dropping this book into our schools systems is likely to have a profound impact.
Katherine Weare, Co-lead for Education, the Mindfulness Initiative UK and Emeritus Professor, University of Southampton
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Kevin and Amy are leaders in this field so I was excited to see them author another book. Their books will set you up for success in teaching mindful awareness in schools with integrity. This one is jam-packed with activities for different ages and provides training session lesson plans for older age groups. The sections with teacher tips, implementation Q and A, case studies, and expert voices were full of insights from lots of experienced educators. Thank you for creating this resource for educators!
Tracy Heilers
Founder and Executive Director, Coalition of Schools Educating Mindfully (COSEM)
With many years of experience integrating mindfulness into education, Amy and Kevin
have created a wonderful resource for educators who are serious about creating
positive change in their schools. Taking a developmental perspective, they provide
invaluable teaching tips for teachers of all grades, with an emphasis on the importance of teachers needing their own practice. Finally, they provide a systems change perspective for how adults can work together to implement this school wide and create more caring and compassionate schools. A fantastic resource!
Christa Turksma
Co-Developer of the CARE program
Director of Training, Createforeducation.org
Not only is Kevin and Amy’s new book a natural and supportive progression from and complement to the first book - “Mindful Teachers, Mindful School : Improving Wellbeing in Teaching and Learning”, it is an invaluable companion and resource for mindful educator to invoke an essential life skill - mindful awareness - for future generations of our planet. The topical and age-specific practices and tips offered in the book are the cumulation of decades of teaching experiences, embodied personal mindfulness practice and, a labour of love. Though presented in the guise of a practical ‘teaching mindfulness toolkit’, it aims towards an important goal of building a wiser, more compassionate and sustainable society, which is “what really matters” in the 21st century, especially if we are to go on flourishing, or even surviving, as some may argue, as a species. I thoroughly rejoice in this wonderful contribution and gift from Kevin and Amy, and I wholeheartedly recommend this book to educators around the world, not the least to teachers in my country of residence, China.
Kevin Fong
Executive-Chairperson of the Mindfulness Professional Committee of the China Association for Life Care (CALC)
Founding Teacher of the ATINAT Institute of Mindfulness Training (AIMT)
Advisor to the Oxford Mindfulness Center
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I’m delighted to see this hugely practical book which contains a vast treasure trove of mindfulness-based activities to try with students across the whole age range. The helpful teaching tips together with references for extension activities and information on further training add to the value this book will bring to the classroom. I have no doubt it will be a well-thumbed addition to my mindfulness resources!
Amanda Bailey, Chief Operations and Finance Officer for Dixons Academy Trust
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This is an easy to read, user-friendly guide for parents, teachers, and coaches who work with kids of all ages. It offers easily replicated strategies that are age-appropriate, offering something to people of all ages, while the charts and graphs help readers make connections. The book can be used in many ways, from a guide for the uninitiated to guidelines for something like a mentoring program where older and younger kids practice together.
Joe George, Middle School Counsellor
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This is a great new book which is sure to be a wonderful resource for mindfulness practice in education. The thought-provoking introductory section had me step back and reflect on where we stand at our own school, and I will certainly be re-reading this as I consider, with colleagues, how we might move forward. The following sections are split up by educational level. As a secondary teacher, I focused on that which I am more familiar with. I fully agree with the authors that one needs to have a solid personal practice in place before taking this next step, so that one may answer some of the inevitable questions that will be asked by the more inquisitive students, as well as be comfortable doing these activities with them. I would even suggest going through them actively with a small group of like-minded colleagues first, to know what they feel like.The sections for Middle Years and Secondary have a suggested sequence of activities for anyone who wants to start on this path, but also with room for variation and adaptation that make this book a rich resource for anyone who is already familiar to some extent with the teaching of mindfulness. As such, I look forward to using it as a way to expand on my foundation of teaching mindfulness to young people. A very welcome book, both as introduction, and as expansion to an existing practice!
Olaf Kievit, PhD, Teacher of MYP Science, DP Chemistry, Physics, TOK, and DP Pastoral Leader