Short-Term & Long-Term Benefits for Enhancing Educator & Student Prosocial Behavior, Well-being, & Resilience Through Mindfulness-Based Social and Emotional Learning Programs in Schools

Project Description: This research is designed to address a lacuna in the field by examining the effectiveness of two universal mindfulness-based social and emotional learning (MBSEL) classroom programs that focus on promoting social, emotional, and cognitive competence and positive classroom environments for early adolescent students and their teachers. Specifically, we will test the effectiveness of an MBSEL program for students and an MBSEL program for teachers, both singularly (MBSEL for teachers) and in combination (educator and students) and examine short-term and long-term outcomes on student and teacher behaviors. The study represents a critical advance in the field of education by exploring the short-term and long-term effects of two programs, singularly and in combination, and will be the first to explore student and teacher outcomes on multiple social, emotional, cognitive, motivational, behavioral, and classroom systems via multiple methods. The focus of the study is on early adolescence - a distinctive time period in which individuals undergo important developmental changes and critical developmental transitions occur.

Project Significance: The escalating mental health crisis in our children and youth has ignited a call to action for finding effective preventive programs that can deter mental health problems before they begin. Indeed, the crisis of children's mental health and rising disparities in educational outcomes has risen to the forefront of national consciousness with the release of the most recent U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory in December 2021. The Advisory calls attention to the rising mental health issues of young people and disparities across subpopulations in the U.S. It then outlines a whole-society approach for tackling the problem and includes a set of recommendations designed to prevent these challenges and bolster children's well-being. One of the primary recommendations outlined is to "support the mental health of children and youth in educational, community, and childcare settings," which involves, "creating positive, safe, and affirming educational environments" and "expanding programming that promotes healthy development (such as social and emotional learning)". To support the well-being and mental health of students, the Advisory also encourages policymakers and schools to undertake efforts designed to promote the "mental health of all school personnel". The Advisory proports that these efforts will directly benefit school personnel, while at the same time, help to foster teachers' social and emotional competencies (SECs), including empathy and compassion-competencies that are needed to create positive learning environments that can promote student well-being and healthy development. Furthermore, other policy makers and advocacy groups in the U.S. have called for the increased training of teachers in SEL so that teachers are better equipped to support the development of students' well-being.

The present study is novel in several ways. First, it represents an initial study to examine the effectiveness an MBSEL education program on a wide corpus of both teacher and student level outcomes. That is, it will examine if a program that is directed to cultivating teacher well-being and prosociality can have collateral benefits for students. Second, it is the first attempt to explore the "value - added" of integrating an MBSEL program for teachers with an already well-established and well-researched MBSEL program for students. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of MBSEL programs on students' well-being, cognitive control, and prosocial behaviors, yet no research to date has examined the extent to which there are additional benefits to teachers and students if teachers also receive an MBSEL program for themselves before they implement a program for students. Third, the study will utilize a longitudinal design to examine the durability of the effects of the two programs, both singularly and jointly after the programs have ended.

The investigators see joint efforts geared towards supporting the well-being and social and emotional competencies of both teachers and students as an effective approach to address the rising trends in mental health challenges and to build optimal learning environments for students to develop, thrive and feel fully included. However, a paucity of research has explored how teachers impact the development of students' social and emotional competencies nor has it explored how teachers' own social and emotional competencies impact that of students. Furthermore, little research has tested the impacts of programming designed to develop teacher social and emotional competencies on student outcomes and/or whether these teachers are more capable of creating inclusive classroom environments that foster equitable educational outcomes. Failure to understand the role of teachers in cultivating students' social and emotional competencies and the lack of insight on how best to support teachers' own well-being and social and emotional competence has led to a gap in knowledge regarding whether and how best to promote students' social and emotional competencies and a classroom climate that supports the prosocial behavior, mental health and well-being of students.

Study Aims and Conceptual Framework The goal of this study is to evaluate the single and joint effects of a universal MBSEL program for early adolescent students, and a companion program for teachers on multiple individual and contextual outcomes and to examine both the short-term and long-term effects of these interventions. In conceptualizing and designing this study, the investigators draw from a developmental systems perspective that "recognizes that human development is a bi-directional, individual ↔ context relational process" in which "there are multiple levels of organization within the individual (e.g., motivation, and cognitive abilities) that influence one's development course," and "different levels of organization within the social ecology (e.g., families, schools, and neighborhoods) that contribute to development".