Welcome to the Website for the Mindful Teacher Project at Boston College

Please note: this site is now under construction. At this phase the site is intended to serve the following three primary audiences:

1) Teachers who are interested in enhancing their mindfulness of key teaching and learning issues in their classroom to improve pupil learning, teachers' sense of inner fulfillment in their vocations, and school and community climate;

2) Teachers who are exploring various approaches related to various spiritual understandings of mindfulness, including Buddhist approaches enhanced with formal meditation practices; Jesuit and Catholic conceptualizations of attentiveness, devotion, and discernment; and other religious and philosophical world-views promoting cross-cultural reconciliation and non-violent conflict resolution; and

3) Educational leaders and social activists seeking alternative approaches to orthodox efforts at school reform that will attend to the cura personalis (care of the person) and a broader humanistic philosophy of education.

What is the Mindful Teacher Project?

The Mindful Teacher is a three year workshop and support network for Boston Public School teachers funded by a grant from the Boston Collaborative Fellows Program at Boston College . The project leaders are Liz MacDonald of Garfield Elementary School and Dennis Shirley of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College . Liz and Dennis have been collaborating since 2001 with support from a $7 million United States Department of Education Teacher Quality Grant and a $5 million Carnegie-funded “Teachers for a New Era” grant.

What are Mindful Teacher project concepts and goals?

Scholars use a variety of terms to describe the “overwork” and “intensification” that characterizes urban public school teaching in the United States today. The Mindful Teacher is predicated on the observation that the pressures on classroom teachers have become so great that few teachers are able to find time for sustained reflection and modification of one's teaching in the company of one's peers. As a consequence, more than fifty percent of beginning urban teachers leave teaching in the first five years—a tragedy of inordinate dimensions when we consider that research indicates that experienced teachers generally help their pupils to learn at higher levels than novices.

To address this problem of retention, the Mindful Teacher provides workshop settings in which Boston Public School teachers explore all of the complicated issues of urban education in a supportive community of inquiry and practice. Workshops enable participants to share the joys and challenges they encounter while teaching and to chart their own personal development as they shape project goals and outcomes. Along the way, teachers keep journals, pilot new teaching practices, and study and respond to workshop reading materials. Teachers will also contribute to co-authored scholarship on mindful teaching.