The Mindful Schools Curriculum for Adolescents: Tools for Developing Awareness

Copublished with Mindful Schools

A flexible set of lessons tailored to the developmental needs of adolescents, based on research in behavioral science.

Arguably, no student population stands to gain more from mindfulness practice― with its power to enhance emotion regulation, attention stability, and self- awareness― than students between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In this comprehensive curriculum developed at Mindful Schools, Oren Jay Sofer and Matthew Brensilver provide  twentyfive brief (twenty- to- thirty- minute) lessons that supply a framework for mindfulness instruction that can be expanded or condensed according to the needs of students. Each lesson includes a “science supplement” with research findings relevant to the practice, and handouts summarizing key aspects of the lesson that can be distributed to students.

Users of the curriculum may also be interested in the instructional resource written from a similar perspective by these authors with JoAnna Hardy: Teaching Mindfulness to Empower Adolescents.

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Oren Jay Sofer leads retreats and workshops on meditation and communication throughout the United States. A member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, he holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University and is a Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner for the healing of trauma.

Matthew Brensilver, MSW, PhD, is a member of the Teachers Council and Guiding Teachers Executive Committee at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He previously served as Program Director for Mindful Schools and for more than a decade, was a core teacher at Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He lectures at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center about the intersections between mindfulness and mental health and teaches retreats nationally. Before committing to teaching meditation full-time, he spent years doing research on addiction pharmacotherapy at the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine and is interested in the unfolding dialogue between meditation and science.