Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Practices in the School Setting: Practical Interventions for Children and Adolescents

This book offers specific, easy-to-implement mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) tools for practitioners to use in schools at an individual, group, or classroom-wide level.

With the increased focus on the emotional and behavioral health of children in the schools, there is a dearth of practical books that specifically address the use of ACT techniques in the school setting. Geared toward the practitioner and how they work with students, teachers, parents, and classrooms, this book introduces a contemporary approach to targeted intervention and discusses how these services can be provided using an MTSS model. These interventions have numerous benefits including increasing attention capacity, compassion, emotional regulation, and self-calming abilities, in addition to use as an intervention for anxiety, depression, and trauma related symptoms.

Graduate students and practitioners who work with children and adolescents such as school psychologists, child and adolescent clinical psychologists, and school counselors will find this book to be a novel resource of interventions for children in grades K–12, along with tools to support parents and teachers.

Melissa L. Holland, PhD is a professor in the School Psychology Program at California State University, Sacramento and is a practicing clinical psychologist.

Jessica L. Hawks, PhD is a clinical child and adolescent psychologist, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, and the Clinical Director of the Pediatric Mental Health Institute, Children’s Hospital Colorado.