Mindful qualities of teaching: A collaborative analysis of teachers’ recollections of classroom interactions

Teaching is a stressful profession that requires extensive social-emotional competence. Interventions that promote mindfulness offer one promising approach to supporting teacher social-emotional competence, while improving teacher well-being. However, we still have a limited understanding of how mindfulness operates within teachers, in their thoughts and experiences of classroom interactions. That is, we have little understanding of mindful teaching. This is due in part to challenges that coming with trying to “peek into the mind.” In this study, we aim to “peek into the mind” of teachers through analysis of same-day teacher written recollections of classroom interactions. With a panel of contemplative practitioners with teaching experience, we collaboratively identify evidence and counter-evidence of mindfulness in these recollections, deriving insights on the nature of mindful teaching. Through inductive analysis, we identified eight mindful qualities: self-awareness, observation, presence, compassion, discernment, responsivity, wisdom, and curiosity. We illuminate how evidence of the presence – and equally importantly – the absence of each of these qualities within a given moment may be reflected in teacher recollections of their internal experience. We close with implications for mindfulness trainings to promote teacher social-emotional competence and for measure development.