Matthew Brensilver

Matthew Brensilver, JoAnna Hardy and Oren Jay Sofer provide a powerful guide to help teachers master the essential competencies needed to successfully share mindfulness practices with teens and adolescents. Incorporating anecdotes from actual teaching, they blend the latest scientific research with innovative, original techniques for making the practices accessible and interesting to this age group. This text is an indispensable handbook for mindfulness instruction in its own right, and a robust companion volume for teachers using The Mindful Schools Curriculum for Adolescents.

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 twenty five 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 summarising 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.