School Leadership and Being Mindful About Mindfulness.

In this series, I have explored the SEARCH framework for well-being designed for schools (Waters and Loton, 2019) in conjunction with school leadership. This week we focus on the "A" in the SEARCH framework for well-being, the attention and awareness pathway to well-being and our ability to pay attention to both our inner and outer worlds.

A study on the well-being of Irish primary principals revealed low dispositional mindfulness during the workday, especially awareness of physical and emotional sensations. Additionally, 97.7% of them struggled to be present when they returned home (McHugh, 2023). This struggle to stay present is echoed in several other papers.

Whilst I know from my own experience that I often came home from my school leadership position and engaged in tasks mindlessly, it was often because my mind was incredibly full, fit to bursting full - but full of school stuff not present-moment stuff.

Interestingly, mindfulness and resilience programs for school leaders, though beneficial, were not always well-received (Doyle Fosco et al., 2023). Similarly, a large-scale trial of mindfulness training for students showed no improvement in well-being compared to usual social and emotional teaching, and in some cases, well-being even declined (Montero-Marin et al., 2022).

However, this doesn’t mean we should discard mindfulness and its benefits which can include increased optimism, calmness, self-awareness and general well-being for students, and increased attendance to self-care, improved relationships and leadership skills for school leaders (Waters and Loton, 2019,  Mahfouz, 2018). A common theme missing from these interventions was autonomy and agency. In the school leaders' study, participants were requested to join a set programme, and the student study concluded that well-being interventions should involve students in the design process.

It has taken experimentation and reflection to discover what mindfulness strategies work for me. During Covid, I tried various meditation tracks but soon dropped those beginning with "this will be a perfect day"—with staff shortages and class closures, a perfect day was unlikely!  But I know that some people find benefit in meditation with affirmations.  I also find group mindfulness sessions difficult, especially online but many people find being in a group helps them step into mindfulness with more ease.

My initial view of mindfulness was narrow, focusing only on meditation. I like Dr. Ryan Niemiec’s question - ‘how big is your mindfulness?’ - helping us think about how we can bring mindfulness into more moments of daily life.

This all points to the need for a mindful approach to mindfulness - an approach that considers individual preferences and explores a broad scope of possibilities for staff and students if introduced at school level but also for our individual practice.

I leave you with a variation of Dr. Ryan Niemiec’s question - how can you make your mindfulness a little bit bigger?

Doyle Fosco, S. L., Schussler, D. L., & Jennings, P. A. (2023). Acceptability of a mindfulness-based professional development program to support educational leader well-being. Mindfulness, 14(8), 1951–1966. APA PsycInfo.

Mahfouz, J. (2018). Mindfulness training for school administrators: effects on well-being and leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 56(6), 602–619. Scopus.

McHugh, R. (2023). A six-component conceptualization of the psychosocial well-being of school leaders: devising a framework of occupational well-being for Irish primary principals. International Journal of Leadership in Education. Scopus.

Montero-Marin, J., Allwood, M., Ball, S., Crane, C., Wilde, K. D., Hinze, V., Jones, B., Lord, L., Nuthall, E., Raja, A., Taylor, L., Tudor, K., Team, M., Blakemore, S.-J., Byford, S., Dalgleish, T., Ford, T., Greenberg, M. T., Ukoumunne, O. C., … Kuyken, W. (2022). School-based mindfulness training in early adolescence: what works, for whom and how in the MYRIAD trial? Evidence-Based Mental Health, 25(3), 117–124.

Mindfulness + Strengths Webinar - YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved May 22, 2024,

Waters, L., & Loton, D. (2019). SEARCH: A Meta-Framework and Review of the Field of Positive Education. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 4(1), 1–46.