MENTES SORRIDENTES (MS)
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I am a teacher because I was meant to be.
And for 24 years it has been quite a journey!
As a teenager I studied in a girls only school, but got kicked out for being a misfit.
In High school, a teacher inspired me to take Literature course and help kids that struggled as I did.
So, I became a teacher and took a Master in Literature, wrote and published children's books, a novel, some scientific papers, became a teacher trainer.
Later on, I worked with Special Need’s children and came up with a mindfulness program named Mentes Sorridentes, inspired by Smiling Mind in Australia. Founded Associação Mentes Sorridentes, was Global Teacher Prize finalist (2018), won Prémio Donativo Santander (2019), and was able to take MS program to more then 1000 kids, teachers, school staff and parents.
All this why? Because I got expelled from school one day…
MS is designed for primary and secondary aged children, can also support teacher wellbeing, developing healthy psychological behavior, through a set of mindfulness based tools. Foresees face-to-face workshops with trained facilitators who can demonstrate the ease of using meditation in the classroom, at home and in life. These workshops provide students, staff and parents with the tools to understand how to cope with emotions and feelings in a world that can be chaotic and overwhelming. This program results in a culture of caring, compassionate, and mature students, and provides schools with the skills and resources needed for an optimal learning environment.
Year 1trains school staff and focus in working with students outside the classroom, year 2 works inside classroom and engages students aged 15 years old or more to become mindfulness facilitators and perform peer mindfulness activities.
The project runs alongside with a strong scientific support and monitoring.
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To learn, students need to be cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally involved in school activities (Pereira, 2013), however, since mental health levels influence the successful academic transition and interfere with learning, success and academic performance (Chow, 2010), it is important to analyze how can school contribute to promote and increase the engagement and young people’s well-being.
Thus, it is important to go beyond academic and behavioral indicators of student’s engagement in school, to better understand the psychological and cognitive mechanisms that underlie them (Appleton et al., 2006).
According to World Health Organization (2018), half of all mental health problems, among which psychological disorders, start at around 14 years of age, worsening with age.
Mindfulness is considered an intentional training of the mind to focus attention through the observation of thoughts, emotions and sensations (Zylowska et al., 2008), showing benefits in cognition (Klingbeil et al., 2017), and “in psychological measures of stress, coping, and resilience” (Zenner et al., 2014). It promotes adaptive emotional regulation processes, fundamental to ensure an adequate response to the demands of the surrounding world and influences well-being (Chiesa, et al., 2011).
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Year 1 – Basic conditions to start the project: get support from the school director, check room/space available, build sponsorships/partnership towards the project sustainability and scientific credibility, work effectively the internal school structure, mostly focused on teachers, in order to raise awareness to mindfulness in education. A team of volunteer teachers and school staff (15) does MS program in order to help them evolve internally and spread the word (facilitators) by experiencing what children will experience. After 12 weeks of training, they work the program with the community, with AMS supervision. Evaluation is done prior to and after the intervention, using different scales. Qualitative data is also analized and comparative data (SPSS v.20) is shared in a seminar with the school community.
Year 2 – we implement a 10 min session within the classroom. Exercises such as breathing, and meditation will help students get into a focused mood before the class starts. Teachers loose 10 min of their class time, but in fact, they are gaining time because kids will be calmer and focused.
Year 3 – engage students to deliver/implement mindfulness to their peers, i.e. for them to be able to be future mindfulness facilitators.
In Portugal, the teaching profession has suffered a deep devaluation from the society in the last years and thus, most of the teachers are not happy in their work/school. There is a general disbelief on teachers’ work and that’s why is so important to support teachers on increasing their cognitive flexibility towards the current state of the “school” environment. We prepare teachers to apply this methodology in public schools – where there is a great diversity of students. They are our main ambassadors, because they will be the ones to first experience the benefits and share MS program. We start with small workshops to prove mindfulness scientific support, then check for school principals interest, start working with small team of school volunteers and then they spread the program school wide. We also engage in giving school some support to build a special space for adults and children sharing the MS program, with the help of partnerships and sponsorships. The scientific support is also insured by strong partnerships such as Commission for Children Protection, Universidade de Lisboa (Instituto de Educação), Associação Portuguesa de Mindfulness and his president PhD. José Pinto Gouveia (University of Coimbra).
- Elevating understanding of and between people through changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
Am I a hero? Surely not, I have not saved people’s lives, but I am trying to help them change the way they experience being alive and dealing with life in all its splendor and difficulties for us as humans. As a teacher I was doing it with my students, as responsible for AMS I can do it widely in public schools and work with school communities as a whole. Mindfulness helps us learn better with our hearts and head focused, but also teaches us about compassion and being king to ourselves. The digital world will surely need this.
Working as a public school teacher, I got overwhelmed with kids (10 or 14 years old) having panic attacks, on a daily basis, at school, or breaking down during tests. I was sad to realize that some kids had no hope left, no one believed that they could change. What were we all doing wrong? How could we transform school?
So, I came up with Mentes Sorridentes (MS) and started testing it. From kids who disrupted classes, I went on working with school staff (teachers and non-teachers). In common was the fact that they were no longer able to cope with academic, life or professional overwhelming challenges: concentration difficulties, panic attacks, low self-esteem, burnout, depression.
Then I asked local Hospital to evaluate MS impact. In Portugal, mindfulness is misunderstood and I needed scientific evidence. I also trained a small team of teachers to help me spread the program and with whom I started a non-profit association. Pre and post intervention evaluation of the students entering the 8 week program showed us: increased attention capacity, wellbeing, less emotional reactivity and greater involvement in tasks, stress reduction and anxiety. Later on I compiled their testimonies in a book.
Being a teacher today is not the same it was when I started 24 years ago. I survived several ministries of education, catastrophic policies, avalanches of legislation. And no one told me it could be so difficult to teach those who seem not want to be taught. I had children and also their problems, I had to teach parents to be parents, I had to fill all sorts of forms that killed me inside as they piled up, deal with my own problems, get to class and smile in spite of feeling dead inside. It comes to a point when you start hating teaching profession and yourself for having loved it once. So, how do you get a smile when you start losing the strength to go to work in the morning? How do you teach when you’re no longer able to listen to the pupils as human beings?
MS made reinvent myself as a person and as a professional. That’s why it’s a whole school approach starting with teachers: they’re the supportive members of the community. But they must start with themselves. Only then they are able to teach again with a smiling mind (Mentes Sorridentes).
When I created the MS program I investigated mindfulness in education for a whole year (a hard labour for a working mum). In Portugal there is no scientific evidence concerning this issue.
After training my own practice, I created the program MS and convinced Smiling Mind in Australia to do a small partnership to kick off. Trained a group of volunteer teachers to come aboard with me and start the non profit Association. Went to the local Hospital and convinced doctors to evaluate the program’s impact, published articles with them, wrote and published a book with testimonies from participants, participated in seminars and conferences to share our experience, did partnerships with Commission for Children’s Protection, Hospital Beatriz Ângelo, Hospital Garcia de Orta. Cooperated with Professor Pinto Gouveia, (University of Coimbra), to improve and study the program. I convinced Hovione company to partnership with us and pay for our specialized training in mindfulness and got help from local town hall with transportation.
I knew no one before this. I just went and knocked on doors, explaining about the scientific results we have, I clear the meaning of what we are doing, how simple it is and how it can be scalable.
The program already reached 14 portuguese schools. There are around 2500. I still have so many kilometers to go.
Oh! And I just started my PhD in my program – the university teachers didn’t believe it was worth the effort, now they ask me about my program.
As a non profit Association we are going a difficult path, because there is no financial support for us, so how can I get the program to public schools? How can I fight the misinterpretation mindfulness leads to in Portugal? How can I get people to come abroad and experiment it?
When I created the program, in my school, my peers would tease me – “there she goes breathing with kids”, teachers are usually very resistant to change. Then they saw the change and also wanted to try.
Research is a way of proving people it works. I have impelled the team to deepen their training in this area, pursuing the goal of improving the project, ensuring a permanent update.
Having the doctors abroad also helps us become trustworthy.
Another problem is getting kids in the program. We share videos from other students talking about their experience in MS and invite them to try 1session. The teachers facilitators are encouraged to slowly, build emotional bonds, show they care.
Presently, we are doing a business plan and sharing ideas about how to become sustainable. We wish to create a mentorship for companies to help a school community thrive with mindfulness.
(MS team, about 8 people) We all worked at the same school, and I knew them to be sensible to children’s issues, although we did not work together.
I realised they were open to new experiments in education. The kindergarten teacher, who asked kids to stop and breath, was surprised to found out she could do more and science was behind it. The special needs teacher told me he had no time, but I asked him to come and try one session with me.
We needed the school psychologist expertise to deepen the program and test it safely with kids and adults.
Doctors were asked to come along because they wanted to stop medicating kids for panic attacks.
I checked for people ready to change themselves and ready to make the change the schools needed. We tested and improved the program, they were convinced to deepen their own practice, try it with pupils, read scientific papers, believe they were part of the change.
And they trusted me all the way so far. We keep working, breathing, teaching other to breath and the one who told me he had no time, is now doing his Phd with me studying Mentes Sorridentes.
- Nonprofit
The innovation lies in the simplicity of this project that, with few means, reveals effectiveness, using an holistic approach to public school. It seeks to ensure learning based on well-being and mental health, extended to all members of the community (students, teachers, families,…).
On the other hand, it creates collaborations with external entities that hardly articulate directly (especially in the case of doctors): Hospital Beatriz Ângelo, Commission for the Protection of Children and Youth (who addressed us for partnership after noticing the impact on the children they accompanied), City Hall.
Finally, contrary to what is frequently occurring in the Portuguese public school, the whole project is evaluated.
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Methods: Study description with evaluation prior to and after the intervention. Instruments used: test D2 (measuring concentration all capacity, SDQ - (Strenghts and Difficulties Questionnaire), PHSCS (Piers- Harris Self-Concept Scale), Project diary and self evaluation forms. Descriptive and comparative analysis of the comparative data (SPSS v.20) (IC 95%, p<0,05). Analysis of the contents of the qualitative data.
Results: n=65, 61,5% male gender, average age=12,6 [10, 16] (DP 1,87). An overall improvement in the index for concentration and performance was noticed in the D2 test. Improvement in the score for self concept, in the score for emotional problems and behavior and in the score for general functioning. From a qualitative point of view the pupils showed improvement in controlling performance related anxiety, better concentration, reduced impulsiveness, better relationship capacity, and more life sense. The evaluation on behalf of adults involved in the project was very positive.
Conclusions: The intervention directed towards behavioral problems, attention and emotional difficulties in adolescents should include educational agents. The techniques of mindfulness, applied in a simple and brief protocol, obtained positive results in emotional management permitting more readiness for learning and betterment of the life quality for pupils.
- Women & Girls
- Children & Adolescents
- Rural
- Peri-Urban
- Urban
- Poor
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Persons with Disabilities
- 3. Good Health and Well-Being
- 4. Quality Education
- Portugal
Finantial support to bring the program to public schools.
Partnerships, mentorship programs for private companies, marketing strategies and wider communication web.
Partnerships: Hospital Beatriz Ângelo, Hospital Garcia de Orta, local Commissions for Children Protection and Associação Portuguesa para o Mindfulness (APM), Hospital Garcia de Orta, Universidade de Lisboa.