Bringing Meditation Into the Classroom: Professional Development for Educators
Last week we led a professional development session for a high school staff in Los Angeles. We didn’t start with strategies for students. We started with the adults.
Teachers can’t hand students a calm they don’t have themselves. So everyone got paper, pencils, and markers, and we asked them to draw alongside their colleagues. Nobody needed art experience. The point wasn’t the drawing. It was a few quiet minutes of slowing down together.
[OPTIONAL: add one real moment here, such as a prompt you gave or something a teacher said.]
From there we got practical: how to make meditation a steady part of the school day, especially during advisory, where a few quiet minutes can change the tone of the whole period.
Four ways to start
Open with a pause. Three slow breaths or one quiet minute of drawing helps students move from the hallway into the room.
Give hands something to do. Slow, repetitive drawing can settle a restless class better than “everyone be still.”
Reset in the middle of the day. A short grounding pause after lunch or before a test goes a long way.
Do it with them. Students notice when you’re taking the minute too, and it stops feeling like an assignment.
Feedback
“You left our team feeling inspired and empowered to approach meditation during advisory with greater consistency and purpose.”
— School staff member, Los Angeles high schoolCreative Wellbeing
This experience is made possible through Creative Wellbeing, a strategic collaboration that grew out of conversations about how to bring more healing into our systems — and how to shift culture by nurturing wellbeing through art.
It is a partnership among the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the Office of Child Protection, the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Justice, Care and Opportunities, and the Arts for Healing and Justice Network, as part of the LA County Arts Education Collective. Together, these organizations are advancing the goals of Arts for All Children, Youth, & Families: Los Angeles County’s Regional Blueprint for Arts Education.
Upward Together is honored to contribute to this vision — bringing art as a language of healing and connection into school and family settings.
Upward Together partners with schools and organizations across Los Angeles to build calm, connected, creatively grounded cultures.
[Photo: staff drawing side by side at a long table. Alt text: “School staff drawing together during a professional development session on meditation and wellbeing.”]