ABSTRACT
School interventions have included social and emotional learning programs, designed to help pupils develop self-management and interpersonal skills such as listening, reciprocating collaborative behaviors, and overcoming disagreements. Inner Explorer’s Mindful-Based Social Emotional Learning (MBSEL) programs are designed for children and student audiences in school settings. The underlying assumption for creating these programs was that students who practice audio-guided mindfulness exercises each school day would become more mindful, and thus experience increased emotional regulation, which in turn promotes academic attainment, as has been shown in both student and adult studies The chapter argues that the MBSEL program is innovative in two additional ways. First, the design of such brief mindfulness practices make it possible for mindfulness training to fit into a normal school day without extending or amending the class curriculum. Second, the automated and pre-recorded delivery mode requires very little teacher training, thus dramatically lowering the human and financial resource constraints required traditionally for implementing a mindfulness program in schools.
