Addressing Mental Health in Schools with Yoga: Rena Shoshana Forester

My name is Rena Shoshana Forester. I have a Bachelors of Science in Elementary Education and a Bachelors of Science in Special Education. I am also a certified, trauma-informed Yoga teacher for kids and adults. I have 10+ years of professional, international teaching experience, including two years formally teaching Mindfulness & Yoga in a school.

As a child I was diagnosed as having a learning disability and placed on a learning track that was below my cognitive abilities. As a teacher, I experienced the stress of school politics and administrative pressures hindering the effectiveness of well-intentioned teachers. Both my experience as a student and a teacher fuel my passion for improving the current landscape of mental health in schools.

Mental Wellness in School: A Full-Team Effort 

Addressing mental health in schools is particularly challenging as it requires the participation of the administrators, teachers, students, and parents, in order to truly be effective.

The challenge with administrators is for them to prioritize addressing mental health in school by understanding that it is actually a basic need that will have positive ripple effects on the school’s culture and performance far greater than anyone could ever perceive.

The challenge with teachers is that they are already swamped with content that they need to teach. Asking them to add on attending to both their mental health and that of their students risks tipping them into overwhelm, and raises the genuine question: when will they be able to fit it in?

The challenge with students is arguably the easiest to solve: it’s just making lessons on mental health and learning tools relevant and engaging for them. The greater challenge is getting them to remember to use their new knowledge and tools, which often requires partnership from the grown-ups in their lives, which is a separate but related challenge.

The challenge with parents is that they, too, are often already feeling on the brink of overwhelm, so it’s hard for them to make time for learning new information and building new habits.

At the end of the day, there is much research about how addressing mental health in schools, particularly through Yoga and Mindfulness yields positive effects. A few specific findings are outlined below:

• “The effect of a Yoga intervention in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was compared to conventional motor exercises. The yoga intervention achieved medium to high effect sizes on all measures; test scores on an attention task and parent ratings of ADHD symptoms. The yoga training was particularly effective for children undergoing pharmacotherapy.” -Haffner, Roos, Goldstein, Parzer, and Resch (2006, p.258).
• “Yoga breathing techniques including right nostril breathing, left nostril breathing, alternate nostril breathing, or breath awareness was tested in a group of school children for ten days. All four groups showed a significant average increase of 84% in spatial cognitive task test scores over control, but not in verbal task scores.” -Telles and Naveen’s (1997, p.265)
• “A small trial of yoga for boys with ADHD reported results, partly because the study was under-powered, however that yoga may still have merit as a complementary treatment for boys with ADHD already stabilized on medication.” -Jensen and Kenny (2004. p.262)
• “The important finding of this study is that the yoga module can be taught to symptomatic inpatients with ADHD and these children were able to learn the yoga procedures. This is demonstrated by the assessment of yoga performances showing that there were improvements on all four domains of the yoga performance… The finding also indicates that as they reduced/stopped the yoga practice, the symptoms worsened. This may suggest a therapeutic benefit from Yoga.” -Hariprasad, Arasappa, Varambally, Srinath, and Gangadhar (2013, p.383)
• “Results from the direct assessments indicated significant effects of the intervention across all three indices of self-regulation. There was also some evidence that the children who were most at risk of self-regulation dysfunction benefited the most from the intervention.” -Razza, Bergen-Cico, and Raymond (2015, p.372)

 Tackling Mental Health Challenges in School Communities

The following is a list of how I have tackled mental health challenges in school communities:

1. As a homeroom teacher, I began each day with a 3-5 minute guided meditation.
2. As a homeroom teacher, I showed my students 15 minute Yoga videos and cleared space in the classroom for them to practice along.
3. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I regularly taught Kindergarten and First Grade age-appropriate meditations, breathing exercises, physical postures, and deep resting techniques that they used outside of class.
4. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I facilitated Mindful Recess: an opportunity for students through 5th grade to learn meditations, breathing exercises, physical postures, and deep resting techniques that they used outside of class.
5. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I facilitated Mindfulness Week where I taught every class in the school meditations, breathing exercises, physical postures, and deep resting techniques that they used outside of class, and gratitude practices.
6. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I created a Gratitude Board where students, teachers, and faculty could stop and write something they are grateful for on a board display for all to see. When passing by, one could pause to read what others had written, also sparking a sense of gratitude for the reader.
7. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I ran a workshop for high school students before final exams to teach them strategies to reduce stress and increase focus.
8. As a Yoga & Mindfulness teacher in a school, I taught weekly Yoga classes after school for teachers and faculty.