Teaching is a great responsibility. I teach English and believe that the ability to communicate, at a personal and societal level, is what builds strong communities and ensures ownership over one’s future. Thus, it’s important that we teachers spend a lot of time on our craft—deliberating the best ways to teach and make lessons fun, interactive, and relatable to students. Professional development thrives on discipline pedagogy and school departments meet to align goals and assignments and to discuss data assessment.

I recently observed a high school science lesson that left me feeling like I had just swished some super-minty Listerine. I was refreshed. I was inspired…so much so, in fact, that I built and entire upcoming PD session around my takeaway from this lesson. I will return to this in just a moment.

The first step to include mindfulness in schools is to provide training to teachers. Here are just some of the many mindfulness educator workshops offered in Canada.

The traditional model of mandated, one‑size‑fits‑all workshops is giving way to professional learning that is more responsive, curriculum-aligned, and customized to each educator’s experience and goals.

Professional development is a lot less about going to see an expert and a lot more about exploring things and the impact they have on student learning.

Educator well-being has suddenly become a buzzword. This isn’t a bad thing—on the contrary, we should have been caring more about the well-being of educators long ago.