Mental health promotion is part of the UN’s third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on health and well-being (United Nations, 2021). The Perth Charter for Mental Health Promotion from 2012 emphasizes that mental health promotion should be incorporated throughout the life span via activities and settings such as schools, educational institutions, and workplaces.

This workshop deals with questions about how to implement mindfulness in schools in a sustainable way. Some questions are how to optimally train school teachers to ensure a good implementation in schools? And how to train teachers’ relational competence and mindfully embodied presence as a necessary part of teaching mindfulness to students?

The workshop also deals with considerations on how to design research in order to evaluate the effects of implementing mindfulness in real-life school settings?

About the workshop holders:

Katinka Gøtzsche MA, Assistent Professor, educator and MBSR teacher at the Danish Center for Mindfulness, AU. She educates teachers, pedagogues’ and teacher-students in empathy, compassion, mindfulness and relational competence. She has been working on several projects on have to use mindfulness in building relational competence in professionals working with children. She has been trained in the .b (dot-be) programme to train teachers.
She is one of the main educators on projects: Stress-free Everyday LiFe for Children and Adolescents REsearch (SELFCARE) and “On Top of Everything” .

Lise Juul, MPH, PhD, Associate Professor at the Danish Center for Mindfulness, AU, has a public health background and has worked with evaluation of health promoting and preventive interventions in real-life settings such as general practice, municipal health care centers, work places and schools for many years. She is head of research of Stress-free Everyday LiFe for Children and Adolescents REsearch (SELFCARE). A cluster randomised trial testing a school teacher training programme to teach mindfulness (“.b”) in Denmark (110 school; 191 teachers; approx. 2000 pupils); and “On Top of Everything”. A cluster randomised trial testing a teacher training programme to teach adopted Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in Danish high schools and vocational schools (43 schools; 76 teachers ; approx. 1000 pupils).