Professional

Open Minds: School Librarians as Leaders, Educators, and Advocates

Written by Justine Clougherty, 2021

On March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black female emergency medical technician, was fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police Department. Months later, and only after the tragic death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor became a rallying cry at anti-racism protests worldwide (BBC, 2020). Like many, I joined other protesters to peacefully advocate for an end to systemic racism and police brutality. Out of the eight protests I attended, some took place in front of government buildings, others took place in front of educational institutions, but most of the protests took place on the steps of public libraries. As a Masters of Education in School Librarianship student, I was far from surprised. Carl Rowan, an American journalist, wrote “the library is the temple of learning and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.” I am proud to work in a school library where educating myself and others on advocacy, inclusion, diversity, and growth is not just one possible way to do my job effectively— it is the only way. Libraries are brimming with diverse voices that cover the kaleidoscope of human experience. These voices are not only nestled between the cover of our books but also within our students, our patrons, and ourselves.

As librarians we are champions of intellectual freedom. We provide “free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause, or movement may be explored” (ALA, 2019). A school library is a place where students have the right to be active participants in the curation of their own world view. It is not a place where we tell them what to think or how to feel. Instead, it is our responsibility to provide them with access to a variety of human experiences.

To be an advocate in a school library is not to try to blatantly change the minds of our students— it is to open minds.

Paradoxically, an open mind, one that reads, experiences, thinks, and listens through the lens of understanding and compassion cannot help but be changed. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

Learning about the struggles, triumphs and perspectives of diverse people necessitates increases in compassion and understanding. In one of my favorite books, Ender’s Game, the main character ponders “I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves" (Card, 1992). As school librarians we not only provide access to diversity of thought and expression, but we also have the privilege of teaching it to our students.

There is an old adage that goes you can't understand someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. In effect, this saying is a reminder to practice empathy. As librarians we are the curators and custodians of libraries full of books where all a patron need do is flip open the front cover of any of our books to glean another perspective—to stretch the mind. As school librarians we have the privilege of working in a place where all are welcome, not just all people but all thoughts and all ideas as well. When there are restrictions and when we encounter censorship, it is our job to publicly speak out against it. It is our job to publicly and vocally challenge censorship and fight for inclusion. It is our job to be advocates.

The ALA Library Bill of Rights states that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues” (ALA, 2019). Sadly, many of our libraries fall short of this requirement. The fact is that there is a disproportionately small number of books in many libraries about minority characters (Spisak, 2018). At the same time, our communities are made of increasingly diverse individuals that span all dimensions of diversity: gender diversity, ethnic diversity, linguistic diversity, academic diversity and exceptionalities, experiential diversity, religious diversity, and diversity of thought. It is our job to advocate for diverse books. It is our job to make sure our students have access to these books.

As school librarians we cannot turn a blind eye to injustice under the assumption that it is not our job to address—it is. We cannot pretend that the world’s problems do not penetrate the walls of our libraries—they do.

Susan Orlean In fact, “every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.” (Susan Orlean, 2018). As champions of intellectual freedom and advocates for free speech, librarians do not shy away from confronting and including the problems of society—we welcome them with open arms. We advocate to keep materials from being excluded from our collections “because of the origin, age, background, or views of those contributing to their creation” (ALA, 2019).

The truth of the matter is that there is injustice in our libraries, in our schools, in our communities, and in our world. As librarians, specifically school librarians, we are privileged enough to be able to build safe havens for freedom and knowledge. School librarians have a platform for educating young minds—for stretching them to hear and read and understand new ideas. We can teach empathy and compassion through our collections, our lessons, and our actions. We have a platform to help shape the minds of future generations. This is a gift. Please, do not waste it. Our role as educators is to give students the tools and the ability to examine and understand the world so that they can then change it. We must diversify our collections and teach inclusion, compassion, and perspective-taking. Teaching diversity, being an advocate, is not a suggestion but a necessity.

In his essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin stated, “the paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated” (Baldwin, 1963). Our education system exists to teach students about the world so they can then go out and change it. Education as advocacy is a powerful and important catalyst for inspiring change. Society should be endlessly iterative. There is no reason we should be content with where we are. We should constantly be striving for improvement.

Change is inevitable. As leaders in our schools, we must be advocates for everyone: the unheard, the downtrodden, the misunderstood.

As school librarians, our primary patrons are the young, the vulnerable. And our libraries are spaces where all are welcome. Where all must feel welcome. Where we must publicly welcome everyone With our collections, with our, lessons, with our words and with our actions we must make sure ALL OUR STUDENTS KNOW: You are welcome here. You matter to me. There is space for you. On our shelves, in our classrooms and in our heats. And if someone tries to silence you, if someone tries to take your voice and your perspective off our shelves, if someone tries to make you feel unwelcome, we will advocate for you. A 15-year-old girl, the same age as some of our students, once wrote, “how wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world” (Frank,1993).

References

American Library Association. (2019, January 29). Library bill of rights. American Library Association. Retrieved July 26, 2020, from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill

American Library Association. (2007, May 29). Intellectual freedom and censorship Q & A. American Library Association. Retrieved July 28, 2020, from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship/faq

BBC News. (2020). Breonna taylor: Louisville officer to be fired for deadly force use. British Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved August 1, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53111709

Card, O. S. (1994). Ender's game. New York: Tor Science Fiction.

Frank, A. (1993). Anne frank: The diary of a young girl. New York; Toronto: Bantam Books.

Orlean, S. (2018). The library book. Simon & Schuster.

Advocacy— Advocacy in School Libraries

Open for Learning: The Impact of Mindfulness Methods on Reducing Stress and Increasing Motivation for and Interest in Reading for Pleasure in High School Students

A research proposal written by Justine Clougherty, 2021

In today's climate, many students are weighed down by stress and anxiety. The social and academic expectations placed on children can lead to adverse effects on their emotional well-being and on their academic performance. We are producing a smart and self-assured generation that is also the most self-centered, competitive, individualistic, and stressed on record. Young people must be taught ways to regulate their social and emotional wellbeing in an increasingly fast-paced and stressful world. The purpose of this concurrent, mixed methods study is to examine the impact of mindfulness methods, specifically the Learning to BREATHE mindfulness-based intervention curriculum, on reducing stress and increasing motivation for and interest in reading for pleasure in high school students.

Review of Literature

Literature Search Strategy

In order to find credible empirical research on this topic, I used the Longwood University databases, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Google Scholar. I started by searching the keywords “mindfulness” AND “school libraries” AND “reading for pleasure.” I also searched synonyms for mindfulness such as “meditation” and “mindfulness methods.” Additionally, I broadened my search from “School libraries” to “schools.” I did not restrict my search to studies only conducted in the United States. I made a point to limit my studies to ones that have been published within the last 20 years. Some of these studies analyzed data that had been collected prior to the year 2000. As long as the study itself was published in the year 2004 or later, I included the study in my review of literature. While many studies focused on the link between mindfulness methods and decreasing stress by increasing emotional well-being, few studies looked at the link between mindfulness methods and reading for pleasure.

Deconstructing Mindfulness

In recent years the concept of mindfulness has become a buzzword, but what does mindfulness entail? According to the Foundation for a Mindful Society, mindfulness is “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us” (Willard, 2020). Researchers have deconstructed the term mindfulness in order to make it more quantifiable and researchable. In 2009, researchers from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill designed two studies to better understand the “composition of mindfulness, as a construct and explored potential mechanisms by which it might influence mental health” (Coffey, 2009). The researcher's first study used factor analysis results to discern that the factors mindfulness and emotion regulation are “overlapping constructs” that can be described as “present-centered attention, acceptance of experience, clarity about one’s internal experience, and the ability to manage negative emotions” (Coffey, 2009). The researcher’s second study expanded on the results from the first study to explore “four potential mechanisms of action in mindfulness: “clarity about one’s internal life, the ability to manage negative emotions, non-attachment, and rumination” (Coffey, 2009). The results of this second study confirmed the importance of these four constructs.

Mindfulness and Mental Health

In 2008, Researchers from the University of Warwick designed a mixed-methods study to investigate the experiences of participants of “cultivating mindfulness during mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) group intervention” (Martin, 2008). The study focused on the relationships between mindfulness skills, emotion regulation, and attachment style. The researchers hypothesized that there would be a “positive relationship between mindfulness skills, emotion regulation, and attachment style” (Martin, 2008). The results of this study indicate a positive relationship between mindfulness and emotion regulation. Many of the researchers created mixed methods studies in order to more fully grasp and describe the experiences of the subjects. The studies used different mindfulness methods; however, all of the methods focused on the same core tenants of mindfulness. These studies focused on the relationship between mindfulness and mental health and emotions. Most of the abstracts indicated that further research is necessary to fully understand the impact of mindfulness on mental health and emotion regulation.

Mindfulness in Schools

Studies have demonstrated that Mindfulness-based practices can have a positive impact on students’ overall well-being. In 2012, Kempson created a mixed-methods study to explore how students from “two secondary schools perceive the impact of studying mindfulness as part of an eight-week school-based curriculum” (Kempson, 2012). The researcher implemented qualitative and quantitative methods to capture the full extent of the student’s experiences. The results of this study show a need for more “detailed exploratory investigations of school-based mindfulness interventions to account for the complexity of pupils’ experiences” (Kempson, 2012). Other researchers have corroborated these results. A study conducted in 2015 looked at the impact of the Fuel for Learning Program (FFL), “a mindfulness-based yoga and nutrition program on factors related to psychosocial well-being for children in urban low-income schools” (Bremer, 2015). Specifically, this study evaluated the impact of FFL on behavioral risk factors and social-emotional skills for an “economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse sample of students across two urban schools” (Bremer, 2015). The researcher analyzed her data using “Repeated Measures Multivariate Analysis of Variance (RM MANOVA)” (Bremer, 2015). The results of the study suggest that school and classroom factors impact changes observed on the dependent variables (behavioral risk factors and social-emotional skills).

Another study conducted in 2018 focused on teaching students to “increase emotion regulation, stress management, compassion, and executive functioning skills to promote well-being and learning” through L2B (Learning to BREATHE), “a mindfulness training and a universal prevention program” (Brier-Kennedy et al., 2018). This study operationally defined mindfulness as “the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience” to make it quantifiable and researchable (Brier-Kennedy et al., 2018). Developing resilience is a life skill that every student should learn and cultivate. This study reinforces the results of many prior studies: bonus-based instruction can improve resiliency in students. The problem is stated clearly as “the effects of a seven-session mindfulness intervention, Learning to BREATHE, on an ethnically diverse at-risk high school student sample” (Brier-Kennedy et al., 2018). This study was a randomized pretest-posttest control/comparison group study. This research contributes and builds upon the existing L2B literature by “evaluating the effects of the abbreviated 7-session intervention, including a control condition, and including a self-report measure designed to directly assess student resilience” (Brier-Kennedy et al., 2018). The conclusion that “MBI may offer an effective strategy for enhancing student dispositional resilience” follows from the interpretation of the results (Brier-Kennedy et al., 2018).

Mindfulness and Reading for Pleasure

The link between mindfulness methods and reading for pleasure has yet to be extensively researched. Data from three major longitudinal studies show that pleasure reading in youth is the most explanatory factor of both cognitive progress and social mobility over time. The first study, Reading for Change: Performance and Engagement Across Countries, analyzed the results from the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Although the complete set of reading literacy tasks used in PISA varies widely in text type, situation, and task requirements and hence also in difficulty. For the initial PISA report, an index of reading engagement had been constructed that was solely based on the students’ attitudes toward reading (Kirsch, et al, 2000). The second longitudinal study was published in 2010 and looked at how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires reading comprehension processes that may be increased by students' amount of engaged reading, parental education, and gender, along with balanced reading instruction and opportunity to read. To examine the effects of those variables on reading achievement and engagement, the authors analyzed “the 1994 Grade 4 Maryland NAEP with hierarchical linear modeling to construct both between-school and between-teacher models” (Huang, et al, 2010). The third study was published in 2013 by researchers from the University of London. This study examined “socio-economic inequalities in cognitive test scores at age 16 for a nationally representative cohort of people born in Britain in 1970 (the 1970 British Cohort Study)” (Brown & Sullivan, 2013). All three of these studies concluded that pleasure reading promotes cognitive progress and social possibility, and even a kind of wisdom and wholeness within participants. Pleasure reading can improve a student's overall academic performance. Similarly, there is a link between mindfulness methods and academic performance. In 2016 a researcher from The University of Alabama created a study to examine the “relationship between mindfulness and academic optimism in schools in North Alabama” (May, 2016). The researcher hypothesized that the greater degree of a school’s individual and organizational mindfulness, the greater the degree of academic optimism. The researcher used two survey instruments and the socio-economic status (SES) of each school. Mindfulness was measured using the “School Mindfulness Scale and academic optimism was measured using the School Academic Optimism Survey” (May, 2016). The results of this study confirmed much of the literature about the relationships of organizational mindfulness, in this case, “defined as practicing an open, creative, multi-perspective state of being,” academic optimism, and SES (May, 2016). Mindfulness methods promote academic optimism which may lead to a promotion of the power of pleasure reading within students.

In Summation

An analysis of mindfulness in school libraries research conducted around the world revealed that few studies have been conducted that focused on the use of mindfulness methods as a way to increase interest in reading for pleasure by patrons of school libraries; however, there are a wealth of studies focusing on the impact of mindfulness methods on emotional well-being and mental health. The body of empirical research examining mindfulness methods largely pertains to classroom settings, rather than school libraries. Most of the literature regarding mindfulness methods in school libraries and classrooms is available through professional literature, such as practitioner journals, books for educators, and national reading reports.

Research Questions and Significance of the Problem

This study examines the impact of mindfulness methods on reducing stress and increasing literacy in the public school. In particular, this study focuses on the following questions:

Do mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lessons reduce stress in high school students?
Do mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lessons increase motivation for and interest in reading for pleasure in high school students?
What experiences and perceptions do high school students report after participating in mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lessons?

Research done by the National Institute of Mental Health states that “an estimated 31.9% of adolescents had any anxiety disorder” and “of adolescents with any anxiety disorder, an estimated 8.3% had severe impairment. DSM-IV criteria were used to determine impairment” (National Institute of Mental Health, 2005). An increasingly common way for educators to addresses the overall health and well-being of their students is by employing mindfulness methods. A randomized controlled trial published in Developmental Psychology on enhancing cognitive and social–emotional development found that “strategies not only to ameliorate children’s problems but also to cultivate their well-being and thriving” (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015). Many studies have been done about the benefits of mindfulness practices but few focus on the intersection of mindfulness and its impact on improving student literacy.

Methodology

This mixed methods study will examine examines the impact of mindfulness methods on reducing stress and increasing literacy in the public school using a concurrent design. Half the participating high school students will be randomly assigned to take part in a six-session mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lesson, Learning to BREATHE (L2B). To quantify the effectiveness of L2B intervention on student stress, self-report questionnaires will be administered in a pre-test post-test style in between delivery of the L2B curriculum. Qualitative evidence will be collected in tandem with the L2B social & emotional learning lessons through researcher observations and post lesson interviews.

Site Selection and Researcher Role.

The participating high school was selected for a few reasons: its diverse and high achieving student body and its accessibility for the researcher. The high school is a majority-minority high school with minority enrollment at 57%. Asian students make up 32% of enrolled students. Black students account for 7% of enrolled students. 14% of enrolled students are Hispanic. 43% of enrolled students are White and 4% of students are multi-racial. The participating high school was also selected because of its high achieving student body. The graduation rate is 98% which is well above the state median. The overall student performance, as measured by the Percentile Score on Standards of Learning or Alternate Assessments, is 94.4% (Fairfax County Public Schools, 2020). This percentile score is based on the percentage of students who achieve proficiency in math and reading and it is used to measure overall student performance on state-required tests. The participating high school is in a Virginia suburb in one of America’s richest counties. The environment produces hardworking, driven individuals; however, the competitive environment and focus on academic and financial excellence can be stressful on students.

This study will be conducted in Northern Virginia where the researcher lives and works. The researcher will take on the role of a partial participant and will be present during the L2B lessons; however, the L2B lessons will be taught by a collaborating partner who has extensive training and experience in the delivery of mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) to youth and who is a licensed mental health provider.

Subjects.

The participating high school students will be randomly selected from the sophomore students taking health class the first block of each school day. The high school is on block scheduling, so classes meet every other day. To account for this, four health classes will be recruited to participate. Two health teachers are employed at the school and they both have classes during the first block of each school day. The students in their classes will be randomly selected to participate in the mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lessons. Half the students in the classes will intermingle in one of the classrooms for the L2B curriculum with the MBI expert and the researcher. The other half of the students will intermingle in the other classroom with the two health teachers to continue with the typical health education material. Legal guardians of students from the four classes of high school students will be approached for consent directly through email correspondence and indirectly through students bringing home consent forms.

Instrumentation.

To ascertain the effects of L2B intervention on student psychosocial characteristics, self-report questionnaires were administered. These questionnaires will be given before and after each of the six L2B sessions. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) was chosen as the basis for these questionnaires because it is the most widely used psychological instrument for measuring the perception of stress (Cohen, 1994). After the development of PSS, Follow-up studies were conducted to build on initial validation work with this scale by “evaluating patterns the convergent and discriminant validity of scores on its six substantially correlated subscales” (Hertzog et al., 2014). PSS is the ideal instrument for measuring student psychosocial characteristics in terms of stress because the items “are easy to understand, and the response alternatives are simple to grasp” (Cohen, 1994). Students should not have difficulty decoding the questions. The second page of Sheldon Cohen’s PSS document will be given to students for the pre and post-test questionnaire.

To measure the student’s pleasure in reading (RfP) a reading survey will be given after the PSS questionnaire to delve into the students views and perceptions of reading. The chosen RfP survey, Reading for Pleasure: Children’s Reading Survey-KS3, was created by Open University: Research Rich Pedagogies. After the RfP survey, students will be asked to relay any additional experiences and perceptions they may have to the researcher. Using the RfP survey along with qualitative observations, the researcher will be able to “reflect on the shifts in the ways some children position themselves as readers, e.g. moving from disinterest to swapping books, developing preferences and initiating conversations” (Cremin, 2017). All five pages of the Reading for Pleasure: Children’s Reading Survey-KS3 will be given to students to fill out at the end of each lesson.

Procedures.

This study will take place over the course of six 90-numute class sessions at the start of the school day. At the beginning of each class, the same questionnaire will be given to students in all four classes at the beginning and end of each of the six class blocks allocated for the study regardless of whether they are in the control group or the treatment group. PSS is 10 items long and the average completion time is 5-10 minutes; therefore, the students will be allocated 10 minutes of class time for the completion of the pre-test PSS questionnaire. Following the pre-test PSS questionnaire, students will take part in a 45-minute learning to BREATHE lesson or a 45-minute traditional health lesson depending on their random assignment to the control or the treatment group. The L2B curriculum is intended to “strengthen attention and emotion regulation, cultivate wholesome emotions like gratitude and compassion, expand the repertoire of stress management skills” (Learning2Breathe, 2019). L2B has been researched with adolescents and has been recognized in “the 2015 CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning) Guide as meeting research criteria for effective SEL programs” (Learning2Breathe, 2019). During the L2B lesson, the researcher will quietly and unobtrusively observe the students while taking field notes of the treatment group. After the L2B lesson or the traditional health lesson, the students will complete the PSS questionnaire again for a post-test. The students will be given 10 minutes of class time to complete the post-test. The PSS post-test will be followed by the RfP survey that is made up of both close-ended and open-ended questions. The students will be given 15 minutes to complete the RfP survey. The students will then be given the opportunity to report experiences and perceptions in the form of a short, class-wide, open-ended discussion during the last 10 minutes of class.

Data Management and Analysis.

The pre and post-test PSS questionnaires along with the RfP survey will be administered electronically, so the answers will automatically populate a google sheet that only the researcher will have access to. The pre and post-test PSS questionnaire scores are obtained by “reversing responses (e.g., 0 = 4, 1 = 3, 2 = 2, 3 = 1 & 4 = 0) to the four positively stated items (items 4, 5, 7, & 8) and then summing across all scale items” (Cohen, 1994). Student scores on the PSS can range from 0 to 40 with higher scores indicating higher perceived stress. Scores ranging from 0-13 are considered low stress. Scores ranging from 14-26 are considered moderate stress. Scores ranging from 27-40 are considered high perceived stress (Cohen, 1994). An ANOVA test will be used to compare the differences in the responses. The researcher will use a p=.05 alpha level for statistical significance.

The RfP survey contains short answer questions that will be coded to find the frequency of commonly used words in student responses along with the percentage of students who used these common words. For example, student responses on their primary reason for reading could by coded into the following categories: to pass exams, it is fun, it helps me understand more about myself, to help me find out what I want / need to know, and it is skill for life. student responses on their Preferred type of reading materials could by coded into the following categories: fiction books, textbooks, internet/website, newspapers/magazines, song lyrics, and audio book. The class discussion at the end of class will center on one single question asked by the researcher to the students: what experiences and perceptions do high school students report after participating in mindfulness-based social & emotional learning lessons? Student responses will be recorded and later transcribed by the researcher and coded based on frequency of use and percentage of students who used them.

Delimitations and Limitations

There will inevitably be delimitations in this study. The study will focus on one high school in one specific location in the United States. The demographics of the participating students, while diverse ethnically and culturally, are singular in many ways. Therefore, this study cannot be indiscriminately generalized. Additionally, there will several limitations in this study. First, follow-up data to evaluate the long-term findings will not be collected. Therefore, it will be impossible to determine the long-term effects of L2B curriculum on reducing stress and increasing motivation for and interest in reading for pleasure in high school students. Another limitation to this study is intervention adherence to the L2B home practice recommendations. Mindfulness methods work best when regularly practiced. It will not be possible for the researcher to enforce strict adherence to a consistent mindfulness regiment on the days that students do not have health class. It will be difficult to motivate students to stay consistent with their MBI when they are not in school. Another limitation is the qualitative data collected in the end of class discussion. Students may be influenced by their classmates’ answers and other students may choose not to participate in the discussion. It will be difficult to enforce a 100% response rate in the class discussion.

Implications for Future Research

The central aim of this study was to build upon the existing literature to examine the impact of mindfulness-based intervention methods, specifically L2B, on reducing stress and increasing motivation for and interest in reading for pleasure in high school students. This study will use the six-session version of L2B; however, there is a longer version that offers eighteen sessions. A follow-up study could look at the differences between the shorter six session version and the more intensive eighteen session version. Further research could also address the limitation of inconsistent out of school practice by adding in a lesson on the importance of maintaining one’s mindfulness practices with the hopes of increasing at home practice in students. Additionally, further research could assess whether changes observed over the course of the study were maintained and stable across time by setting up measures for following up with students after they graduate from high school. This study will only be conducted in one high school in one specific region of the United States. Further research should replicate this study in other areas of the country to validate and solidify the findings of this study and other studies on MBI in schools. This study will contribute to the growing knowledge of the effects f school-based MBI; however, more research is needed to replicate and expand upon the results of this study.

References

Bremer, A. (2015). Fuel for learning: Impact of a mindfulness, yoga, and nutrition program on social emotional skills and behavioral risk factors (Publication No. 10085487) [Doctoral dissertation, Abstract, The Ohio State University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

Brier-Kennedy, E., Clawson A. J., DiFlorio, R. A., Felver, J. C., Janack, P., & Morton, M. L. (2018). School-based mindfulness intervention supports adolescent resiliency: A randomized controlled pilot study. International Journal of School & Educational Psychology, 7(1), 111-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683603.2018.1461722

Broderick, P. C. (2019). What is learning to BREATHE? Learning2Breathe. https://learning2breathe.org/introduction/

Brown, M. & Sullivan, A. (2013). Social inequalities in cognitive scores at age 16: The role of reading. Institute of Education University of London. https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CLS-WP-2013-10-.pdf

Coffey, K. A. (2009). Deconstructing mindfulness and constructing mental health: Understanding mindfulness and its mechanisms of action (Publication No. 3366318) [Doctoral dissertation, Abstract, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

Cohen, S. (1994). Perceived stress scale. Mind Garden. https://www.sprc.org/system/files/private/event-training/Penn%20College%20-%20Perceived%20Stress%20Scale.pdf

Cremin, T. (2017). Documenting reading for pleasure. The Open University. https://researchrichpedagogies.org/_downloads/Documenting_Childrens_Reading_for_Pleasure_FINAL_.pdf

Fairfax County Public Schools. (2020). High school rankings: Chantilly high school. Fairfax County. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/districts/fairfax-county-public-schools/chantilly-high-school-20433

Hertzog, C., Morgan, E. S., & Umberson, K. (2014). Construct validation of self-reported stress scales. Psychol Assess, 26(1): 90-91. https://doi/10.1037/a0034714

Huang, C., Guthrie, J. T., & Schafer, W. D. (2010). Benefits of opportunity to read and balanced instruction on the NAEP. The Journal of Educational Research, 94(3), 145-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220670109599912

Kempson, R. J. (2012). Mindfulness in schools: a mixed methods investigation of how secondary school pupils perceive the impact of studying mindfulness in school and the barriers to its successful implementation (Publication No. U634346) [Doctoral dissertation, Abstract, Cardiff University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

Kirsch, I., Jong, J., Lafontaine, D., McQueen, J., Mendelovits, J., & Monseur, C. (2000). Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. http://www.oecd.org/education/school/programmeforinternationalstudentassessmentpisa/33690904.pdf

Martin, A. M. (2008). Cultivating mindfulness: An exploration of relationships between mindfulness, attachment and emotion regulation (Publication No. U502106) [Doctoral dissertation, Abstract, University of Warwick]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

May, J. D. (2016). The effects of individual and school mindfulness on the academic optimism in schools in North Alabama (Publication No. 10162705) [Doctoral dissertation, Abstract, The University of Alabama]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

National Institute of Mental Health. (2005). Any anxiety disorder. National Institute of Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder.shtml

Schonert-Reichl, K. A., Oberle, E., Lawlor, M. S., Abbott, D., Thomson, K., Oberlander, T. F., & Diamond, A. (2015). Enhancing cognitive and social–emotional development through a simple-to-administer mindfulness-based school program for elementary school children: A randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 51(1), 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038454

Appendices

Instrument of Implementation — Sheldon Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale document

Instrument of Implementation — The Open University’s Reading for Pleasure: Children’s Reading Survey-KS3

Researcher Field Notes Observation Form — pdfFiller Narrative Observation Form

Informed Consent Form Template — World Health Organization’s Informed assent for children/minors

Informed Consent Form Template — World Health Organization’s Informed parental consent for research involving children (qualitative)