Patricia Jennings

Last updated
Patricia Jennings
Alma mater Antioch College
Saint Mary's College
University of California Davis
Occupation(s)Educator and researcher
Employer University of Virginia
Notable workMindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills For Peace And Productivity In The Classroom
TitleProfessor of Education

Patricia A. Jennings is a Professor of Education at the University of Virginia.

Contents

Education and early career

Patricia A. Jennings received a BA from Antioch College in 1977, an M.Ed. from Saint Mary's College in 1980, and a Ph.D. from the University of California Davis in 2004. [1] Before her degrees in education and human development, Jennings also studied Buddhism at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and later founded a Montessori school that taught meditation during the late 1980s. [2]

Research

She was an associate professor at the School of Education and Human Development (formerly the Curry School of Education), University of Virginia until 2019, when she was promoted to Full Professor. [3] She has also served as a Research Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. [4] Jennings's book Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills For Peace And Productivity In The Classroom, was published in 2015. [5] [6] Jennings is to co-creator of the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) program, [7] a thirty-hour mindfulness-based professional development program. The goal of the program is to help Pre-K-12 teachers deal with in-class stress. [8] [7] It was tested in a clinical trial in 2017, which involved 224 elementary school teachers, evaluating the program through teacher questionnaires and classroom observations. [3] The results of the research showed that CARE can “increase teacher social and emotional competence and the quality of classroom interactions,” according to the New York Times . [9] It was the largest study of its kind to date at the time. [10] Following this, she worked on the Compassionate Schools Project research project, intended to teach and provide mindfulness skills to elementary students. [11]

In 2018, she received the Catherine Kerr Award for Courageous and Compassionate Science. [12]

Her book The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom was then published in 2019. [13] Jennings is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Fostering Healthy Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Development among Children and Youth. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meditation</span> Mental practice of focus on a particular topic

Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Naropa University</span> University in Boulder, Colorado, United States

Naropa University is a private university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named after the 11th-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. The university describes itself as Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical, and nonsectarian rather than Buddhist. Naropa promotes non-traditional activities like meditation to supplement traditional learning approaches.

Mindfulness is the cognitive skill of sustaining meta-awareness on the contents of one's own mind in the present-moment without conceptual reification. The practice of mindfulness meditation refers to the recurrent training of one's attention to reorient whenever it acquiesces to its opposite, absent-mindedness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvard Graduate School of Education</span> Education school of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is the education school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1920, it was the first school to grant the EdD degree and the first Harvard school to award degrees to women. HGSE enrolls more than 800 students in its one-year master of education (Ed.M.) and three-year doctor of education leadership (Ed.L.D.) programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Kabat-Zinn</span> American professor emeritus of medicine

Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the 'Stress Reduction Clinic' and the 'Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society' at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Buddhist teachers such as Philip Kapleau, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Seung Sahn, and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of hatha yoga, Vipassanā and appreciation of the teachings of Soto Zen and Advaita Vedanta led him to integrate their teachings with scientific findings. He teaches mindfulness, which he says can help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness. The stress reduction program created by Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), is offered by medical centers, hospitals, and health maintenance organizations, and is described in his book Full Catastrophe Living.

The Vipassanā movement, also called the Insight Meditation Movement and American Vipassana movement, refers to a branch of modern Burmese Theravāda Buddhism that promotes "bare insight" (sukha-Vipassana) to attain stream entry and preserve the Buddhist teachings, which gained widespread popularity since the 1950s, and to its western derivatives which have been popularised since the 1970s, giving rise to the more dhyana-oriented mindfulness movement.

Contemplative education is a philosophy of higher education that integrates introspection and experiential learning into academic study in order to support academic and social engagement, develop self-understanding as well as analytical and critical capacities, and cultivate skills for engaging constructively with others.

Charles Halpern is a lawyer, activist, author, educator, and meditation practitioner. He also served as the founding dean of CUNY School of Law, and as a faculty member of various prominent law schools across the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Kaiser Greenland</span> American author and teacher

Susan Kaiser Greenland(born October 1, 1956) is an American author and teacher of mindfulness and meditation, practicing a state of present-moment awareness to develop overall attentiveness and social/emotional skills. Susan played a foundational role in making mindfulness practices developmentally appropriate for young people, and with her first book The Mindful Child she helped pioneer activity-based mindfulness. This technique is now practiced in American schools throughout the country to help children learn how to reduce and alleviate their stress levels.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week evidence-based program that offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain. Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga and exploration of patterns of behaviour, thinking, feeling and action. Mindfulness can be understood as the non-judgmental acceptance and investigation of present experience, including body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, emotions, impulses and memories, in order to reduce suffering or distress and to increase well-being. Mindfulness meditation is a method by which attention skills are cultivated, emotional regulation is developed, and rumination and worry are significantly reduced. During the past decades, mindfulness meditation has been the subject of more controlled clinical research, which suggests its potential beneficial effects for mental health, as well as physical health. While MBSR has its roots in wisdom teachings of Zen Buddhism, Hatha Yoga, Vipassana and Advaita Vedanta, the program itself is secular. The MBSR program is described in detail in Kabat-Zinn's 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donna Wilson</span>

Donna Wilson is an educational and school psychologist, teacher educator, and author of 20 books applying mind, brain, and education science. Wilson is the head of academic affairs of the Center for Innovative Education and Prevention (CIEP) and BrainSMART. She presents at educational conferences in the United States and internationally and blogs regularly on Edutopia. She serves as advisor to New York City's Portfolio School and on the foundation of Carl Albert State College.

Marcia Invernizzi is an American professor, author, and researcher in the field of Reading Education. At the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, she teaches reading education. As founder of the Book Buddies program, she is known as a leader in early literacy intervention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amishi Jha</span> American neuroscientist

Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami.

Catherine Kerr was an Assistant Professor of medicine, Assistant Professor of family medicine, and the Director of Translational Neuroscience in the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University at her untimely death in November, 2016. Kerr received her bachelor's from Amherst College before completing her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. Following this she was a post doctoral fellow and Instructor at Harvard Medical School, and it was here that she received a career development award from the NIH to conduct research into the cognitive neuroscience of meditation. She joined Brown's Department of Family Medicine and Contemplative Studies Initiative in 2011.

Trauma-sensitive yoga is yoga as exercise, adapted from 2002 onwards for work with individuals affected by psychological trauma. Its goal is to help trauma survivors to develop a greater sense of mind-body connection, to ease their physiological experiences of trauma, to gain a greater sense of ownership over their bodies, and to augment their overall well-being. However, a 2019 systematic review found that the studies to date were not sufficiently robustly designed to provide strong evidence of yoga's effectiveness as a therapy; it called for further research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mindful Yoga</span> Buddhist-style mindfulness practice with yoga as exercise

Mindful Yoga or Mindfulness Yoga combines Buddhist-style mindfulness practice with yoga as exercise to provide a means of exercise that is also meditative and useful for reducing stress. Buddhism and Hinduism have since ancient times shared many aspects of philosophy and practice including mindfulness, understanding the suffering caused by an erroneous view of reality, and using concentrated and meditative states to address such suffering.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">John P. Miller (educator)</span> Canadian educator

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark T. Greenberg</span>

Mark T. Greenberg is the emeritus holder of The Bennett Endowed Chair in Prevention Research in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, and founding director of the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the chair of CREATE for Education, a non-profit organization that promotes caring and compassion in education.

Greta Morine-Dershimer is an American education researcher. She is Professor Emerita in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. She has served as an officer of the American Educational Research Association, and is a former editor of Teaching and Teacher Education.

References

  1. "Patricia A. Jennings". Curry School of Education and Human Development - University of Virginia. 10 August 2017.
  2. "When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom". NPR.org.
  3. 1 2 "Fighting Teacher Stress". 28 March 2019.
  4. "Awaken Pittsburgh develops mindfulness programs for youth, teachers". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
  5. "Teachers Are Stressed, And That Should Stress Us All". NPR.org.
  6. Harris, Elizabeth A. (23 October 2015). "Under Stress, Students in New York Schools Find Calm in Meditation". The New York Times via NYTimes.com.
  7. 1 2 Oaklander, Mandy. "The Mindful Classroom". Time.
  8. "Can mindfulness help stressed teachers stay in the classroom?". PBS NewsHour. 28 March 2019.
  9. Cohen, Alison; Gonchar, Michael (7 September 2017). "Cultivating Mindfulness for Educators Using Resources From The New York Times". New York Times.
  10. "When Teachers Get Mindfulness Training, Students Win". Greater Good.
  11. "10 Mindfulness Researchers You Should Know". Mindful. 6 December 2017.
  12. "Catherine Kerr Award for Courageous and Compassionate Scholarship". Mind & Life Institute. Retrieved 2023-02-18.
  13. "How to Build a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom Where All Learners Feel Safe". KQED. 3 December 2018.
  14. "Patricia Jennings - Profile". Greater Good.