Teachers are becoming increasingly exhausted, reactive, and disconnected from their sense of purpose. Some might think the problem is the workload, the parents, or the administration. Those pressures are real, but the deeper problem was invisible: chronic stress had changed how their brains worked. When stress becomes the baseline, attention narrows. Teachers stop being present with students and start mentally rehearsing tomorrow's problems or replaying yesterday's failures. Emotional reactions become automatic and the sense that education matters, the reason most teachers entered the profession, gets buried under survival-mode functioning.
Most wellbeing programs offer self-care tips or one-off workshops. These fail because they treat the symptoms while leaving the underlying pattern untouched. Teachers need practical skills to interrupt the cycle of stress, scattered attention, and lost meaning that's running in the background of their professional lives.
I designed Mindfulness Circles because I could see the pattern clearly in my colleagues, and I knew from the research and from my own practice that short, consistent contemplative practice could begin to shift it. The goal is not to removing difficulty, as teaching will always be hard. Instead, the goal is to restore the teachers' capacity to find meaning within that difficulty.
Teachers and staff meet biweekly in small cohorts for 30 minutes during existing PD time. The same people stay together throughout the program to build trust. The program moves through three phases, each one building on what came before.
Phase 1 focuses on the body. Teachers in survival mode can't think their way out. Simple breathing and body awareness practices calm the nervous system and teach attention as a skill that can be trained.
Phase 2 focuses on the mind. Teachers learn to notice their thought patterns without being controlled by them. They learn to recognize that a stressful thought is just a thought, not a fact. They practice turning toward difficulty instead of avoiding it, and they examine what in their lives nourishes them versus what drains them.
Phase 3 focuses on connection. Loving kindness practices and a sense of shared experience break the isolation that stressed teachers often feel. By this point, teachers can hold both the difficulty of their work and its meaning at the same time.
Every session follows the same structure: a short reading before arrival, a structured pair conversation, brief instruction from the facilitator, a short mindfulness practice, and written reflection in a personal journal. There is no technology required, and no extra time added to anyone's schedule. The program lives inside the PD structure the school already has.
Mindfulness Circles launched in January 2026 as a pilot at I Can School in Vietnam. It is currently in its first implementation cycle.
The program was designed from the start to be adoptable by other schools. Everything that makes it work is transferable:
It fits in 25-30 minute PD slots that most schools already schedule. It doesn't require additional time from already-exhausted teachers. The consistent session structure of read, reflect, learn, practice, write can be facilitated by any trained practitioner. All materials are being documented for open-source release.
The theoretical foundation integrates research on attention, resilience, meaning-making, and contemplative practice into a framework that makes intuitive sense to teachers: stress scatters your attention, scattered attention blocks your sense of meaning, and mindfulness practice interrupts this cycle.
Achievements to date: full curriculum designed and documented, three cohorts running simultaneously, program integrated into existing PD without additional scheduling burden, and a foundational academic paper articulating the theoretical model.
Goals for the next 2-3 years:
Complete pilot evaluation with pre/post data and qualitative feedback
Train interested teachers as peer facilitators so the program sustains itself
Publish an open-source facilitator guide with all session materials
Partner with other schools for adoption
Share the model at education conferences and through publication
Contact Matt at matthew-james.allen@icanschool.edu.vn for the facilitator guide, which includes session plans, pre-readings, reflection prompts, and assessment tools. You'll need someone trained in mindfulness-based approaches to facilitate, and existing PD time in your schedule. The program requires no technology, no special equipment, and no budget beyond what your school already spends on professional development.
