Teach .b Application

1. Ongoing commitment of a .b teacher

.b is a classroom-based course for teaching in educational settings with safeguarding in place. It must not be taught as a public course.

To find out more about how and where you can teach .b please refer to the Terms & Conditions and the FAQs page for teaching the .b curriculum.

We ask that anyone applying to train to teach .b understands and agrees to the prerequisites and adheres to these standards on an ongoing basis.

1.1 – Personal Mindfulness Practice

Having an established personal mindfulness practice allows you to:

Teach mindfully
Embody mindfulness
Model mindfulness to young people
Guide practices with awareness
Skilfully respond in enquiry

1.2 – Teaching Mindfulness to Young People

Ability to engage pupils in a classroom setting
Good class management skills
Good communication skills
To inform and include staff and senior leadership in the mindfulness work in the school in which you are teaching

PLEASE NOTE:

If applying to train to teach .b, previous experience of teaching or working in some capacity with groups of students in the relevant age group (11 – 18) is crucial.

If you intend to be a self-employed teacher of .b going into schools, it is important to be aware that many schools have limited resources to pay for external providers of teaching and training. Before investing in training to teach .b, we recommend that you approach schools in your area to find out if they might employ you as an external teacher.

I agree to meet the ongoing commitments of teaching the .b curriculum and will not teach .b as a public course, ie outside the context of a school, sports club or other educational or youth-related organisations where safeguarding policies and procedures are not in place.

2.2 – Formal practice

A personal practice on 5 out of 7 days a week, for a period of at least 1-2 months’ between the completion of your 8-week course and the start of the training to which you are applying.

We would expect this personal practice to involve a range of practices, including the formal practices explored as part of an 8-week secular mindfulness course alongside shorter practices built into your day such as mindful eating, walking and awareness of senses. We ask that you aim for a daily formal practice where possible for 20 consecutive minutes per day.

Longer practice periods allow you to develop an experiential understanding to support you to leading a range of practices as part of the .b curriculum.

The practices, commonly found in MBSR and MBCT courses provide the scaffolding that underlies the .b curriculum, and it is assumed that those who attend our teacher training courses have a well-embedded experiential understanding of the key practices involved. Your own practice is fundamental to teaching the curriculum to the young people you work with. It is assumed that those who attend our teacher training courses have a well-embedded experiential understanding of the key practices involved in these adult 8-week courses. This will then support you when leading young people in the range of practices explored in .b, and allow you to deal more skilfully with any questions or responses that arise out of them and strengthens your capacity to model mindfulness in holding the experience of others, and to respond skilfully if difficult situations arise for young people in the classroom.

What does not count as formal mindfulness practice?

Informal practices are ways of integrating mindfulness into your daily life, using the breathing space or through mindful activity such as mindful eating, mindful cooking, mindful walking, mindful sports etc.

We encourage you to practice these alongside formal meditation practice.

Many other practices have elements of mindfulness within them but are not included in our prerequisites, as they are not directly related to our curricula e.g. yoga, relaxation, visualisation and transcendental meditation.

Where possible, use both silent and guided practice

Guided practices (using recorded guidance) are a helpful way of internalising the scripts and structures of the practices in question. It is also essential tot develop your ability to guide yourself in silence before training to teach mindfulness to young people. Silent practice enables you to be responsive to what comes up in the present moment and forms the basis of being able to guide others while remaining grounded in your own experience.

I practise mindfulness as set out above for at least 20 minutes a day, 5 out of 7 days a week.

Teach .b Application