Pre-service Teachers’ Mindfulness and Anxiety

Abstract

 Abstract — Teaching has become a very strenuous profession and successful teachers are defined not only by their scientific and psycho-pedagogic abilities, but also by their ability to be aware of everything that is going on in their classroom and in their students’ minds, hence, the necessity of metacognitive training (Henter, 2014) for the cognitive part, doubled by the development of personal abilities such as perseverance, receptivity, tolerance and acceptance that can be attained through mindful practices. Pre-service teachers face many anxiogenic situations as they do not have experience and are under continuous observation. One proven way to reduce anxiety is being mindful. Mindfulness is defined as the ability to draw one’s attention to the experiences occurring in the present moment without judging them and in an accepting way (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and research has shown the possibility of training mindfulness skills, meaning that they can be taught and learned through specific methods. Our hypothesis was that pre-service teachers with high levels of mindfulness skills are less anxious during their teaching activities and they feel greater well-being than those not practicing mindfulness. Students preparing to become teachers were given a mindfulness and an anxiety inventory. The findings are discussed in the present