Charlie Sutherland lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches preschool at the U School, where he has worked to integrate mindfulness practice into the curriculum and pedagogy for the children, as well as into trainings for parents, families, and his fellow educators.

Near the beginning of his teaching career, Charlie first began meditating in order to develop concentration power.

I started meditating partly out of curiosity and partly out of necessity. At the time, I was a public high school teacher. Public school environments are not well designed for concentration, and I could feel my attention span shortening. For the first year or so of practice, I was swimming around trying to find books and figure out how to learn. Then I stumbled into Shinzen’s work, and I felt more clear about what I was learning, and aligned with his approach.

Right from the beginning, applying practice in the classroom has been an interest of mine.  When I first became a preschool teacher, I was working in Montessori classrooms, which are environments that are designed for concentration. I learned more about mindfulness in early childhood education through that experience.

I’ve been at the U School since it opened in September 2015, and since then I've been focused on finding ways to bake mindfulness into the way we deliver curriculum and, really, into how our school operates for everyone involved. It's been a lot of fun and I think it's been helpful.\

Another integral piece of Charlie’s work has been developing the U School Lexicon, a mindful language tool.

The U School Lexicon is a way of speaking and guidelines for communication with young children that we created to use with the children and to train teachers and families. When families that take the training, their child is in the classroom hearing this language from us, and then they're going home where their parents are also on board, using the same language and practices.

We like to say that at the U School, the whole family enrolls. The goal of our mindfulness trainings is to educate the whole team of grownups who care for a particular child. When we get that sort of critical mass, that's when we hear “Wow, there's so much less conflict in our house” or that things are more peaceful. And that that's when I get the biggest smile.

When Charlie heard Shinzen talk about Word Power, he became curious how his work -- mindful pedagogy and communication with children from the age of three -- might overlap with or relate to Shinzen’s Word Power. He’s also interested in how to interact with the children in his classroom while maintaining deep technique.

To the extent that I can currently do this skillfully, I start to experience interactions where my teacher-response emerges more organically from within the children's situation itself. Then my coaching of their play tends to come across less like a bumbling grown-up reacting from without, and more like some useful coaching and modeling arising just as much as they need. But I wonder if there are specific ways I can accelerate this skill development?