For the first time since 2020, the Cathey Simmons Humphreys Distinguished Lecture Series returned to campus. Professor Tish Jennings delivered the Humphreys Lecture Feb. 17 at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Her talk, “Building Resilience with Mindfulness and Compassion,” focused on how mindfulness-based approaches can help adults and children manage the stressful demands of life today, cultivate supportive interactions and promote optimal human development.
Those in attendance were given tools for mindful awareness practices for managing stress and promoting wellbeing and learned how to introduce mindfulness-based practices to children to support learning. Jennings’ research on mindfulness in education was also discussed.
Jennings is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of social and emotional learning and mindfulness in education and professor of education at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Her research places a specific emphasis on teacher stress and how it impacts the social and emotional context of the classroom. Earlier in her career, Jennings spent more than 22 years as a teacher, school director and teacher educator. Her latest book is Teacher Burnout Turnaround: Strategies for Empowered Teachers.
