About Mindful Schools Retreats

Mindfulness Practice • Community • Connection

Strengthen your inner resilience and gain inspiration alongside a community of like-minded educators. Mindful Schools retreats are an opportunity to expand and deepen personal practice through more dedicated periods of guided practice. Together, we explore and cultivate a range of mindfulness strategies that support educator well-being in the classroom and beyond.

Join us for a day dedicated to mindfulness practice, community, and connection. Our retreats are five-hour, live virtual events guided by Mindful Schools faculty.

Upcoming Retreats

Spring Retreat

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Retreat Registration: $195

Registration Deadline: April 18 at 11:59PM PT

Spring Mindfulness Retreat for Educators

Saturday, April 20, 2024
8AM–1PM PT / 11AM–4PM ET
Guided by April Frazier, Lucy MacGregor, Raúl Betancourt, and Tanya Farmer

Mindful Schools retreats are an opportunity to expand and deepen personal practice through more dedicated periods of guided practice. Together, we explore and cultivate a range of mindfulness strategies that support your well-being in the classroom and beyond. This is a live virtual event––guided by Mindful Schools faculty, April Frazier, Lucy MacGregor, Raúl Betancourt, and Tanya Farmer––designed to nurture your well-being, supporting you to strengthen your resilience, agency, and inspiration in the final stretch of the school year. Join us for a day dedicated to mindfulness practice, community, and connection!

The retreat schedule includes:

  • Guided Silent Practice, Movement, Journaling
  • Connection and Interaction in Small Groups
  • Q&A with Faculty

Read our guide: How to Prepare for Retreat at Home

Certificate of Attendance is provided for attendees who meet the criteria, see FAQs.

Spring Retreat Registration

Saturday, April 20, 2024

This retreat is offered with sliding scale options in an effort to create access for as many educators as possible. We depend on you to select the option that most closely represents your financial capacity. Our intention is to uphold this sliding scaled option for as long as it is sustainable. We thank you for your thoughtful selection. $195 suggested tuition for families making over $75,000 a year.

Meet the Mindful Schools faculty guiding this retreat:

April Frazier (she/her)
April has served as a middle school teacher at an under-served school in the South Bronx. She considers herself a lifelong learner of mindfulness and yoga as a tool for self-empowerment and social justice in diverse, resilient communities. In 2010, she completed her 200-hr teacher certification through Dharma Yoga certification and has since held space for yoga in under-performing schools, trauma centers, and addiction centers to cultivate inner healing. April has also been certified in laughter yoga, yoga for 12 step recovery, off the mat and into the world, restorative justice, and various trauma-informed and mindfulness in-schools programs. These days, her main mindfulness practice is being a foster mom.

Lucy MacGregor (she/her)
Lucy has taught children and youth in a variety of classroom and therapeutic settings from instructing teens at North Carolina Outward Bound School to educating young people in preschool. She is currently the Director of Teaching and Learning at Shalom Children’s Program.

Lucy facilitates professional communities of practice focused on cultivating restorative school communities and increasing capacities of mindful well-being in students, educators, and families. She holds a Masters In Education, Mindfulness for Educators, from Antioch University New England, an Early Childhood Montessori Credential form the Center for Guided Montessori Studies, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from Oglethorpe University. 

Raúl K. Betancourt (he/him)
Raúl is an educator and mindfulness practitioner with 25 years of experience teaching science to middle and high school students. As a teacher, Raúl found that his meditation practice helped him navigate the stress of school, and he began sharing mindfulness tools with students and colleagues. Motivated by the impact he saw on those around him, Raúl increased his focus on mindfulness education in schools, becoming a teacher for the teen group at East Bay Meditation Center and a mentor for iBme teen mindfulness retreats. Raúl began his own mindfulness practice as a teenager, learning from monastics at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. He then went on to study Zen at centers in the US, Japan, and recently in Hawai’i at Chozen-Ji Zen Dojo, where he was a live-in student at the start of the pandemic and continued to study since then. Raúl’s years of training have focused on integrating mindfulness into daily life, and he’s passionate about sharing these valuable tools with students and teachers.

Tanya Farmer (she/her)
Tanya has taught yoga, meditation and mindfulness in NYC public schools for the past 8 years. In her role as lead yoga teacher she created a yoga curriculum for kindergarten-8th graders, led professional developments for staff members and hosted a weekly Morning Show focused on cultivating social emotional and mindfulness skills. She brings heartfulness and optimism into everything she does. Tanya was drawn to mindfulness as a way to access peace and she loves sharing what she’s learned to empower, uplift and bring people together. She has a deep belief in the possibility for human transformation through awareness practices and strives to create safe and joyful spaces for all participants. Tanya is a certified mindfulness instructor through MNDFL and works as a kids yoga instructor with Bent on Learning. She is a proud plant mom living in Brooklyn, New York.

Why Retreats for Educators?

In our 101 and 201 courses, educators learn that a mindfulness practice is not something that we “achieve” and then check off as complete. It is an ongoing process of learning and investigation into ourselves and our experience. As we cultivate awareness over time, and through more dedicated periods of practice like retreats, we deepen our understanding of what it means to be an embodied educator. This is a foundational element of the Mindful Schools Domains of Mindful Teaching framework (see pg 4), supporting us to approach our work with young people with curiosity and compassion.

What to Expect

Our retreats are five-hour, live virtual events guided by Mindful Schools faculty. Retreats include both silent and guided practices as well as interactive elements to connect with each other as a community.

Since you will be joining us virtually, our faculty will create a retreat container that is both firm enough to hold your experience, and also flexible enough to meet our varied living circumstances. View our guide: How to Prepare for Retreat at Home.

Faculty

All retreats are guided by Mindful Schools faculty. You can learn more about our amazing faculty members, or Program Facilitators, on the “Meet Our Team” page.


Retreat FAQs

How do I join the live event? When you register, you will receive call-in instructions to join the zoom room as well as a 1-hour reminder on the day of the event.

What if I can’t make the live event? This live event will not be recorded. We encourage you to make necessary accommodations to attend the event at the scheduled time.

What can I expect at this retreat with Mindful Schools? Please read our How to Prepare for Retreat guide.

Who is this retreat for? Do I need a certain level of mindfulness or retreat experience to participate? Our retreats are appropriate for all levels of experience. Mindful Schools programs are designed by educators––for educators, counselors, parents, and a wide range of school community members who are excited to share mindfulness with students. We encourage you to take our 101: Mindfulness Foundations course so you may participate with a shared understanding of the Mindful Schools practice framework of secular mindfulness.

Cancellations: In order to receive a full refund, cancellations must be made at least 48 hours prior to the scheduled event. Refunds will not be granted after this time. If you need to cancel and request a refund, please contact support@mindfulschools.org.

Certificate of Attendance:
To be eligible for a Certificate of Attendance, participants are required to:

  • Register and pay for the retreat by the registration deadline (published on the event page)
  • Attend in full. Attendance will be verified if you complete the following:
    • Join the retreat, by web browser or Zoom App (not dialing in by phone) within the first 10-minutes of the start of the retreat.  
    • Join the retreat using the same email as used to register.
    • Stay logged-in, and engaged, for the duration of the retreat.
  • Complete the event survey within 1 week of receiving the link to access the survey. The survey link will be emailed on the day of the event.

Certificates of Attendance will be emailed to those who complete the attendance requirements and submit the survey within the stated time frame. Certificates will be emailed 2 weeks after the event.

Important Notes:

  • Certificates are available only for those who complete the attendance and survey requirements, without exception. 
  • It is the responsibility of the participant to ensure adequate internet reliability and bandwidth. 
  • Incomplete attendance nullifies eligibility for the certificate. Attendance is considered incomplete if the participant joins more than 10 minutes after the start time, has gaps in attendance, or leaves early. We are unable to give partial credit for incomplete attendance. 
  • There is a $20 fee to reissue certificates, and certificates are available only if the attendance and survey requirements were met.

We use cookies to personalize content and ads, and to analyze our traffic. To learn more, please visit our Privacy Policy.