Schools are searching for innovative ways to meet the unique academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs of adolescents, many of whom face serious personal and family challenges. An innovative practice that is currently being introduced into school settings is meditation. Types of meditation offered in school-based settings include mindfulness meditation, the relaxation response, and Transcendental Meditation. These practices, as cognitive-behavioral interventions that are available for use by social workers and other school professionals, help students to enhance academic and psychosocial strengths and improve self-regulation capacities and coping abilities.This article defines meditation and meditative practices, reviews the literature showing the benefits and challenges of offering meditation to adolescents in a school-based setting, and describes the relevance of these practices for adolescents. The article also discusses implications for school social workers, teachers, and school administrators and reflects on the current research and future efforts toward building the research base for the promising practice of meditation in schools.

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This article describes a feminist-informed reflective teaching project enacted by a group of social work faculty at Texas State University -San Marcos. Utilizing Schon's notion of reflection-in-action, faculty formed a participatory action research group to implement reflective techniques to further their professional development as new teachers and better prepare social work students for practice in the social work profession. This project guided the participants in establishing academic identity through the creation of a supportive academic setting and peer collegiality. The group met monthly to share reflective teaching journals (RTJs), participate in intergroup dialogue, and engage in contemplative practices, such as meditation and visualization. Methods of data collection and analysis included content analysis of the intergroup dialogue sessions. Findings from the project reinforced Kolb's experiential learning cycle, in which new insights gained from reflection were integrated back into the classroom. This article presents these important insights and suggests replication of this project to promote reflective teaching in social work education and to help prepare new social work faculty for success in academia.

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