Many mindfulness teachers have strong inner critics. The slightest perceived clumsiness in wording, moment of inattention, or missed opportunity to make a learning point, and we wonder if we’re competent.

If we could ask the participants, they might say they haven’t noticed any clumsiness in wording, the teacher seems attentive and interested, and they’re learning a lot in this course. Teachers might find this reassuring.

On the other hand, the participants might have experienced something in the teacher’s way of teaching that was problematic for them. It would be helpful to have a systematic way to ask participants about this.

Introducing the new MBI:PAT

Thanks to a recently published paper by an international team of mindfulness researchers and teachers, we now have a scientifically sound way of asking the participants about the competence of their mindfulness teacher – the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Participants’ Assessment of Teaching (MBI:PAT).

The MBI:PAT is based on the MBI:TAC (Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria). As many mindfulness teachers know, the MBI:TAC is an observational tool for assessing the skills required for competent teaching of evidence-based mindfulness courses. It’s available in several versions.

The original version was developed to evaluate the competence of mindfulness teachers based on a formal assessment. The mindfulness teacher records themselves teaching an entire course and the recordings are evaluated by a trained assessor. The assessor is looking for skills in six domains:

1. Coverage of the curriculum, pacing and organisation
2. Relating to the participants
3. Embodying mindfulness
4. Guiding mindfulness practices
5. Conveying course themes
6. Creating a supportive group learning environment

The challenge with formal assessment

Formal assessment of skills can induce anxiety and self-criticism. A less intimidating version, known as the MBI:TLC (Teaching and Learning Companion) is intended to support teachers at any stage of their training and beyond. The TLC can be used in supervision and for self-reflection about teaching skills, without the pressure of formal assessment.

Neither the MBI:TAC nor the TLC includes the participants’ perspectives on their teacher’s skills. The MBI:PAT helps to fill this gap. It covers the same six domains, in questionnaire format, and asks participants to rate specific skills or experiences on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 6 (outstanding!)

You might be wondering how participants can rate certain elements of the MBI:TAC. Participants don’t know what each session is meant to include. They might not realise if the teacher left out something important or included something that doesn’t belong there. It wouldn’t be helpful to ask participants how embodied their teacher was, as they might not know what this term means. Only trained raters, or the teachers themselves, can reflect on such things in an informed way.

How the MBI:PAT works

The MBI:PAT works with this by using ordinary language to capture skills and experiences that participants can notice and reflect on. Here are some examples:

• The pace of the classes was right for me; for example, the activities were not too rushed or too slow (Domain 1)
• The teacher seemed genuinely interested in participants’ experiences during practices (Domain 2)
• I got the impression that the teacher followed what they taught in class in their everyday life (Domain 3)
• When guiding mindfulness practices, the teacher’s instructions helped me to understand what to do when my mind wandered (Domain 4)
• The teacher helped me understand how awareness of thoughts, feelings and body sensations can be helpful (Domain 5)
• The teacher’s style of leading seemed right for the group (Domain 6)

What the new research tells us

This new paper includes several important findings about the MBI:PAT.

• First, the questionnaire is psychometrically strong. This means that the scores derived from it are likely to be reliable and valid indicators of the participants’ perceptions of their teacher’s competence.
• Second, higher MBI:PAT scores were associated with larger increases in mental wellbeing, meaning that participants who perceived their teacher as more competent showed greater benefits from the course.
• Third, people who experienced their teacher as less competent were more likely to have distressing unpleasant experiences during the course. Only a small number of participants had distressing unpleasant experiences, and so this finding is based on limited data. Even so, it highlights the importance of competent teaching to support participants in understanding and working skilfully with the difficulties that naturally arise in mindfulness courses.

Limitations in the research

One limitation is that the mindfulness courses were delivered by a small number of well-trained and experienced teachers who meet the good practice guidelines provided by the British Association for Mindfulness-Based Approaches (BAMBA).

From a teaching perspective, this is of course a desirable situation; it’s best if everyone taking a mindfulness course has a well-trained and experienced teacher who meets good practice guidelines.

The problem for research is that it’s hard to see patterns if all of the teachers are highly competent. To see patterns in research, we need variation. But ethically, we can’t recruit incompetent mindfulness teachers for a study, because the participants are real people, and they might have an unsatisfactory experience or even be harmed.

Even with this limitation, the relationship between greater competence and greater benefit was significant.

A question that was not answered by this research is how the MBI:PAT compares to a formal assessment with the MBI:TAC. It would be very interesting to investigate whether formal assessments by trained MBI:TAC assessors reach the same conclusions as the ratings by the participants in the courses. Perhaps the participants have a different perspective on the most important teaching skills. At this point, we don’t really know.

Another unanswered question is whether more competent teachers are more effective in encouraging participants to practice outside of sessions. If so, it would support something we already suspect is true: that helping participants to work with obstacles to home practice is an important teaching skill.

How mindfulness teachers could use the MBI:PAT

Asking course participants to complete the MBI:PAT at the end of a course would take only a few minutes and would give the teacher important information about how the course was received. Low ratings would indicate areas for possible skill development, whereas high ratings could reassure the teacher that basic elements of competence are present from the participants’ perspective.

It’s important to remember that the MBI:PAT is not a formal MBI:TAC assessment. It’s possible to have important learning needs as a teacher, even if participants are giving high ratings on the MBI:PAT.

Even so, the MBI:PAT could provide useful insights for teachers about their participants’ perceptions, and we invite teachers of evidence-based mindfulness courses to use this new tool.

We would love to hear your impressions of it.