Laura Bean

Affiliation

De Anza High School

Biography

Laura Bean is excited to combine two of her great loves, mindfulness and poetry, to promote healthy, productive classroom environments. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and spent ten years practicing meditation and teaching ESL at the college level in Kyoto, Japan. For the past seven years she has been developing the Write to the Core curriculum, which integrates social-emotional learning with reading and writing. Her work promotes self-reflection, empathy, compassion, and creativity and is aligned with Common Core Standards. After becoming a certified mindfulness educator through Mindful Schools in 2019, she was featured at a mindful youth conference sponsored by the Center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego. She has shared her experience and passion for mindfulness and creative self-expression with her colleagues and led professional development for West Contra Costa Unified School District and the Tang Center at UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Magazine and in the anthology Educating Mindfully, published by the Coalition of Schools Educating Mindfully. Laura lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches English Language Development and mindfulness to high school students in Richmond, California.