110 Chapter 6 expected that these adaptations may have a positive influence on the social and cognitive development of pupils. So from the current study we can conclude that there is a mutual connection between elementary school teachers’ personal and professional skills. The acquired personal skills thus have a positive impact on the professional skills that in addition allowed teachers to better adapt their teaching to the needs of their pupils. This contributes to the findings of a study by Hwang et al (2019), in which it was found that learning to be self-compassionate could function as self-help skills, promote person-centered teaching practices, and enhance interconnectivity between teachers and students. Also, Jennings (2015) suggested the critical importance of selfcare and how by addressing one’s own physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual well-being teachers become better equipped to meet the needs of their students in the classroom. Finally, we found effects on classroom climate. Teachers observed effects, for example, on concentration and more ‘calmness’ in both the children themselves and in the classroom, more expressing and naming of feelings and emotions by the pupils and more prosocial behaviour towards classmates. Teachers experienced that changing their attitude, behaviour and content of lessons directly impacted the classroom climate quality. It is a promising finding that a standard MBSR intervention – not especially adapted for the educational field – has positive effects on pupil and on classroom functioning through the effects it exerts on teachers. With these findings the current study adds to previous studies (e.g. Schlusser, 2019; Klingbeil & Rendshaw, 2018; MackKenzie et al., 2020) in which it was suggested to also examine effects on teachers personal functioning and classroom quality and to provide insight in working mechanisms of the intervention (Lomas et al., 2017). A strong point of the current study is the fact that this qualitative study involved a large number of teachers from 23 different schools. A diversity of teachers and participating schools will contribute to the generalizability of this research. Another strong point is the fact that we had an independent interviewer who is familiar with education and mindfulness. By using an independent interviewer in the focus groups, possible social desirability might have been reduced. However, this has obviously not been the case during the last session group interviews. A third strength is the diversity of the expert group that has thematized, in which there were a number of experts who had no experience with mindfulness. The fact that there were five different researchers represented in the expert team who discussed the codes and combined them to themes ensured different perspectives on the data could be seen as a strength as well. Lastly, strong point of the current study was the triangulation, because it allowed us to obtain a better impression of the reliability and validity of the effects. Most other (mixed) studies only rely on individual interviews in particular (Hwang et al.,2019; Mackenzie et al., 2020; Schlusser et al., 2019).
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