75 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for elementary school teachers: a randomized controlled trial found the mindfulness training valuable in their demanding professional lives, as evident from high participation rates. Importantly, the study leverages an existing training intervention, ensuring widespread availability for prompt, personalized implementation in educational settings at various levels. This study also has limitations. First, participation was voluntary, potentially affecting the applicability of findings to mandatory program attendees. The urban-centric study population may limit generalizability, given regional stress variations (Abel & Sewell, 1999). All groups had the same mindfulness teacher, impacting generalizability. Future research should diversify geographical regions, trainers, and explore various program delivery features for a comprehensive understanding (Hill et al., 2013). Secondly, this study relied on self-reported questionnaires, introducing the possibility of social desirability and other biases (Caputo, 2017). The assessment of teaching quality, in particular, might have benefited from additional observer-rated measures. For future research, it is important to consider incorporating more objective outcome measures alongside self-report data, aligning with the notion of utilizing direct observations of classroom variables or informant-report measures (Klingbeil & Renshaw, 2018). Moreover, relying on a single source of information tends to overinflate the significance and size of detected effects. We suggest to include pupil perspectives and to further explore teachers’ experiences through qualitative research methods to gain a more indepth understanding of their perceptions regarding the impact of MBSR. In that regard, it might also be interesting to investigate to what extent the MBSR for teachers has an effect on pupil performance. Additionally, investigating whether MBSR enhances teaching quality, as assessed by the adoption of an enthusiastic and motivating style, could provide valuable insights as well (e.g., Keller et al., 2016; Moè & Katz, 2022; Taxer & Frenxzel, 2018). Last, because the control group was a waiting list rather than active control group the study design does not allow to differentiate between specific and non-specific effects of (parts of) the intervention. Implications Many school organizations are seeking a way to reduce teachers’ perceived stress without compromising the quality of teaching and education. Based on our findings, it might be beneficial to implement MBSR within educational settings as a stress prevention intervention. We do stress the importance of addressing perceived stress in elementary school teachers not only through individual interventions, but to also take the broader context and system into account in which teachers operate. 4
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