Mindfulness in education: The need to properly understand an effective construct

In the recent years, the Iranian studies on mindfulness has only repeated the positive effectiveness of mindfulness-based training on the various constructs of teachers' professional and personal lives, however, they neglected the usefulness of these trainings. In addition, these studies do not address the theoretical and practical challenges raised by the issue of mindfulness in education over the past decade. The purpose of this paper is to answer questions that are raised in relation to these challenges. This paper reports a descriptive-analytical research and it has been developed in two parts: the basis of usefulness of mindfulness for teachers and the recent challenges to mindfulness in education. In the first part, the neurological basis of mindfulness practices has been dealt with. In the second part, in addition to the common challenges around the mindfulness, the concept of mc-mindfulness and its threat to the realm of education has been considered. The most important weakness of this version of mindfulness is ignoring the ontological basis, and moral end in training of a truly mindful personality. In what follows, the distinction between the two concepts of 'thin mindfulness' and 'thick mindfulness' has been presented as the first step to face the challenges of mindfulness in education. Finally, it is pointed out that the future research must necessarily refrain from merely repeating the effectiveness of mindfulness on students and teachers and pay attention to new challenges regarding mindfulness in education. In particular, it should be remembered that the goal of mindfulness is to achieve a personality that is characterized by compassion for oneself and others.