MBI-TAC: A Beginner's Guide

Helping you to navigate the Mindfulness-Based Intervention Teaching Assessment Criteria

The Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI-TAC) provides a comprehensive framework for assessing and developing the teaching of mindfulness-based interventions. It is designed to ensure the fidelity and integrity of mindfulness teaching, offering a structured approach for evaluating teacher competence across various domains. This framework supports teachers in cultivating the skills necessary to deliver mindfulness-based courses effectively, emphasizing the importance of personal practice, embodiment of mindfulness, and the ability to facilitate group learning.

Core Components of MBI-TAC

The MBI-TAC consists of six core domains, each focusing on a different aspect of mindfulness teaching:

Coverage, Pacing, and Organisation of Session Curriculum

This domain evaluates how well the teacher structures and delivers the curriculum, ensuring adherence to the programme's form while maintaining responsiveness and flexibility to meet the group's needs. Key features include the relevance and appropriateness of themes and content, the teacher's organisational skills, and the session's flow and pacing.

Relational Skills

In this domain, the focus is on the teacher's ability to build supportive and empathetic relationships with participants. It involves being authentic and potent, establishing connections and acceptance, demonstrating compassion and warmth, showing genuine curiosity and respect, and fostering a mutual and collaborative working relationship.

Embodying Mindfulness

This domain assesses the teacher's personal practice of mindfulness as reflected in their teaching. Key features include present-moment focus and responsiveness, a balance of steadiness and vitality, qualities of allowing such as non-judging and acceptance, and a natural presence that is authentic to the teacher.

Guiding Mindfulness Practices

This domain examines the clarity, precision, and adaptability of the teacher's guidance during mindfulness practices. Key elements include the use of language that is accessible and conveys spaciousness, ensuring key learnings are available, and considering particular elements for each practice, including safety and trauma considerations.

Conveying Course Themes through Interactive Inquiry and Didactic Teaching

It involves the teacher's ability to articulate and facilitate understanding of course themes using a variety of teaching methods. This includes maintaining an experiential focus, skilfully navigating the inquiry process, fluently conveying themes, and effectively enabling participant learning.

Holding the Group Learning Environment

The final domain focuses on creating and managing a conducive learning environment. This includes establishing a safe yet open space for exploration, managing group development and dynamics, connecting personal learning to universal themes, and demonstrating effective leadership without imposing views.

Levels of Competence and Adherence

The MBI-TAC outlines levels of competence adapted from the Dreyfus Scale of Competence, with modifications to better suit the assessment of mindfulness-based teaching. The scale incorporates an additional level of 'incompetence' and renames 'novice' to 'beginner' and 'expert' to 'advanced'. This structure is intended to provide a nuanced view of a teacher's abilities across different domains of teaching mindfulness-based interventions. The levels of competence are:

1. Incompetent: Teaching demonstrates a significant lack of key features, inappropriate performance, or harmful behavior. There is no evidence of understanding the fundamentals of MBI teaching, leading to likely negative outcomes.

2. Beginner: The teacher shows basic competence in at least one key feature across domains but lacks consistency and has many areas requiring development.

3. Advanced Beginner: Demonstrates competence in two key features in each domain, ensuring participants' safety. However, there are major problems in other areas, indicating a need for greater consistency across domains.

4. Competent: All key features are mostly present, with some good aspects but also some inconsistencies. The teacher shows a workable level of competence, indicating they are 'fit for practice'.

5. Proficient: Shows sustained competence with only minor problems or inconsistencies, suggesting a deeper familiarity and comfort with the teaching process.

6. Advanced: Exhibits excellent or very good teaching practice, even in challenging situations. The teacher has a deep, tacit understanding of MBI teaching, demonstrating flexibility and originality in their approach.

Best Practices for Using the MBI-TAC

Utilising the MBI-TAC offers an opportunity to develop your mindfulness and teaching practices. As you explore the domains of the MBI-TAC, consider it not as a static framework but as a guide that changes with you as your teaching practice develops. Here’s how you can make the most of it:

Reflect Purposefully

Take the MBI-TAC as a companion on your teaching journey, one that encourages you to pause and reflect on your sessions. After each class, revisit the domains, asking yourself how each element manifested in your teaching. This isn't about self-judgment but about recognising your growth areas and celebrating your strengths.

Collaborate and Share

Your exploration of the MBI-TAC doesn’t have to be a solitary endeavour. Collaborate with fellow teachers, sharing insights and experiences. This could range from formal peer-review sessions to informal discussions. Through this sharing, you enrich your understanding, gaining perspectives that illuminate your practice in unexpected ways.

Targeted Professional Development

With the MBI-TAC as your guide, identify specific areas for growth and pursue development opportunities that align with these needs. Choose supervision topics, training, or literature that resonate with your teaching style and personal practice. This targeted approach ensures that your professional development is both meaningful and impactful.

Seek and Offer Mentorship

Mentorship is a two-way street that can profoundly influence your teaching journey. Whether seeking a mentor or offering guidance to others, engage with the MBI-TAC to foster a relationship of mutual growth and learning. This connection not only supports your own development but also contributes to the broader mindfulness teaching community.

Embrace Continuous Learning

Approach the MBI-TAC with a mindset of continuous learning, staying open to new research, methods, and perspectives in mindfulness teaching. This curiosity keeps your practice up-to-date, innovative, and ensures your teaching remains impactful.

By integrating the MBI-TAC into your teaching practice in these ways, you transform it from a mere assessment tool into a dynamic guide for personal and professional development.

References

Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice. (2021). Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI-TAC). Bangor University. Retrieved from https://mbitac.bangor.ac.uk/mbitac-tool.php.en

Appendix: MBI-TAC Domains and their Key Features

Coverage, Pacing, and Organisation of Session Curriculum

Assessing the teacher's ability to structure and deliver the course content effectively, maintaining balance between different components.

Key features:

1. Adherence – The teacher adheres to the form of the programme,

   and covers the themes and curriculum content.

2. Responsiveness and flexibility – in adhering to the session curriculum.

3. Appropriateness – Appropriateness of the themes and content

   (taking into account the stage of the programme and experience of the participants).

4. Organisation – Level of organisation of the teacher, room and materials.

5. Session flow – The degree to which the session flows and is appropriately paced.

Relational Skills

Evaluating the teacher's capacity to develop a supportive and empathetic relationship with participants, fostering a safe and inclusive learning environment.

Key features:

1. Authenticity and potency – Relating in a way which seems genuine, honest and confident.

2. Connection and acceptance – Actively attending to and connecting with participants and their present moment experience and conveying back an accurate and empathic understanding of this.

3. Compassion and warmth – Conveying a deep awareness, sensitivity, appreciation and openness to participants’ experience.

4. Curiosity and respect – Conveying genuine interest in each participant and their experience while respecting each participant’s vulnerabilities, boundaries and need for privacy.

5. Mutuality – Engaging with the participants in a mutual and collaborative working relationship.

Embodying Mindfulness

The extent to which the teacher's personal practice of mindfulness is reflected in their teaching, demonstrating mindfulness principles in action.

Key features:

1. Focus – Present moment focus expressed through behaviour and non-verbal communication.

2. Responsiveness – Present moment responsiveness, working with the emergent moment with spaciousness and ease.

3. Steadiness and vitality – the teacher simultaneously conveys calm, ease, non-reactivity and alertness.

4. Allowing – the teacher brings forth qualities of non-judging, patience, trusting,

   accepting and non-striving.

5. Natural presence – the teacher’s behaviour is natural and authentic to their own intrinsic mode of operating.

Guiding Mindfulness Practices

The skillfulness of the teacher in guiding participants through mindfulness exercises, including clarity of instructions and adaptability to participants' needs.

Key features:

1. Language – Language is clear, precise, accurate and accessible while conveying spaciousness.

2. Key learning - The teacher guides the practice in a way that makes the key learning for each practice available to participants (see checklists for each practice in the manual).

3. Particular elements - The teacher considers the particular elements for each practice while guiding (see checklists for each practice in the manual). These include practical issues, and safety and trauma considerations.

Conveying Course Themes through Interactive Inquiry and Didactic Teaching

The ability to articulate the key themes of the course, facilitating understanding through inquiry-based learning and direct teaching.

Key features:

1. Experiential focus – Supporting participants to notice and describe the different elements of direct experience and their interaction with each other; teaching themes are consistently linked to this direct experience.

2. Inquiry process layers - Moving around the layers within the inquiry process

   (direct experience, reflection on direct experience, and linking both to wider learning) with a predominant focus on process rather than content.

3. Conveying themes – The teacher conveys the learning themes through skilful teaching using a range of teaching approaches, including: inquiry; didactic teaching; experiential and group exercises; stories; poems, and action methods, etc.

4. Fluency – The teacher brings fluency, confidence and ease to the teaching process.

5. Enabling learning - The teaching is effective in enabling learning to happen.

Holding the Group Learning Environment

1. Learning container – Creating and sustaining a rich learning environment made safe through careful management of issues such as ground rules, boundaries and confidentiality, but which is simultaneously a place in which participants can explore and take risks.

2. Group development – Clear management of the group development processes over the eight weeks, particularly regarding the management of the group in terms of beginnings, endings and challenges.

3. Personal to universal learning – The teacher consistently opens the learning process towards connection with the universality and common humanity of the processes under exploration.

4. Leadership style – The teacher offers sustained ‘holding,’ and demonstrates authority and potency without imposing the teacher’s views on participants.