About Peter

Peter Franklin is the founder of Mindful Educator, and Chief Mindfulness Guy.  His mission is to vastly improve today’s educational landscape and prepare each student for the future by changing the classroom paradigm.  He does this by fostering a student-centered learning environment, facilitated through leadership coaching and mindfulness.

As a Certified Mindfulness Instructor (Mindful Schools) and a .b Mindfulness in Schools teacher & instructor, Peter has invested countless hours developing his own mindfulness practice and completed the Mindful-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course of study, as well. For the last several years, Peter has integrated mindfulness into his classrooms and run numerous Professional Development workshops for his colleagues and administrators to do the same. 

Peter began his teaching career after graduate school in 1975 and has spent twenty years teaching English at the high school and college levels. Throughout this tenure, he came to realize that most student and teacher interactions revolve around the grade, with the student asking the questions and the teacher being the all-knowing party who provides the answers.  He saw that this approach was not effective at engaging the student and promoting true learning and comprehension.

Peter went in search of a better method and learned about the value of leadership coaching as a way to more fully engage with students through inquiry.  He became a Certified Professional Leadership Coach (CPC) from the world-class Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC).  In a “coaching environment,” Peter and the students collaborate on the grading process, critique their papers and complete the rubrics together. Through motivating and empowering questions, he is able to help his students self-correct and find their own answers.  The results of his approach are substantial. After bringing leadership coaching skills into the classroom, his students are more energetic, engaged, and happier than he has ever seen them. They are retaining more and their work quality has improved significantly.

Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a graduate degree in Education from the University of California, Davis. In addition, he has a law degree from Concord University School of Law. He resides in Marblehead, Massachusetts with his wife of 32 years. Together they have a 28-year-old daughter, a 23-year-old son and a Portuguese Water Dog, Zorro. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, cycling, and writing poetry.