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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Addressing everyday suffering in schools through compassion
Compassion and dignity provide an essential framework for building caring and inclusive schools. Many books focus on what teachers can do as individuals; Creating Compassionate Change in School Communities is different. This book focuses both on how educators can cultivate compassion within themselves and lead together to cultivate humanizing school environments. Teachers, librarians, counselors, resource specialists, mental health professionals, and social workers who are working to create conditions for compassion and dignity in schools are all leaders who can impact change. Offering concrete evidence and case studies that showcase the power of compassion to create flourishing school communities and rejuvenate education, the book will help all educators better serve K-12 students with school cultures that promote healing. Compassion can be cultivated, dignity can be affirmed, and leaders need skillful means to do so—tools and practices that can help them develop compassion for themselves and others and see their own dignity and that of others.
- Experiment and engage in meditation practices to strengthen personal capacity for mindfulness and compassion and the application to the classroom and school communities
- Engage in hands-on writing exercises and self-reflection questions educators can ask themselves and then apply their personal growth to influence school policies and climate
- Gain perspective on compassion in schools through a multidisciplinary lens drawing from contemplative practices, psychology, and organizational change theory
- Learn from stories and examples of K-12 educators who have exemplified compassion in action
While we cannot fully address all the suffering that is happening in schools today, educators do have the power to work within themselves and together locally to create more compassionate responses to suffering and to affirm the dignity of all members of their school communities. Creating Compassionate Change in School Communities offers a valuable approach to integrating wellness into schools, as much for principals and superintendents as for teacher leaders, librarians, counselors, resource specialists, and others who work to create the conditions for compassion and dignity in their school.
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Seitenzahl: 479
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Introduction
Origins of This Book
What We Know About the Power of Compassion
Affirming Dignity
Compassion Organizing and Leadership
Organization of the Book
Practical Activities to Support Your Growth and Work
Guidance on Using This Book
Part 1: Cultivating Awareness and Setting Intentions
Chapter 1: Pausing to Attune to Our Own Experience
The Power of Attention
Where Our Attention Goes on Its Own Versus with Cultivation
The Power of Cultivating Mindfulness
Being Mindful of Intentions for Cultivating Mindfulness
Chapter 2: Getting Close to Suffering in Our Schools
Suffering in Schools
Pain and Suffering
The Role of Discernment in Skillful Action to Relieve Suffering
Beginning with Cultivating Awareness of Our Response to Pain and Suffering
Learning to Get Close to Suffering
Perspectives and Activities to Transform Our View
Remembering that We Do Not Suffer Alone
Chapter 3: Curiosity and Friendliness as Resources
Curiosity Helps Us to Be Open
Nurturing Curiosity
Curiosity About Our Own Experiences
Curiosity for Those in Our School Communities
Unconditional Friendliness
Friendliness vs Niceness
Nurturing Unconditional Friendliness
Chapter 4: Setting Intentions to Act Compassionately
Guidance for Setting Intentions
Working with Intentions
Exploring Intentions and Impacts Together
Learning to Act with Consciousness of Both Intent and Impact
Chapter 5: Empathy and Compassion
The Value of Empathic Care for Others
The Limits of Empathy
Moving Toward Compassion
The Benefits of Shifting from Empathy to Compassion
Part 2: Embracing Self-Compassion and Affirming Dignity
Chapter 6: Self-Compassion Teaches Us to Be a Friend to Ourselves
Defining Self-Compassion
Being a Friend to Yourself
Developing the Courage to Be a Friend to Yourself
Self-Compassion Helps Us to Show Up for Others
Chapter 7: Making Room for Self-Compassion
Obstacles to Staying with Our Own Suffering
Wise Perspectives for Preparing the Heart for Self-Compassion
Chapter 8: Self-Compassion as Preparation for Action Toward Justice
Working with the Edge State of Moral Distress
Stepping Back from the Edge to Practice Self-Compassion
Getting Close to Discomfort and Stepping Back
Supporting Each Other in Self-Compassion
Part 3: Widening the Circle of Compassion
Chapter 9: Recognizing Common Humanity and Interdependence in Our Everyday Interactions
Just Like Me
Strengthening Our Capacity to Embrace Common Humanity
Embracing Common Humanity and Appreciating Difference
Appreciating Others Through Recognizing Interdependence
Creating Connected Environments
Chapter 10: Working with Our Difficulties and Limits
What Gets in the Way of Extending Compassion to Neutral and Difficult People
Views That Support Widening the Circle of Compassion
Tonglen, the Practice of Sending and Taking
Part 4: Creating Compassionate Schools
Chapter 11: Humanizing School Environments
Forms of Suffering in Schools
Defining Social Suffering
Refining Our Intentions: Creating Humanizing School Environments
Holding Space for Possibility
Chapter 12: Building a Shared Commitment to Compassionate Action
Establishing an Educator Team
Setting a Common Intention
Expanding Possibilities: Introducing the Compassion Organizing Framework
Uncovering Our Collective Why
Chapter 13: Preparing for Collective Compassionate Action by Seeing the System
Seeing Your School as a System
Two Metaphors for Schools That Help Us See Them More Clearly
Seeing the System through Actor Network Maps
Creating Your Own Actor Network Map to See Your System
Crafting an Aim Statement
Chapter 14: Leading for Compassionate Change
Theory of Compassionate Change
Drafting Your Theory of Compassionate Change
Planning for Compassionate Action
Evaluating Progress Toward Your Aim
Persuading and Inspiring
Rehearsing Conversations
Acting with Compassion
Conclusion
School Change Is an Inside-Out Job
A Call for Wise Hope
Working Together to Envision and Create Compassionate Schools
Dedication and Gratitude Practice
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Example of Connections in My School Community Diagram
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Expanding the Circle of Compassion
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Template to Identify Potential Members of a Schoolwide Team
Figure 12.2 Matrix to Map Potential Team Members' Influence and Relationship...
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Meaghan's Actor Network Map
Figure 13.2 The High School Team's Actor Network Map
Figure 13.3 Actor Network Template
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 NB's Theory of Compassionate Change
Figure 14.2 The High School Team's Theory of Compassionate Change
Figure 14.3 Theory of Compassionate Change Template
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for Creating Compassionate Change in School Communities
“Education has changed drastically in the past five years. This book humanizes the difficulty of the changes and provides tangible steps educators can take to support their students and the people many often overlook—themselves.”
—Autumn Rivera, 2022 Colorado Teacher of the Year and 2022 National Teacher of the Year Finalist
“This exceptionally written book reminds us to engage our work in education with our heads and our hearts. A much-needed text during these times of intensified stress, anxiety, self-doubt, and blame, these authors shepherd readers through strategies and tools to help us heal individually as we renew and reset our commitments to practices of listening, compassion, empathy, and understanding, in service with and to others. An accessibly written book, grounded in transformative and rigorous research, this book should be read by any of us determined to keep pressing and fighting for education for all.”
—H. Richard Milner IV, Professor, Vanderbilt University, and author of The Race Card
“What a timely gift of a book! Filled with gratitude and hands-on support for healing spaces of learning, Creating Compassionate Change in School Communities is a text that is poised to (gently) transform the lives of students and teachers.”
—Antero Garcia, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Creating Compassionate Change in School Communities
Leading Together to Address Everyday Suffering in Schools
Ashley Seidel Potvin
William R. Penuel
Sona Dimidjian
Thupten Jinpa
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Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
ISBNs: 9781394265220 (Paperback), 9781394265244 (ePDF), 9781394265237 (ePub)
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We dedicate this book to you, dear educator, and to all those reading this book who care for and tend to the hearts and minds of young people. It is our genuine wish that whatever benefit this book brings to you ripples out to benefit the communities of which you are a part, to help bring about a more just and compassionate world.
May you be happy.
May you be well.
May you know peace and dignity.
May you lead with curiosity, courage, and compassion.
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to the educators who joined us in collaborative design to develop the arc of the digital compassion and dignity certificate: Adrienne, Ambika, Amy, Cindi, Dana, Halie, John, Karen, Katie, Lindsey, Loren, Naomi, Nikki, Max, Michelle, Stacy, and Taylor. Your thoughtfulness, commitment, and care for one another, your students, and the future educators in the digital certificate during a particularly challenging year continues to motivate and inspire us.
We wish to thank all of the educators who found their way to our compassion and dignity community, who enrolled in our programs, and who supported our efforts through showing up, providing feedback, and spreading the word. In particular, we want to thank those educators who gave voice to many of the ideas within this book, and who so often said it better than we ever could: Adam, Adrienne, Ben, Brittany, Colleen, Crystal, Emma, Fabi, Gricel, Kaelyn, Karen, Kendra, Madison, Maggie, Meaghan, NB, Raquel, Samila, Sara, Sarah, Stephanie D., Stephanie P., Taryn, Tina, and Vincent. You are the heartbeat of this book!
Thank you to our district partners, especially Anna and Lora, for their commitment to the well-being of educators and students and for their ongoing support of compassion in their schools.
We wish to express our gratitude to our community at the Renée Crown Wellness Institute for showing us what a compassionate community looks and feels like. Thank you to Julia Zigarelli, Leah Peña Teeters, Michele Simpson, Donna Mejia, Michelle Reininger for their enthusiasm, friendship, and support. We would also like to thank our incredible Compassion & Dignity for Educators team who were involved in various stages of envisioning, designing, revising, and teaching the digital certificate: Michelle Shedro, Caitlin McKimmy, Erica Van Steenis, Jovita Schiffer, Irfanul Alam, and Marisa Mendoza-Mauer.
We also wish to thank Caroline Pfohl and the Hemera Foundation for their generous and abiding commitment to contemplative practices that promote compassion and dignity in the world broadly and among educators specifically. Our partnership has helped to grow healthy, nurturing, and creative environments for educators and young people to thrive. Thank you, also, to the team of compassion and dignity meditation coaches who facilitated coaching and practice sessions with such care for educators enrolled in the certificate: Carla Burns, Sumi Kim, Amy Kisei Costenbader, Jeremy Lowry, Charlotte Rotterdam, Jogen Salzberg, and Claire Villarreal.
Thank you to the CU Boulder Teacher Leadership Program team for their ongoing support and encouragement of the compassion and dignity certificate: Kathy Schultz, Emily Gleason, Paula Battistelli, and Tyler Caldwell.
Thank you also to early advisors to this work, Kimberley Schonert-Reichl and Rob Roeser, and for championing the wellness of teachers through their work and service in the world.
Ashley: Thank you to Tom for his generosity, patience, steadiness, support, and compassion and to our girls for teaching me to find joy in life’s smallest moments. I am also so grateful to my parents, Mary and Fred, who were my first teachers and the first people who loved me into being.
Bill: Thank you to Edie for her incredible support in always inviting me to pursue work that reflects who I am and want to become and to my spiritual teachers who have provided guidance and wisdom to help me cultivate an open mind and heart, especially the Ven. Dhyani Ywahoo, Gil Fronsdal, and Peter Williams.
Sona: I express my deepest gratitude to my friends and colleagues in the Crown Institute and all the young people, families, and teachers with whom we have the honor to work. I thank all the teachers who have supported and guided my learning and my crescent family for holding compassion, dignity, and love at our core.
Jinpa: First and foremost, I would like to express my deep gratitude to His Holiness the Dalai Lama to whom I owe much of what I know of compassion. I thank my co-authors for inviting me to be part of the team, my colleagues at the Compassion Institute, and, last but not least, my wife Sophie for sharing insights gained from her years of offering workshops on Social Emotional Learning to teachers.
Collectively, and finally, we express our deepest gratitude to Dr. PC Crown for her visionary commitment to the wellness of educators, kids, and families and the reminder to lead and teach always with heart.
About the Authors
Ashley Seidel Potvin, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works in partnership with PK-12 educators to bring compassion and dignity to school communities. Ashley designs, studies, and teaches programs focused on supporting educators to cultivate compassion and dignity for themselves and others, to deepen their leadership capacities, and to envision and work toward just and compassionate schools. Through qualitative methods she examines educator learning and wellness, teacher–student relationships, and the development of caring, inclusive, and humanizing classroom and research environments. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of the Learning Sciences, Mindfulness, Teaching and Teacher Education, Education Sciences, Learning Environments Research, and Professional Development in Education. This is her first book.
Ashley earned a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross, an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Providence College, and her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on teaching and teacher education from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a former middle and high school teacher and has experience supporting teachers in various roles as curriculum leader, coach, mentor, and university instructor.
William R. Penuel, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the Institute of Cognitive Science and School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Renée Crown Wellness Institute. He designs and studies curriculum materials, assessments, and professional learning experiences for teachers in STEM education. He also studies how contemplative practices and critical inquiry can support educators in cultivating more compassionate schools. A third line of his research focuses on how long-term research–practice partnerships can be organized to address systemic inequities in education. He is a co-developer of an approach to partnership research called Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR).
He is the author of two books in education, Creating Research-Practice Partnerships in Education (with Dan Gallagher, Harvard Education Press, 2017) and The Connected School (with Barbara Means and Christine Padilla, Jossey-Bass, 2001). In addition, he has co-edited two volumes on collaborative education research: Connecting Research and Practice for Educational Improvement: Ethical and Equitable Approaches (with Bronwyn Bevan, Routledge, 2018), and The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education (with Donald Peurach, Jennifer Russell, and Laura Cohen-Vogel, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He earned a B.A. in Psychology from Clark University, an Ed.M. in Counseling Processes from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Clark University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and the International Society for Design and Development in Education. In addition, for six years, he served on the Board of Science Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Sona Dimidjian, Ph.D., is Director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also holds the Sapp Family Endowed Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence. Her research focuses on cultivating mental health and wellness among women, children, and families by engaging people's capacities for learning to care for themselves and their communities. She develops and studies programs and practices in education and healthcare settings, with an emphasis on navigating key developmental transitions, such as the perinatal period, early childhood, and adolescence. She also has a longstanding interest in expanding access, scaling, and sustaining effective programs, using both digital technology and community-based partnerships. Her current research projects focus on preventing depression and supporting wellness among new and expectant mothers, promoting healthy body image and leadership among young women, and enhancing mindfulness and compassion among youth, families, and educators.
She is the co-author with Sherryl Goodman, Ph.D., of a book for new and expectant mothers, Expecting Mindfully: Nourish Your Emotional Well-Being and Prevent Depression During Pregnancy and Postpartum. She is also the co-author of Behavioral Activation for Depression and Behavioral Activation with Adolescents and the editor of Evidence-Based Practice in Action: Bridging Clinical Science and Intervention. She is the recipient of numerous awards acknowledging her teaching and clinical research, including the Dorothy Martin Women's Faculty Award, the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, and the Robert L. Stearns Award at the University of Colorado Boulder along with the Susan Hickman Award from Postpartum Support International and the Women and Psychotherapy Award from Division 35 of the American Psychological Association. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Washington.
Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D., is the Founder and Chairman of Compassion Institute, and the principal author of Compassion Cultivation Training™ (CCT©), the Institute's flagship compassion education offering, developed while Jinpa was at Stanford University. Jinpa also serves as an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal, and is the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics. He has been a core member of the Mind and Life Institute and its Chairman of the Board since January 2012.
Jinpa trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. Jinpa also holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, both from Cambridge University. Jinpa has been the principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama since 1985, and has translated and collaborated on numerous books by the Dalai Lama including the New York Times bestsellers Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness, as well as Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. His own publications include A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives and translations of major Tibetan works featured in The Library of Tibetan Classics series.
Introduction
I hope that everyone feels seen and heard. And that they have people there who are supporting them and people who love them. And that every kid and every staff member has someone whom they trust. And hopefully more than just one person, someone whom they can go to and know that they're there for them. And I would just hope that all the families too feel like we're really there for them to support them and to help them in any way. And that there's no division, and everyone just feels together and welcome.
—Taryn, First Grade Teacher
I hope that school's a place that people want to be, that they feel safer there than anywhere else or as safe as they do anywhere else. And that is created by a staff that is patient with each other and themselves and the kids and understands that big picture of common humanity and common suffering. I think that for my school, we feel it. There are some days that it feels like that, where it just feels like love and support all day, and you don't hear any enraged comments. In a great world, it would just be that warm, positive, supportive environment. We're going to acknowledge the difficulty and we're still going to try to be positive and supportive.
—Adam, High School English Teacher
Our schools today need to become spaces of healing, like the schools envisioned by these educators. Spaces of healing for young people from marginalized and minoritized communities, who are often asked to prove their humanity and worth just to gain access to a meaningful education. Spaces of healing for parents and families, who had to carry heavy burdens of teaching and caring for their children during the pandemic and who may be still carrying grief and wounds from that time. Spaces of healing for educators who have been asked to transform their teaching to meet the twin realities of the pandemic and racial reckoning and then have been criticized for teaching truths about our nation's injustices. Healing cannot come soon enough, and a key premise of this book is that you are the leaders who can help bring it about.
The healing we need requires courageous attention and care for ourselves and others to address everyday suffering in schools. As leaders, we need to address the manifestations of suffering that are in our own hearts and minds: the fatigue we feel from the empathy we hold for our students' suffering, the distress we feel from not being able to do what is right by our students or protect them from harmful systems, and the agitation and resentment we feel from difficult interactions with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents. We also need to address manifestations and the root causes of suffering that are present in our schools, by introducing new policies, practices, and routines that center caring relationships and that honor the dignity of each person who walks through the doors of our schools every day. We need especially to address policies and practices that cause harm to those students who are most vulnerable in our schools and in our society, including newcomer students impacted by immigration policies that threaten to separate their families or LGBTQIA2S+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual or agender, and two-spirit) students and many others whose very identities are made invisible in our curriculum. And we need to maintain hope that this kind of healing is possible, that it's possible to create compassionate and dignity-affirming schools where children, families, educators, and communities feel seen, heard, and valued.
For this difficult work, we all need support to move past our own fatigue and overwhelm and resource ourselves for the long haul, and we need tools for transforming schools to eliminate everyday suffering in schools. To that end, this book presents a set of foundational ideas, practices, and educator experiences that can help prepare you to work with others in your school to create more compassionate, dignity-affirming schools. Our book is different from most books on self-care for educators and books on leadership. While other books focus on the power of contemplative practice for helping individual educators become more skilled at caring for themselves and others, our book is unique in its focus also on transforming schools into compassionate organizations. It takes up opportunities both within and beyond the classroom to promote compassion by changing policies and practices within schools that can be sites of suffering. Our aim in this book is to inspire educators like you to take up compassion as a focal point for collective leadership, to provide hope for compassion's power to rejuvenate educators as professionals in a time of difficulty, and to offer a pathway toward healing in schools through creating compassionate change.
We wrote this book for people in and around schools who are especially concerned with addressing the everyday suffering in schools that are experienced inequitably. That includes teachers in schools and other educational settings at all grade levels and content areas, school leaders, counselors, mental health professionals, social workers, librarians, and student support staff. This also includes teacher educators, preparing the next generation of teachers and current teachers for the classrooms of today and tomorrow. In many ways, we wrote this book as an act of love for educators—including you—who do such important and difficult work every day.
Origins of This Book
The book's content draws on a coherently crafted integration of contemplative practices, psychology and the science of compassion, theories of learning and organizational change, and experiences of educators, an integration that is reflected in a course of study we co-designed with educators to prepare educators to be changemakers in their schools. That course of study exists as an online master's certificate, Cultivating Compassion & Dignity in Ourselves and Our Schools, developed by the Renée Crown Wellness Institute in partnership with educators and the Compassion Institute and offered through the University of Colorado Boulder. It is a four-course certificate that begins with three asynchronous courses and concludes with a synchronous capstone course. In this book, we offer a synthesis of the ideas and practices of the program, along with educators' experiences and insights from the course, with the aim of making its lessons accessible to a broad audience.
During the 2019–2020 school year, we collaboratively designed (co-designed) with a group of educators—including teachers, counselors, administrators, librarians—the arc of the year-long digital compassion and dignity certificate for education leaders. Little did we know when we began this work that a pandemic would sweep the globe in the middle of the school year, soon to be followed by racial uprisings in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and others. The need for compassion, care, and connection was acutely felt both within our team and around the world as many suffered from illness, isolation, grief, confusion, and loneliness, as well as anger and frustration.
We began the co-design process by completing Compassion Cultivation Training© (CCT™) together to ground our work in a shared experience, to develop common language, and to be inspired. CCT is an 8-week evidence-based training program developed by Jinpa, in collaboration with Founding Faculty from the Compassion Institute. CCT integrates the science of compassion with secular approaches for cultivating compassion adapted from Tibetan Buddhist practices (Goldin & Jazaieri, 2017). Now taught around the world by certified teachers, CCT offers tools and resources for relating to oneself and others with empathy, compassion, and kindness. Following the 8-week compassion training, our co-design team met weekly to adapt, extend, and apply core content from CCT to design a digital certificate for educators. Educators drew on their experiences, including their joys and struggles, to contribute to the design of the compassion certificate to benefit other educators and ultimately their schools.
We are filled with gratitude for these educators who dedicated nearly 60 hours of their time during an extremely challenging school year to help create the compassion and dignity certificate with us, signaling to us the urgent need for compassion in schools. We know that as we struggled together to make sense of and make do with the challenges presented by the pandemic, we and our educator partners were transformed through the co-design process. One of the co-design teachers, Karen, reflected on her experience:
This process has been life-changing in that it has brought consistent mindful practices into a space that is usually so full and stressful. This process has transformed me, bringing self-compassion into a place that is often full of self-criticism. All of this allows me to step into my role as educator with more awareness and the ability to have compassion for others. I hope that this [certificate] brings such insights, awareness and consistent practices fully alive for educators in a profound and powerful way. Just maybe, we can make the world a kinder, more responsive place for everyone.
Another educator shared their wish with the group:
It will help [educators] to take a step back from things that have become routine and expected, and to look at their students with fresh eyes, to identify our intentions in the thousands of difficult decisions and interactions we have each day, and I think this will go very far to bring more compassion into the world.
Since launching our compassion and dignity programs for educators in 2020, we have engaged nearly 550 educators in our courses, training sessions, and workshops. The educators teach and lead at all levels from PK-20 and represent all content areas. The educators are classroom teachers, principals, superintendents, district leaders, librarians, counselors, school-based mental health professionals, social workers, interventionists, paraprofessionals, researchers, and university instructors. While many participants in our programs live and work in Colorado, through our virtual programs and courses we also engage educators living across the United States and internationally. Our hope is through this book we can reach thousands more educators, providing them with ideas, practices, and tools to create more compassionate schools.
We are also educators and scholars who bring our own experiences, perspectives, and investigations to bear on the content of the book. Ashley is a researcher in the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she works in partnership with educators and co-teaches our certificate program with Bill. She is a former middle and high school teacher, curriculum leader, and instructional coach who has been dedicated to creating caring and inclusive classrooms and schools and supporting the well-being of educators. She brings the perspective of both a scholar and educator-leader to this book.
In addition to co-teaching the certificate program, Bill is a faculty member at CU Boulder in the learning sciences. He has devoted many years to building and studying how educators and researchers can work together to design curricula and programs like ours. In addition, he is a long-term practitioner of meditation, and he has engaged for many years with the practices included in this book.
Sona is Director of the Crown Institute and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research focuses on cultivating mental health and wellness among women, children, and families by engaging people's capacities for learning to care for themselves and their communities. Her career has been dedicated to the science of contemplative practices like compassion and mindfulness among youth, families, and educators and to teaching these practices as an educator and clinical psychologist (and in her own life).
Jinpa is the Founder and Chairman of Compassion Institute, and the principal author of CCT, the Compassion Institute's flagship compassion education offering, developed while Jinpa was at Stanford University. He is also an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University and is the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics. Jinpa trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. Jinpa has been the principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama since 1985 and has translated and collaborated on numerous books by the Dalai Lama. Jinpa and Sona began working together as Board members at the Mind and Life Institute, a beautiful and rich context for a long-term collaboration dedicated to the wellness of educators and our world at large.
What We Know About the Power of Compassion
As this book is centered on compassion, we start with a definition that can provide a common starting point for exploring how to cultivate compassion in ourselves, our relationships, and our schools. We know there are lots of ways that we talk about compassion in everyday conversation. But as the research base for compassion has expanded over the last two decades, some general agreement on a useful definition has emerged (Mascaro et al., 2020). Drawing from scientific and contemplative approaches, we define compassion as having four basic components: (1) an awareness of suffering; (2) a feeling of concern and connection to one who is suffering (empathy); (3) a desire to relieve that suffering (motivation); (4) a willingness to respond or act to relieve suffering (Gilbert, 2017; Goetz & Simon-Thomas, 2017; Jinpa, 2015). As the definition implies, compassion involves empathy but it is more than that—it pushes us to move from concern to intention and action in the world.
Compassion is a basic instinct—something that humans evolved to naturally feel (Gilbert, 2017; Goetz et al., 2010). Consider, for a moment, someone who is close to you—a family member, a friend, or even a pet. When they are sick or hurting, you naturally feel concern for them and you want to do something to help them to feel better. This instinctual aspect means compassion is always available to us.
Compassion is also something that we can purposefully grow or train ourselves in, much as we train our bodies for exercise (Condon et al., 2013; Kirby, 2017). The good news is that it doesn't take years of training to receive the benefits from cultivating compassion (Hutcherson et al., 2008; Jazaieri et al., 2017), and you can begin today. Throughout this book, we'll offer guidance, meditation practices, reflections, and other exercises to help you deepen and grow your compassion.
Cultivating compassion and generosity not only brings benefit to others, but it also can benefit you. Researchers have been studying compassion to understand the benefits of compassion. Compassion has been shown to contribute to physical health as well as emotional well-being. Compassion can serve as a buffer against stress (Breines et al., 2014), increase resilience in times of challenge (Presnell, 2018), and protect against loneliness (Ramahlo et al., 2021). When leaders express compassion and act compassionately, others feel a sense of support (Cosley et al., 2010) and can even act with more creativity (Peng et al., 2017).
We have been among those scholars contributing to this growing body of research on compassion. Several years ago, I (Sona) conducted a study with my colleagues Tor Wager, Yoni Ashar, and Jessica Andrews-Hanna to examine the impact of brief compassion meditation on people's cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to the suffering of others and on changes in their neural processing of images and stories of suffering others (see Ashar et al., 2016). We wanted to know how to cultivate more compassionate responding in our world and we wondered: What is the impact of compassion meditation on responses to the stories and images of suffering others?
We decided to ask participants at the start and end of the study to come into the lab to view photos and hear stories of suffering others, and to answer questions about their feelings about the suffering others, the attributions they made about them, and how similar they thought they were to them. We also gave each participant $100, with instructions that they could keep the money for themselves or donate to groups that helped the suffering individuals.
We divided participants into three groups. The first group was asked to listen to guided secular compassion meditation practices that Roshi Joan Halifax from Upaya Zen Center recorded. The second group was asked to use a nasal spray daily, which we told them was oxytocin and would help them to become more compassionate, although it was actually a saline placebo. The third group, the repeated exposure group, was asked to view the same photos and hear stories each day but they were not asked to take any other particular action.
Our findings provided support for the benefits of compassion practice at the behavioral and brain levels. For example, our data showed that with respect to donations, there was no significant change in compassion meditation participants, and in contrast, a significant decrease in donation among participants in the repeated exposure condition, with the placebo group falling right in the middle. One of the potential effects of compassion meditation in this trial may have been in buffering against the decreased response to suffering observed in the repeated exposure condition. This may be consistent with the notion that repeated exposure to the suffering of others, in the absence of having tools or a framework to guide one's response, leads to a kind of empathy fatigue in which ultimately people are at risk of being numb or blunted in their responses to such suffering. This study tells us both about the potential benefits of very brief compassion meditation practice and perhaps equally importantly about the risks of failing to provide people with tools when they are repeatedly exposed to suffering.
When I (Sona) shared this study with educators, they told me how powerfully they related to the study participants who were asked to see images and hear stories of suffering people without being given any tools to respond. They shared that their jobs are like the people in the repeated exposure condition. Educators shared that it can be deeply challenging to sustain compassion when exposed repeatedly to suffering experienced by students in their classes, their families, and members of their school community. Educators wanted to know: What can we do to ensure that we don't become numb or disengaged over time? What can we do to sustain our love of teaching, our original intentions that led us to this profession, instead of feeling burned out over time? Their questions spurred us to undertake the research and curriculum design work that led to this book.
The great news about our research and the ideas presented in this book is that we can do something to counter the burnout or fatigue that can come from repeated exposure to suffering. Even brief compassion practice, like the practices we share in this book, can bring you a lot of personal benefits and can support you in meeting the suffering of students, their families, and others in your school community with an open heart and with steadiness. You also learn how to bring this same compassion for others, right back to care for yourself during tough times too!
Affirming Dignity
Recognizing the dignity of oneself and others is an essential component of cultivating compassion. We draw on a definition of dignity from Espinoza et al. (2020), who define dignity as “the multifaceted sense of a person's value generated via substantive intra- and interpersonal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one's mind, humanity, and potential” (p. 326). Their definition highlights the fact that dignity is inherent to all human beings by virtue of our common humanity, but we can also do things that either affirm or deny others' dignity, by how we treat people. A dignity-affirming school environment is one where each person can find meaning and purpose in what they do, and where people feel seen and heard (Espinoza et al., 2020). When we see the dignity in ourselves and others, we see all as worthy of our care and attention and as deserving of compassion.
In schools and classrooms, dignity is always on the line, shaped by policies, practices, and daily interactions. These can either support or undermine the dignity of students and staff. Dignity is more than just a right—it's also a responsibility. It involves recognizing each person's value through meaningful learning experiences that honor their mind, humanity, and potential.
As educators, we play a crucial role in recognizing students' inherent worth and creating environments that affirm their dignity. This happens when we design learning experiences where students see themselves reflected in the curriculum and are given meaningful opportunities to participate. Affirming dignity means allowing students to share in decision-making and ensuring they are seen and heard by those in positions of power. It also involves being mindful of the often invisible struggles and identities students hold who are part of our schools.
Compassion Organizing and Leadership
Our approach to supporting the well-being of educators and schools is unique in that in addition to a focus on cultivating compassion and dignity for oneself and others, we also focus on developing capacities for creating change at the systems level. We draw on a framework for compassion organizing to help leaders put compassion and dignity into action to transform the policies, routines, and practices of their schools. The compassion organizing framework, developed initially in organizational studies (Dutton et al., 2006; Worline & Dutton, 2017), emphasizes the need for leaders to gather resources and support that allows for a timely response to suffering in the organization, as well as customizing responses to meet the needs of those who are suffering and for creating dignity-affirming environments. In education, compassion organizing involves attuning to the causes of social suffering that are experienced inequitably—that is, the policies and practices that cause harm to those most marginalized in our society (Penuel et al., 2024).
Organizing for compassionate change and addressing suffering in your school requires leading with others. Collective leadership makes it possible to create and sustain compassionate change in ways that contribute positively to the well-being of your school community, even when the suffering feels intense. Collective leadership, coupled with the cultivation of compassion and the affirmation of dignity, allows you to persist in the face of suffering, and to do so skillfully. Working with others, you can create healing spaces by cultivating conditions in schools where everyone can grow and know that someone cares for them and sees them as a human being worthy of their respect.
As we use this term throughout the book, “leaders” are not just people with titles and formal responsibilities for administering schools, because you are a leader if you are a teacher, librarian, counselor, resource specialist, or custodial staff member who is working alongside others to create conditions for compassion and dignity in your school. You are a leader if you use your knowledge of students, your connections with others, and resources to organize responses to sources of suffering in schools that perpetuate inequities, such as discipline policies, grading practices, and exclusion of groups of students from the curriculum.
Organization of the Book
This book is organized into four sections that follow the sequence of our program at the Renée Crown Wellness Institute for supporting educators' growth in compassion and for helping them organize their schools to become more compassionate places for them and their colleagues, their students, and their families and communities.
In the opening section of the book, Cultivating Awareness and Setting Intentions, we introduce you to foundational aspects of cultivating compassion that can support wellness: developing awareness and setting intentions. Grounded in the realities of the current system of schooling and educators' lived experiences, these chapters explore what it means to recognize and get close to pain and suffering in today's educational contexts, to reconnect with the joys of teaching, and to set intentions to act with compassion.
The second section of the book, Embracing Self-Compassion and Affirming Dignity, focuses on what it means to offer compassion to yourself when faced with your own suffering. For many educators we've worked with, the idea of self-compassion, of bringing attention to your own care and needs, is one of the most impactful concepts in our program and it's also often the most challenging. Many people in the helping professions, such as education, find it much easier to extend compassion to others than to themselves.
The third section of the book, Widening the Circle of Compassion, focuses on cultivating compassion for others to prepare for action to cultivate more compassionate schools. We share practices for cultivating awareness of common humanity in the world in our everyday interactions with those with whom we have weaker or even challenging relationships.
The final section of the book, Creating Compassionate Schools, guides you through a process for developing your school as a compassionate and humanizing system. We invite you to deepen your leadership capacities for collective organizing. We offer tools and practices for attuning to the forms of social suffering that impact groups inequitably, building a shared commitment to compassionate action, seeing your school as a system, and implementing compassionate change to alleviate a form of social suffering in your school community.
Each chapter includes an introduction to key concepts and research, educator stories and examples of compassion in action, meditation practices, on-the-spot practices, journal reflection prompts, and activities. If compassion can be cultivated and dignity can be affirmed, leaders need skillful means—that is, the ability to use tools and practices to develop their own compassion and see their own dignity and that of others. This book introduces you to a sequence of contemplative practices and guided inquiry, including structured reflection activities, to help develop those skillful means. Both are necessary, in that contemplative practices can help stabilize awareness and prepare you for meeting suffering with an open heart, while inquiry can help you see more clearly your values, biases, and the impacts of your actions on others (Potvin et al., 2023).
At the heart of our work are educators' own journeys of coming to develop their understanding and skills for showing compassion and creating dignity-affirming school environments. We foreground the voices of educators from our workshops and certificate program, to highlight both their successes and challenges and to ground these ideas in the real and messy work of people in schools. Their voices appear in every chapter, and they have been our partners in design since we began developing our certificate program (Potvin et al., 2023).
Practical Activities to Support Your Growth and Work
Throughout this book, we invite you to attune to the experiences of your own mind, heart, and body in meditation practice, in interactions with others, and even as you engage with research-based ideas we introduce. We offer different kinds of activities that are aimed at helping you learn and grow and at working with others to develop plans for a more compassionate school. There are four kinds of activities:
Meditation practices:
In the first three sections of the book, we'll introduce you to contemplative practices to strengthen your capacity for mindfulness and compassion. You are invited and encouraged to establish a daily, consistent practice. Educators we've worked with have found these practices to be crucial resources throughout their journeys as compassionate educators. We recommend trying out the practices introduced in each chapter every day for at least a week. You can always revisit the practices as you continue through the book.
On-the-spot practices:
On-the-spot practices are intended to help you try out the skills you gain from meditation practice and apply compassion in your day-to-day interactions. The on-the-spot practices offer a way to practice compassion even within the busy-ness and hectic pace of your workday. These practices are quick and concrete ways to integrate mindfulness and compassion into your day-to-day life.
Journal reflections:
Many of the chapters also include journal prompts and we encourage you to pause and reflect on the experiences of your heart and mind. Choose a journal format that works best for you: a document on your computer, a notebook, or audio recordings.
Activities:
We have included some written and dialogue activities throughout the book as well. These activities are designed to further your inquiry into key topics. In the final section of the book, we provide templates and guidance to help you, along with a team, develop action plans for bringing more compassion and dignity to school policies and practices. These templates and guidelines are grounded in the compassion organizing framework and allow for integration of insights drawn from contemplation and inquiry into your day-to-day work.
Orienting to Meditation Practice: Practice Makes Practice
We encourage you to try out and discuss the practical activities—including the meditation practices—with your colleagues and to think of your meditation practice as a gift to yourself. While you might share the practices with colleagues, it's beyond the scope of this book to provide instruction to you on how to teach meditation to others, whether that be to other educators in your building or to students in your class. For now, we invite you to find a rhythm to your own practice and to notice with curiosity how engaging with practices impacts your capacity for creating and sustaining your own efforts to create compassionate change in your school.
As you try out the meditation practices in this book, remember that there is no such thing as a “perfect” practice. Practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes practice. It may be difficult to get used to this idea, but practice does not have to look or feel a certain way to benefit you and others. There isn't a “right” way to practice, and practice won't always feel calm and peaceful.
Sometimes, practice makes you aware of your own level of tiredness, distraction, and anxiety. In these moments, you are encouraged to invite whatever arises to be part of your practice. At times during your practice, your mind will certainly wander, and you may experience boredom or discomfort. This is not a problem; it's part of the process. Challenge, distraction, and discomfort present valuable opportunities to cultivate awareness and compassion for yourself. If you find a specific practice challenging, be gentle with yourself. The recognition that practice is hard can actually be an opening to self-compassion. We can say, “Oh, this is hard” and soften our hearts. When you notice that you are distracted, we invite you to gently guide your focus back to the breath as an act of self-compassion, without judgment.
In the same way, when you forget to do the practice or run out of time, bring compassion to yourself. Notice the forgetting as part of your practice and gently return to your intention(s) for your practice. And, if you feel like a specific practice is not for you on a given day for any reason, you always have an option to take a break, return to your breath, or engage in a different practice. Remember, you have choices related to when and how you engage with the practices. Adapting to who you are and what you are experiencing in any moment is critical.
If you are new to daily practice, look to establish a set time in your day to do the formal practice. You will likely find that the best times for formal meditation practice are before or after school. When you are starting out, it can be helpful to tie it to another routine in your day, such as while you are waiting for your morning coffee to brew. It can also be helpful to add your practice as an event in your daily calendar. Think of it as an experiment within the laboratory of your life. Make a commitment to develop a daily habit, while also giving yourself the flexibility to learn from what doesn't work.
If you already have a consistent, daily practice we recommend that you try the compassion practices introduced in this book 2–3 times a week and continue with your other practices on the remaining days. We encourage you to maintain the practice that you've worked hard to cultivate and to allow yourself to grow through the compassion practices.
You may find the following tips helpful as you develop or deepen a daily habit of practice. Some of the tips will work better for you than others; experiment and see what's most helpful to you.
Set up an easy place to practice each day:
You could decide to practice in a quiet room in your home or a calm corner of your classroom before school begins.
Schedule practice:
Some educators find it helpful to schedule practice into their daily calendars as an event or set an alarm.
Write a reminder:
For other educators, scheduling in the practice makes it feel like another “to-do” or “chore.” Instead, you might find it more helpful to jot a reminder to yourself on a sticky note and put it in a high visibility place, such as near your computer screen, in your plan book, on your bathroom mirror, or on your refrigerator.
Find a “practice buddy”:
If you are reading this book as part of a book study with colleagues, consider supporting one another as “practice buddies.” If you are reading this book on your own, consider reaching out to someone in your life who already has a regular meditation practice. Set up quick, regular check-ins with your practice buddy so that you can talk about how it's going and hold each other accountable. You could check-in through email, text, or brief meetings.
Find a community:
It can also be very helpful to find a group of people who are committed to contemplative practice and who meet regularly to practice in community. There may be local groups or organizations in your own town or city, or you might find a virtual community to join.
Pair the practice with a routine you already have:
You might also try pairing practice with another activity, such as sitting down to practice while you wait for your coffee to brew or meditating in the evening just after you brush your teeth.
Set or reset intentions:
Sometimes it can feel overwhelming to start practicing after missing several sessions. Try to be gentle with yourself. Remember, it's never too late to set (or reset) your intentions for practice and to begin again.
Try practicing without the script:
After you've practiced any given meditation with the script a few times, you may wish to practice in silence by recalling the guided practice on your own.
Guidance on Using This Book
A key premise of this book is that creating and sustaining compassionate change in your school community requires coordinated, collective action and leadership. We have observed the power of bringing educators together to discuss the forms of suffering they, their students, students' families, and colleagues experience in schools. When teams come together to face this suffering, they can see they are not alone in noticing and wanting to respond to suffering and they can collectively reimagine their schools as healing and dignity-affirming spaces. Thus, we recommend that you read this book with colleagues. You might consider organizing a book group, pausing to talk about the key concepts in each chapter, sharing reflections, and then planning together for compassionate change using the guidance and templates provided.
You can also read this book on your own. If you are reading this book alone, we encourage you to find a trusted colleague or thought partner at your school who you can share ideas with as you read. This person might even become an important ally as you plan to bring compassion into your school community.
