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© (CCTT) 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...