Resources For Educators

Caring and compassion are vital, teachable skills with the power to promote tolerance and inclusiveness in our schools, communities, and neighborhoods. This fun, three-part series has been designed to inspire and empower children to be ambassadors for good beyond their immediate friends and family.

To help educators learn how to build empathy in their school communities, Making Caring Common reviewed existing research on empathy and the strategies of evidence-based programs that promote it. Our work shows that there’s more to developing empathy than simply asking students to “walk in someone else’s shoes.” In this resource, you’ll find steps you can take to build real empathy in your students and your community.

How can we inspire and teach young people to care about and take responsibility for others, to think clearly about and pursue justice, to stand up for important principles?

Research suggests that developing these key moral capacities is not achieved via one-shot class assignments or brief programs but through sustained commitment and reflection within the context of peer and adult relationships. Yet children rarely engage in either substantial ethical activities or reflection, guided by adults who stand for important moral values, or even dialogue about how to live those values day to day.

Shared experiences and rituals can tie together school and community as places that value care and commitment and play a vital part in fostering a moral identity in students. Over the course of a semester or an academic year, the Caring Community Youth Capstone supports young people’s ethical development and builds a positive school culture where young people are responsible for creating a caring community.

The School Climate Committee is a key mechanism for creating positive social norms, for reducing bullying, and for developing more respectful, caring children. It also gives students agency in creating positive social norms.

A growing body of research supports the key role of school culture and social norms in preventing a wide array of social and emotional problems and promoting the development of caring, responsible, and respectful children. As children enter adolescence, they are especially influenced by social norms — by what other teen’s consider important, by how other teens define who is and is not worthy of concern, and by how other teens gain power and respect.

Because students primarily take signals from other students about social norms and what is ethically acceptable, and because students have inside knowledge about social dynamics, it is mainly students—especially acting together—who can change norms. This School Climate Committee strategy is one way to channel student power and influence in their school community.