to their feelings? Do we really?
Sometimes I was so worried about my own ailments that I could not see the other persons in my professional life. I could not connect the dots of how my actions affected them. The residue of the work life and effort I was leaving behind was not in my rearview mirror; it was on the road right in front of me.
Ask a trusted colleague, “Do I bind together compassion, humility, grace, and love with an appropriate sense of toughness? Am I too soft? Am I too hard? How could I be better at demonstrating compassion?”
I just needed to look. Like when I first met Rebecca DuFour.
If you have had the pleasure to meet PLC at Work™ educational leader and author extraordinaire Rebecca DuFour, then like me, you have found her high level of compassion compelling. I went to Becky and asked her for advice on how to nurture compassion in the school culture. Here is what she had to say (R. DuFour, personal communication, May 23, 2016):
Members of a school community—students and adults—can instill and nurture compassion in the culture of a school first and foremost by modeling compassionate behaviors. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”
Treating others with kindness, care, concern, and consideration in our daily interactions will demonstrate what compassion “looks and feels like.” But if we want those behaviors to permeate our school’s culture—and we should—we can also communicate the importance of compassion in additional ways.
For example:
• Teach students to recognize and demonstrate compassionate behaviors during character education lessons, through shared stories, books, and real-world examples.
• Celebrate and reward acts of compassion on a regular basis in classrooms and throughout the school. Create bulletin boards, showcases, sections of newsletters, awards, positive notes home to parents, and media stories that highlight specific examples of compassion within the school community.
• Confront behaviors that are not congruent with compassionate acts. Help members of the school community understand that compassion is so important, you are willing to gently but firmly call attention to negative behaviors as a way of reinforcing positive ones.
When compassion becomes part of a school’s culture, the larger community benefits as those behaviors ultimately extend beyond the school walls.
Reflect on Becky’s words about creating a more compassionate school culture, and then take the time for a final compassion, sympathy, and empathy check. Use the definition for each word.
Our passion works best when complemented by love and compassion. In Atlanta, Georgia, on February 4, 1968, as part of his final message before his assassination, “The Drum Major Instinct,” Martin Luther King Jr. stated: “Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve…. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”21
Grace and love. Compassion and courage.
These are the elements that become the signposts of our heartprint greatness. These are not courses we take in our undergraduate teaching certification. And yet, they represent critical elements of the social justice mission and the responsibility of our work with students. They represent the life source of authentic happiness in the workplace. In the next chapter, we explore the love and hope required to achieve a school and classroom culture that sustains compassion for others.
Rank yourself 1, 5, or 10 on how well you understand and express these three feelings toward others during this current season of your professional life.
Compassion: “Feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin.”18
Sympathy: “The feeling that you care about and are sorry about someone else’s trouble, grief, misfortune, etc.”19
Empathy: “The feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions.”20
Wanted: Persons of Positive Character and Hope
The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
—Pythagoras
Your influence on others, without moral character, can lead to manipulation and inauthentic behavior. It can lead to potential actions of entitlement and selfishness. As you model the core values of the school culture, you influence your students and colleagues toward the essential voice, purpose, and the general “good” of the expected and agreed high-quality work of your school. As Pythagoras indicated, “You and I have a lot of power for good or for evil.”22
The ability to make and keep commitments, the ability to manage your life well, and the ability to meet deadlines, to lead your students with good intentions, and to take responsibility for every area of your life represent actions of persons of positive character and maturity. Building such character requires a teachable and growth mindset.
Healthy schools are filled with adults that possess great character.
Over the years, I have learned positive character lessons from Becky DuFour. We have worked together at the Solution Tree PLC at Work Institutes since 2011. Toward the very end of a fall season of institutes, we shared some quiet time with her family and friends.
Becky shared with us a poem, “To Be of Use,” from the book Circles on the Water, a collection of poems by Marge Piercy.23
To Be of Use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out
of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a
heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move
things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident,
Greek amphoras for wine and oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher