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Got Compassion? Check!

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

—Dalai Lama

A fully formed heart—a heart that pursues happiness in its work for students, for colleagues, and for you—finds completeness in its compassion.

Don’t read too fast. Read that sentence again.

A fully formed heart—a heart that pursues happiness in its work for students, for colleagues, and for you—finds completeness in its compassion.

MY HEART PRINT

Run a Google images search for the word compassion, and you’ll see several images with a heart in them. To become a teacher whom a child or colleague would follow and to become an administrator whom a teacher or colleague would follow, we demonstrate and develop a culture of compassion. It becomes part of our heartprint over time.

She was a colleague of mine. We taught many of the same classes together. She taught in Room 212. I taught in Room 210. This was before the professional learning community (PLC) era. She was older than I, and I did not know too much about her. We mostly lived in different worlds: my life filled with teaching, coaching, and my own young children; her life filled with friends and activities outside of school. We did not work on school activities or lesson planning together.

How would you define compassion? What does the word compassion mean to you?

How does a fully formed heart exhibit compassion?

Then one day I entered her room before school, because I could hear her crying. She sat at her desk sobbing. Her dog had died the night before. Yet, here she was at work. I knelt down by her side and hugged her for what seemed like a really long time, maybe three minutes. And it seemed a bit awkward, hugging an older female colleague.

But at that moment, she needed me to mourn with her. She needed me to provide her with my compassion. She needed me to allow her loss to enter into my being. And I do not know why I felt that way. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to think, “Oh, she needs compassion right now, so give her some.” It just seemed to be the right thing to do.

A few years later, I needed a small amount of money for a family emergency. She heard about my dilemma from another colleague. Without reproach or request, she wrote me a check. She said she knew I would repay her. She said she had never forgotten my act of compassion on the day her dog died. Again, I was too young to understand, but her act of compassion on that day was her way of identifying and owning with me my family emergency. Her kindness overwhelmed me.

Compassion means being there for the students and colleagues that intersect your path. It means you identify with them. You are cheering for them. You celebrate victories with them, no matter how small, and more important, you mourn their setbacks. It means you always and sincerely wish them well in your heart. You lean into them, even when it is difficult to do so.

You and I have a lot of power. Think about the words used thus far: We demonstrate compassion. We mourn setbacks. We cheer on victories. We identify.

We can also choose not to do these things.

We can choose to withhold compassion. Over the years, I refused to allow my colleagues to hide behind or allow others to hide behind the words, “I am just not a very compassionate person.”

Yes, you are.

Do not let your colleagues get away with this mindset either. Compassion is a choice. To identify with another person is a choice. Passing judgment that someone does not deserve your compassion, and withholding it, is also a choice you can make.

Gallup asked workers over the age of eighteen the question, “What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life? And, “What three words best describe what this person contributes to your life?” The workers produced four categories of responses. The first category was compassion. When asked what compassion meant to these respondents, the top responses were:¹⁷

♦ Compassion is about caring.

♦ Compassion is about friendship.

♦ Compassion is about love.

♦ Compassion is about happiness.

So, got compassion? Compassion encompasses caring, friendship, love, and happiness. It is an essential professional element of an effective workplace culture. In My Heartprint that follows, think about each compassion category and reflect on how you show compassion in the workplace.

MY HEART PRINT

Caring: You mourn the setbacks of others.

Friendship: You cheer on their victories.

Love: You do not withhold compassion.

Happiness: You model compassion for others.

How would your students or colleagues rank you on each of these four compassion characteristics? Give yourself a 1, 5, or 10, with 1 being low, 10 being awesome, and 5 meaning you are working on developing compassion in your professional life. Briefly explain your rating.

Although compassion means being there for your students and your colleagues, don’t confuse love and compassion with softness. Being there for someone is deeper than just wanting to spare him or her pain. If I really am there for the person (child or adult), then I must be ready to warn, reprove, confront, or admonish when necessary. Always do so with grace and humility, of course. Always with the understanding that to be there for them, to show compassion for them, may also require honest reflection with them about potential destructive behaviors.

Linda Ruesch was my final student teacher, and she was terrific during student teaching. I was moving on to my new job at Stevenson, and I begged her to join me in my new district when a teaching job opened up. We became friends and colleagues, as Linda and her husband played on our coed Friday night softball team too. She became not only a great teacher to her students but also a mentor to many of her colleagues. She had a disarming way of collaborating with others and bringing peace to the resolution of tough issues teachers face every day. She had a tough-minded compassion.

For me, she became someone I trusted implicitly. She was a model of grace and humility. I also knew I could trust her with information that might be confidential at a given moment, as I would often test out an idea with her regarding the entire scope of our division’s work.

One day, I called her into my office and asked her an important question: “I am thinking about applying to be the next superintendent of our district. Give me your honest response, do you think I would be good for the job and good for the school district?”

What Linda did not know is that I had been stewing about this for about two weeks. That is usually the way it is for you too, right? By the time you actually talk to your spouse, colleagues, immediate boss, or even your students, you have already been rolling the issue over in your mind. But for them, it is new news.

I knew this was the first time Linda (or anyone other than my family) was hearing this, so her quick and immediate response took me back a bit.

Without even a second of hesitation, she said to me, “Oh, Tim, you would be perfect for that job!”

I thought, she must really want to get rid of me! What I said out loud, however, was, “Why do you think that?” And this is when I learned a lesson from this very wise teacher.

Linda said to me, “Because you are a compassionate man, but we are all just a little scared of you. You hold us accountable, but you generally do it with grace. That will serve you well.”

Her response was meant to be a compliment, but I went home wondering, what was the real residue of the work life and effort I was leaving behind?

Was it a residue of fear? Compassion? Kindness? Retribution? Grace? Focus? Clarity?

MY HEART PRINT

Linda indicated that the faculty and my students knew I loved them. But they also knew I meant business, which in turn, created a small amount of compassion-based urgency to our work.

Wholeheartedness. Love. Compassion. These pursuits allow you to delight in and enjoy others. If I choose to love you, I do not do so out of obligation or duty. When you love your students and your colleagues, the thought of them should delight you, right?

Love and compassion give to and serve the one who is loved. The test of your heartprint for a fully formed heart (and this may take you a few years, as I am not sure I am completely there yet) is that you give love when there is no expectation in return.

This describes a type of love that takes the most ragged students who enter your path and creates value in them—so they can build value in others—forever. This is why our teaching profession is such a daunting day-to-day challenge. You have to be on your best game every day. Our profession is not for the weakhearted.

As we look at our students and our colleagues, do we see who they are intended to become? Do we see their potential? Do we understand and connect 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.

MY HEART PRINT

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