Cultivating Compassionate Classrooms

Wendy Hinrichs Sanders, in an article that forms the basis for an Exchange Out of the Box Training Kit, "Cultivating Compassionate Classrooms," provides a number of suggestions for helping support children's expression of their own innate compassion. Here are some of them:

"Empower children to respond with compassion. When we walk alongside children and build upon their ideas, we can help them with incidental, day-to-day acts of compassion and special projects. Children want to contribute. In my research they spoke of helping, giving comfort, and praying for those in need.

• Name ways children show compassion. ‘McKayla, I see you are helping Lamont pick up the pieces of his puzzle that fell to the ground.’ Be careful to validate rather than reward.
  
  
• Expand children’s ideas of ways to help those in need. For example, one set of teachers discussed a child’s idea to gather food for an animal shelter, and the school as a whole adopted the project.
  
  
• Help children who might be ‘stuck’ to solve problems. For example, one six-year-old girl said she had heard about children being sold as slaves and cried herself to sleep. She decided to sell lollipops at basketball games to raise money to free a child. We can protect children’s vulnerability by being there to help them problem-solve."

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