Moving On from the Forum on Educating World Citizens

Moving On from the Forum on Educating World Citizens

Washington DC

October 8-9, 2009

Rona Wilensky

Introduction

This essay is an attempt to integrate the diverse perspectives offered throughout the two day Forum on Educating World Citizens, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute, and to draw out the implications for those working directly on these issues as conveners, researchers and practitioners bringing compassion and mindfulness to teachers and students.  It begins with a summary of the ideas articulated by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama (hereafter HH).  The second section considers the remarks of panel participants and the ways in which their comments provide a distinctly American social and educational context for the vision of HH.  The third section considers next steps in field development.

What the Dalai Lama Said (and what may be inferred)

Across two days of comments, His Holiness indicated in various ways that he would like citizens of the world to deeply understand that their individual well being depends on the well being of all others on this globe and to act in accordance with that understanding.

HH also strongly endorsed the cultivation of the feeling that he calls warm heartedness, which can be understood as an open hearted kindness toward all others.  This warm heartedness is, in his view, the essential antidote to widespread and destructive violence and greed. 

As HH repeatedly made clear in his comments across two days of dialogue, genuine compassion for all beings, in whatever forms, requires a combination of intellectual appreciation of interconnectedness, the feeling of warm heartedness and the motivation to actually enact both principles in every day life. 

Levels of Compassion

HH made a distinction between two developmental levels of compassion.  The first he called “biological” compassion, which he described as the natural feeling that develops within the child in response to the immediate circle of people the child knows.  In this circle, children learn to care about the well being of those who care for them and be indifferent or even hostile to the well being of those who do not.  The primary source of this warm heartedness is the loving mother/child bond.  It is here that a child acquires a felt understanding of kindness and compassion.  As was made clear throughout the Forum, these views of HH HHH HHHHfully accord with the understandings of developmental psychology and cognitive science, although those disciplines reference primary care givers rather than “mothers” as the source of the child’s capacity to experience and extend kindness.

According to HH, the next step in developing more compassionate world citizens takes place when adults use reason with young people, along with ongoing affection, to help them move beyond the first level of compassion to include all beings within their circle of concern.  The shift from the first to the second level of compassion is a shift requiring cognitive understanding of both interdependence and the ever changing reality of causes and conditions.  It as well requires motivation, practice and reinforcement if it is to become habitual.    

Educating for Compassion

Because the shift to more global compassion involves reason and understanding, HH recommends that secular education systems play a major role in developing it.

The central question for HH is how to educate all children in compassion.  As research and practice unfolds following the Forum, it will be important to build on his general remarks and clarify exactly what is meant by this term.  How will we know it when we see it?  How will we measure it as either an outcome or as a means to other outcomes? 

There are several possibilities and there was no indication as to which, if any, HH would prefer.  While it may or may not be important to him which are pursued, each implies different strategies and approaches for schools and teachers.

A first specific application of compassion to schooling is to focus on the development of citizens who engage in social and civic action to improve the lives of others. A second is to work on the development of citizens who take interdependence into account when deciding how to lead their individual lives.  A third is to focus on the development of citizens who strive toward kindness in all their interactions with others.  There are undoubtedly others which should be added to this list.  When the list is complete, we will be able to identify what needs to be done to bring any or all of them to fruition. 

Compassion and/or Mindfulness

It is noteworthy that other participants in the Forum and other people in “the field” tend to speak about teaching “mindfulness” rather than about teaching compassion to teachers and children.   This adds a further level of complexity to the terrain.  The same questions apply – what does “mindfulness” mean, how will we know it when we see it, how will we measure it?   It will also be necessary to clarify in what ways, if any, the development of mindfulness is necessary or related to the development of compassion in children and the adults who teach them.   The answers to these questions will have implications for what is done and how it is done in classrooms and teacher training programs.

As noted above, from HH’s point of view, compassion is the desired outcome of a re-focused educational system.  But among panelists, compassion and mindfulness tended to be spoken of primarily as means toward other outcomes for teachers and students.  The outcomes mentioned included:  attentional focus, emotional self regulation, classroom behavior, preparation for crises, autonomy/student voice, interpersonal skills, reductions in risky behavior, patience, kindness, emotional security, trust, cognitive learning, executive functioning, happiness, physical well being, and reduced aggression. 

That the list is so long indicates the many ways in which compassion and/or mindfulness connect to well being.  At the same time, such a long list poses real challenges.  Clarifying which of these outcomes are being sought and by what means in any given endeavor, as well as which will be measured to evaluate various programs and projects will undoubtedly affect what is planned and how much support and funding becomes available for new projects in this field.

The American Context

HH’s central question of how to teach children compassion (as well as the potentially related question of how to teach them mindfulness) exists within significant complexities introduced by many of the other Forum participants.   Below I identify five distinct themes which ran throughout the varied comments and questions of the Forum.  Teasing them out of the rich mix of dialogue will, I hope, help clarify the relationship between HH’s vision and the applied work of researchers and practitioners.  In what follows, I speak only of teaching compassion because that was the focus of HH.  It seems likely that all are germane to the teaching of mindfulness as well. 

Weakened families

The first theme that emerged from panelists across the two days of dialogue is that within contemporary American society many, many children do not have access to the warm, stable inner circle which is needed to both nourish the development of first level compassion and provide the emotional foundation for successful cognitive learning of any kind.  Many speakers addressed the new role that teachers need to play in compensating for this deficit in addition to the more conventional role that they have in developing students’ cognitive understanding of all subjects, including interdependence.  As noted by many, success in even this conventional role requires that teachers consistently enact regard and affection for all their students.

Teachers need sophisticated skills

The second, related theme is that teachers themselves must have sophisticated emotional and cognitive skills and dispositions in order to provide students with such a nurturing learning environment.  The following preliminary list of skills and dispositions draws on explicit comments of panelists as well as implications of their remarks. 

Those who would teach children compassion need:

• The intention to provide all students with a nurturing learning environment.
• The ability to regulate their own emotional responses to children and to other events in their lives;
• The motivation and skill to build positive, supportive relationships with individual young people;  
• The skills to teach and support students in learning to recognize and regulate their own inner states; 
• A sophisticated understanding of interdependence as it manifests in the world and the subjects they teach;
• An understanding of how to structure classroom culture and learning activities so that students can practice compassion as part of regular classroom life.

And, of course, teachers must know how to weave all these threads into the regular curriculum which their students are expected to learn and they are expected to teach. 

Contemporary schooling is not a hospitable environment for educating world citizens

The third theme is that enormous changes are needed in teacher training and in the structure of schools in order to create the conditions for the kind of teaching and learning described above.  Currently there is virtually no recognition of the tremendous complexity of the work that teachers do.   Consequently they are neither provided with appropriate training nor appropriate induction into the profession.  The result is the widespread failure to accomplish many of the current goals of education.  There is no reason to think the status quo could succeed at a new goal of inculcating compassion.   

There is equally limited recognition of the need for schools to be personalized learning environments that attend to the developmental needs of the whole child at all stages.  As a result, national, state and local reform efforts are typically focused on narrow academic outcomes, and strategies for realizing them.  Such reforms are actually antithetical to the goal of cultivating compassionate teachers and children. 

Pockets of Hope

A fourth theme is that the picture is not one of unrelieved bleakness.  There are individual schools at both the elementary and secondary levels which provide the right kind of context for the work of teaching children compassion.  So too, there are some teacher preparation programs that already use approaches which are complementary and could readily incorporate new strategies targeting compassion.  And there exist practicing teachers who already have the skills needed to enact compassionate teaching, usually as a result of practices learned and carried out in their non-school lives.  It is, however, necessary to acknowledge that such schools, teacher preparation programs and classroom teachers are outliers in the vast world of public education.   

The Need for More Research

The fifth and final theme of the Forum is that we do not yet have definitive answers to most of the questions about how children actually learn compassion.  We do not fully understand the timing of critical windows in brain development for its learning, we do not know which strategies are best for different age groups nor what a coherent sequencing of these strategies would look like, and we do not know if there are significant cultural variables that affect this learning.  However, there is still good news in this picture.  The only apparent barrier to answering these research questions is adequate funding for both researchers and the projects they need to study; the techniques for measuring most of the salient variables already exist or are within reach. 

Implications of these themes

Learning the answers to the research questions mentioned above is critically important.  That these questions are nested within the complex challenges facing American families and American schools, however, means that new knowledge will not readily translate into action to benefit most students. To reach most of the children in our schools in a deep way, we would also need a social commitment to fully support them from gestation through graduation, along with an equally comprehensive commitment to transform schools into personalized environments that are responsive to the whole child.  In the absence of these large scale social initiatives,  research-based knowledge about developmentally and culturally appropriate ways to teach compassion will most likely be adopted in a systematic fashion only by the relatively small number of communities, institutions or teachers that already have the capability or disposition to assimilate this information and use it to enhance their existing endeavors.

That said, perhaps the answers to the research questions may allow us to reach larger numbers of students and teachers through interventions that can be readily introduced into the existing social and educational landscape.  Research may help us identify small scale, hence doable, interventions for students or teachers (or both) that nonetheless yield measurable outcomes. 

To acknowledge the limited scale of implementation in no way diminishes the value either of the research or its sphere of influence.  Explicitly bringing compassion and mindfulness fully into the repertoire of willing schools and teachers can enhance their effectiveness and augment the benefits their students receive.   Finding smaller scale (and more affordable) strategies for more typical schools that nonetheless have positive effects on learning and social skills, while taming behavior problems and distraction, will reduce the suffering and increase the well being of teachers and students alike.  And success in any of these efforts may encourage broader changes that we cannot yet imagine. 

There is, however, an important caveat to bear in mind for efforts to develop small scale affordable interventions that “fit” into mainstream classrooms.  None of us would like to see compassion and mindfulness practices used to pacify students and habituate them to harmful teaching practices and or meaningless learning expectations. We would not want mindfulness and compassion to lessen the perceived need for the kinds of changes that would create classrooms that address the whole child and offer authentic and challenging learning opportunities.

Next steps

With all that said, it is useful to consider some of the strategic and logistical issues involved in carrying out this agenda – research, programming for students and teachers, and developing high quality teacher trainers.

As discussed above, research is needed to better understand the effects of compassion and/or mindfulness training on students and teachers, to identify developmentally and culturally appropriate practices, and to identify the best ways to introduce and sustain practices for both students and teachers.   Clearly research and programming go hand in hand.  Researchers need programs to study and programs need research in order to grow and improve. 

In the area of programming for students, there are several formal programs that already exist (Mind Up!, Inner Kids, Learning 2 Breathe) each of which has some preliminary research results or plans to obtain them.  Similarly, in the area of programming for teachers, formal programs already exist (Cultivating Emotional Balance, SMART in Education, CARE) which are also conducting research as they implement trainings.  Any field development research agenda clearly must expand the study of the outcomes of these program as well as develop comparative studies of the effectiveness of various design elements. 

One of the most important things to remember about this field, however, is that it is just emerging.   As a result, for quite some time it will be disorganized, dispersed, and full of idiosyncratic initiatives begun by people who have been exposed to the wide array of general audience adult mindfulness training that has been available in the US for the last 30 or so years and feel drawn to bringing this work to teachers and students.  The “market” in mindfulness programs will sprout, just as the market in yoga did, not so long ago.

As a result, there is an early need for guidelines on what should and shouldn’t be done, especially with children.  Efforts to cull such guidelines from the preliminary research in this field, from research in related fields such as those focused on developmental processes, or from practitioners who also have insight into youth development such as child and adolescent therapists, should be undertaken as soon as possible. 

A second need related to the immature state of the field is for the development of protocols and assessments that can be used by new programs to determine their efficacy.  This effort should consider both guidelines for the collection and use of readily available data as well as the creation of instruments that will collect new data specifically related to this field such as user friendly measures of attentional focus, emotional regulation and executive functioning.

While research is needed to determine the efficacy and appropriateness of particular strategies, it is unlikely to  dispute the central role that teachers play in building warm hearted relationships with children, modeling compassionate (or mindful) behavior, structuring the activities in which children participate, and structuring the learning that children do.  We know that in order to reach children or adolescents in any form, their teachers must be involved.  Questions related to this necessary role of teachers include the following:  Do teachers need special training to help them develop their own practices before they bring mindfulness to students?  Can teachers develop their practices at the same time as they are bringing mindfulness to students?  Are there different effects on students depending on which strategy is adopted or simply differences in the size of the effects on students? 

A final set of considerations has to do with increasing the supply of skilled trainers who can bring this work to schools in appropriate ways.  All the programs mentioned above will have to address this issue if they wish to grow, as will any new programs that emerge.  What skills do trainers need and how skillful do they need to be?  Do they need to have long standing practices of their own or just a commitment and passion about the work?  Will each program develop its own training of trainers program or will other organizations step in or new ones emerge to fill this need?  

There seem to be three possible sources for recruiting those who will train teachers either for the purpose of bringing programming to students to or for the purpose of providing direct support to teachers.

1. From the ranks of teachers or teacher educators with well developed personal practices some of whom may already have begun to integrate aspects of these practices into their classrooms. 
2. From the group of teachers who become deeply attracted to this work when introduced to it through any of the training programs listed above.
3. From the ranks of those who already teach meditation, mindfulness and/or compassion to adults (without any special focus on educators) through the wide variety of programs offered by such organizations as Insight Meditation, Shambhala,  the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction network, and others like them.

There are strengths and weaknesses involved in each of the options. 

Option 1 offers the pool of trainers most qualified to handle the work of training teachers in developing their own practices and integrating them into classrooms.  Here we already have teachers who know what mindfulness has done for them and for their students.  The first challenge is that such practicing classroom teachers or teacher educators are dispersed across the country (and world) and not necessarily connected to existing networks.  The second challenge is that they already have jobs which are more than full time and their availability to teach and coach their peers may be limited.

Option 2 offers a pool of trainers with direct, day to day classroom experience.  But as novices to a mindfulness practice, they are limited in their ability to embody this work to those they train.  There is a risk that the practices that are taught by them will not be modeled or transmitted in a deep way.

Option 3 offers a group of trainers with relatively deep personal practices who have already integrated the teaching of mindfulness into the structure of their lives.  Many of them do so as part of a personal commitment to serving others and often for relatively limited financial compensation.  These individuals, however, do not have a professional understanding of the challenges of day to day classroom life.  They could undoubtedly facilitate conversations among teachers, but initially they will not be able to offer direct advice or effectively trouble shoot problematic situations with students.

Regardless of the backgrounds of the trainers selected for any given program, energy must be put into adapting to their weaknesses, developing their strengths, and creating coherence among them in what they do, especially those involved in any research studies.  Just as teachers need collegial staff development to be effective in the classroom, so too trainers will need a high quality support program to insure that they learn from and with each other. 

Conclusion

The Forum in Washington was a major public announcement that a new field of research and practice in education is being developed all around us.  With the support of major research universities and leading figures in research and practice, the dialogue gave a new level of legitimacy to a movement that is in the early stages of defining itself. 

It will take many years to appreciate the full impact of this event.  In the meantime official participants and members of the audience have a new sense of the work that needs to be done to bring to fruition the vision of a compassionate world that attends to the needs of all its beings.