“From my work with elders, I learned stories, games, and how to become a better person,” said a student named Mya. It even relieved despair for one resident, Jodi, who said, “I went from a daily dread that I was still alive and breathing . . . to anticipat[ing] an awesome day that was full of life and joy.”

Many extracurricular activities, sports, meetups, and other community programs bring people of similar ages together: children with children, teens with teens, adults with adults, seniors with seniors. But new research on an intergenerational program known as iGen suggests that these initiatives may be especially beneficial to our health and well-being.

Finding meaning in connection

For the study, the 25 participating students—as well as three elders and eight long-term care staff members—completed a variety of surveys. At the end of the day, they rated how meaningful their interactions with different groups of people were, how much fun and positive and negative emotions they had, and the quality of their physical health that day. They also reported how many kind and helpful actions they performed, and how strong their social connections and sense of belonging were.

Everyone completed surveys for 10 straight school days in late September and early October, and then again in June.

The results suggested that people were experiencing meaningful interactions between generations, and highly meaningful interactions with their peers of similar ages. While people didn’t become happier, healthier, or more kind overall over the course of the program, the researchers did observe changes on a daily basis.

On days when people had more meaningful interactions, they tended to feel better, more connected, healthier, and kinder. This was true for both interactions with people the same age (like students with students, or elders with elders) and intergenerational interactions—although the benefits seemed more pronounced between generations than with peers.

This link appeared even stronger toward the end of the program than near the beginning. In June, having meaningful interactions through iGen seemed to have an even bigger impact on people’s well-being than it did in the fall. The researchers, led by Jason D. E. Proulx, suggest this might be because students had deepened their relationships with elders by that point, or they were savoring their last few weeks together.

The length and depth of this program—spending whole days together over 10 months—may have contributed to how powerful it was, the researchers suggest.

Although this research only reflects one program, with a majority of white participants, it offers promising evidence that programs like this can help young and old alike, and comprise a valuable part of students’ education. Other research finds that interacting across generations can improve mental health and cognitive function in older people, and a sense of purpose for all of us.

“Programs like iGen may be one effective and scalable intervention to foster more inclusive, meaningfully connected, and happier communities,” write Proulx and his colleagues.

Mya’s mother Tanya said that she “built long-lasting friendships with the residents . . . but also learned the value and appreciation of life.”

“It took those sixth-grade kids to bring life back into focus for me,” said Jodi, who had thought her life was over and sometimes wanted it to be. “iGen saved me.”

We are beginning to expect a lot from these pre-teens, whether it’s keeping a promise, taking responsibility, or showing courage. But too often, we have not given them the language, structure, or time to think through how to make the right decision in those moments that matter.

Scientific research can help—believe it or not! There are a range of compelling studies that offer middle school educators a roadmap on what skills and mindsets students need to make the right decisions.
 
Self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation—and there are compelling data that middle school students are more likely to act consistently when their goals are personally meaningful, not externally imposed.

In addition, David Yeager’s work on adolescent motivation highlights that young people are deeply driven by a desire for status and respect from their peers and mentors. When students feel respected and see themselves as capable of contributing to others, their motivation and behavior improve.

More recently, research by Benjamin Rogers and his colleagues suggests that when individuals of all ages see their lives as part of a broader “hero’s journey,” they are more likely to act with purpose and be a force for good.

Overall, researchers point to a clear and compelling insight: Students need opportunities to define who they are, who they want to become, and how their everyday choices—guided by their values—align with that identity. This insight directly informed a curriculum we designed for middle school students titled Moments That Matter.
 
The Moments That Matter curriculum is a program of the Griffin Institute at the National Medal of Honor Museum, based in Arlington, Texas. For middle school students, a “moment that matters” could be when they’re being pressured to lie, steal, or cheat or when they want to hang out with their friends, but their mom needs them to stay at home with a younger sibling.

Tapping into their own personal interests and experiences, our mission as educators was to take middle school students on a journey of self-discovery, empowering them to explore two essential questions: Who am I? Who am I becoming for others?

While students learn about the history of the Medal of Honor—the highest U.S. military decoration—the curriculum is primarily focused on four core values that have enabled ordinary Americans to do extraordinary things: commitment, integrity, sacrifice, and courage.

Each student begins their journey by identifying their own superpowers, the unique strengths, talents, and skills they will need to become their best selves for others. Students are also encouraged to identify the superpowers of their classmates. At the core of these activities is an opportunity for students to discover how their unique strengths can connect to and support the values and goals that mean the most to them.

One of the cornerstone moments of the curriculum is when students are encouraged to reflect and write down a set of goals that focus on who they want to become for others. Some students write they want to be the best friend they can be. Others say they want their parents to see them as trustworthy and responsible.

After students have written about a specific goal that will enable them to be their best self for others, teachers guide them through a series of lessons on each of the four Medal of Honor values. The lessons do not focus on hypothetical scenarios but on how each student’s everyday choices and decisions directly connect and shape their personal goals and identity.

Commitment: Turning goals into action

Students are encouraged to reflect on commitments they have already made, whether it’s helping their parents with the dishes or wanting to be the best teammate. Students also collaboratively explore the reasons why it’s sometimes hard to keep their commitments (e.g., peer pressure, competing priorities, wanting to fit in). In addition, students learn how to develop positive habits and routines that will help them to consistently “live” their commitments.

Each student then creates their own “commitment action plan.” The plan includes:

• a commitment they will implement within the next seven days;
• the habits and routines they will create;
• the challenges they may face; and
• a person they will ask to hold them accountable to their commitment (a friend, parent, teacher).

Integrity: Aligning our values, words, and actions

Students next learn why integrity is important in those moments that matter—and how integrity occurs when we align our beliefs, words, and actions. Students read and discuss different scenarios where someone has shown integrity (and the value or belief at the heart of that person’s integrity, such as compassion, friendship, or sportsmanship).

Students then create their own “Integrity Action Plan.” They start by writing down their North Star values, the values and beliefs most important to them (e.g., honesty, fairness, kindness). Every student is also encouraged to come up with their own personal motto that they will repeat to themselves whenever they need to be reminded why it’s important to follow their North Star values.

Sacrifice: Acting for others, not just ourselves

Students next explore how sacrifice is almost always linked to a conviction or strong belief about who they want to be. Students also discover how empathy and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can help them decide when to make a sacrifice. They write in their journal about a fictional character from a movie, show, or book who made a sacrifice and how empathy might have motivated the character to make that sacrifice.

Each student then creates their own “sacrifice preparedness plan.” They first write down a particular conviction or belief (e.g., “I want to be caring”). Next, they reflect on those “moments” when they may need to make a sacrifice to stay aligned with their convictions and beliefs. A week later, students come together to reflect on two questions: How does making sacrifices impact people in your life? and How could you start making sacrifices for the things or people you care about?

Courage: Acting despite fear, danger, or hardship

At this moment in the Moments That Matter curriculum, students are eager to explore the three essential “tools” that produce courage in those moments that matter: commitment, competence, and confidence. They learn that:

• commitments push us to act with courage;
• competence is having the knowledge and skills to do something scary or difficult; and
• confidence is that internal feeling of “I can do this!” —an indispensable tool that fuels our courageous behaviors.

Students also learn about the power of positive self-talk.

Finally, students are invited to write their own “courage action plan.” At the heart of the plan is identifying the different areas of their lives where they may need to act with courage.

Next, they create their own “if/then” scripts: “If” I am in this situation, “then” I will respond with courage because I have made a commitment, practiced the skills and knowledge to do the right thing, and can leverage my confidence and positive self-talk to overcome my fears or doubts.

What have we learned from tracking the classroom impact of Moments That Matter? Teachers who piloted the curriculum have told us that what they most appreciate about it is how it encourages student voice (e.g., how students were learning from each other as they shared with their peers why they sometimes did not show integrity or courage).

The post-assessment data collected from our pilot implementation is also promising. Students report increased levels of self-awareness, a greater willingness to take responsibility for their actions, and a stronger tendency to think about their values when making everyday decisions.

Perhaps most powerfully, we appreciated hearing from teachers that the Moments That Matter curriculum gave them the opportunity to serve as mentors. As one teacher shared with us: “The curriculum reminded me why I became a teacher. It gave my students space to talk about character in a way that felt authentic and meaningful for students—and me.”

This phenomenon creates an exceptional opportunity for college and university faculty. Not only can they teach content, but they can help students cultivate character virtues needed for adult life and potentially see them spread throughout many areas of society.

Without too much heavy lifting, faculty can create classroom conditions that cultivate virtues like open-mindedness, awareness, empathy, and democratic citizenship. These virtues can help increase students’ capacity for ethical decision making, leadership, and professional growth, which are crucial for responsible participation in society.

As young people tackle heightened ideological polarization and partisan hostility in the U.S., they need the right tools to navigate tough conversations and connect with others whose lives look different from their own. Universities can offer a safe and structured, yet intellectually challenging, environment for their students to practice character virtues that are essential to a healthy society.

What university experiences support character development?

Our project team wanted to understand how students’ experiences at our university affect their capacity to cultivate character virtues. To do this, we conducted 12 focus groups with 51 undergraduate students, asking them to reflect on the aspects of their course experiences that either supported or hindered them in developing character virtues. Below are some key takeaways.

1. Activities that promote perspective taking and productive disagreement can support students in practicing virtues such as open-mindedness, awareness, and empathy. Examples of these activities varied in scope. Several students spoke about the importance of building meaningful relationships with peers, both inside and outside the classroom. They often mentioned how these opportunities were crucial in nurturing virtues related to open-mindedness and empathy.

Within classes, students highlighted that their most meaningful peer relationships were facilitated through working with members of their program cohort, participating in project-based group work, or discussing topics with partners. For example, students talked about how working in small-group settings encouraged them to build trust with one another, ultimately fostering a classroom environment that encouraged authentic dialogue and productive disagreement:

The [program] cohort that I’m in [is] still small enough where I could probably name everybody, and a fun fact about them, and like that’s super cool, because then I can also disagree with everybody because I feel comfortable, knowing who they are and I know their values, and I know how to contradict them in a way that’s productive versus just like arguing at someone for hours, [that] doesn’t get you very far.

One student, for example, recounted her experience completing an assignment that required her to interview someone who held a different political viewpoint from her. She shared:

I think [my Political Dialogue class is] where I started working on my open-mindedness . . . because [I realized] everyone has a deeper root for what they believe in. There was one guy I had to meet with and talk with, and the reason he was more [politically] conservative was because he grew up in the [Great] Depression era, and his [conservatism] came from the economic side. [This assignment] was really wonderful, because you also learn these skills of talking to people and presenting empathy and open-mindedness [to others].

One student shed light on how her course experiences have helped her grow in her ability to be more curious and less judgmental about people with different views than her own:

[My classes] allow me to have a wider perspective of people’s backgrounds, views, and ideas, and why they have them, even if it’s someone that I don’t agree with. I still appreciate being exposed to that. I think the way my classes are structured really help me learn from a different perspective . . . my professor will take time out of the beginning of class to literally put all [our] desks in a circle so that we look at each other when we speak. It’s little things like that that help with my moral development . . . when I leave [university], I’ll know how to properly listen to a person, ask follow-up questions, and ask clarifying questions . . . little things like that [can] help me learn about someone holistically rather than just [think] “they said a statement” and then I judge it based off of the statement.

2. Personal connections with instructors who show empathy help cultivate environments where students feel comfortable asking questions and sharing opinions. It is not surprising that students emphasized the critical role their instructors play. Specifically, they shared the importance of instructors demonstrating effort in building authentic and meaningful relationships with their students, and being accessible (such as lingering at the end of class, showing up where students spend time, making clear that faculty have time for and are interested in helping students, and providing office hours but also expressing to students how to use these office hours [e.g., “Come and chat”]).

Students also mentioned how the classroom culture set by their instructor influenced how comfortable they felt to express their opinions generally, but also how likely they were to engage in authentic dialogue with their peers:

I’m an [education] major, so a lot of our classes [involve] discussions. I feel [like this] relates a lot to being open-minded. I feel like a lot of the discussions in classes . . . the space is a lot more welcoming, for disagreement and challenging different ideas. And I feel like the professors are very supportive of that, too. I’ve also found that a lot of professors in that school [the School of Education and Human Development] are more willing to foster relationships with their students.

Not all students had positive experiences. Some students spoke about times when instructors created hostile classroom environments that discouraged authentic participation. One Black student shared about a time her professor used a racial slur and how this impacted her psychological safety:

I think that censorship is a big theme in classrooms and . . . I think that students don’t feel like they can truly express themselves because professors are not cultivating an environment where respectful debate is welcome. . . . I know one professor in particular—I love him, but he said something crazy . . . the N-word. And he’s white and tenured. That power dynamic gives you the ability to say something like that and not receive repercussions. . . . But students can’t. . . and that challenges your ability to truly like authentically, be yourself in the classroom. So, I appreciate when professors are who they are, but they are cognizant of the demographics that they are teaching. And even if those demographics are not in the room, they’re constantly including those demographics in their discussions, because to me, that’s true allyship and advocacy.

This example illustrates how important it is for instructors to be aware of their own personal attributes and past experiences, the power differences between them and their students, and the intersection of the two—especially in classrooms that include students with marginalized identities.

3. Understanding the relevance of course content within the real world impacts students’ virtue development. Students crave opportunities to apply their new classroom knowledge to real-world situations linked to current events in society. One student, for example, described how seeing real-life applications deepened their understanding of how they can exercise their civic-related virtues to make the world a better place:

I think using a real-life application project as a way to facilitate diversity [is meaningful]. I remember going to a conference two months ago and seeing a . . . competition where entrepreneurs pitched ideas about how they can use AI or machine learning or any type of technology to improve, for example, maternal health for Black mothers, since we are more likely to die in childbirth. . . . It’s really cool to see how innovative these projects can be and how it can help a lot of people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, or anyone who just wants the problem solved. So more of those real-life examples [in the classroom].

Though students want their learning to connect to real-world situations, it is not always feasible for instructors to implement experiential learning opportunities. Courses are already packed with specialized content and sometimes serve as a prerequisite for other courses. Saying yes to one type of content might mean saying no to another.

Yet we see that college student engagement has dropped in recent years—students, on average, spent 1.7 fewer hours attending classes, discussion sections, and labs in 2022–23 than in 2018–19. Is it possible that incorporating real-world situations would enhance engagement? What if every semester included at least one course built around real-world, experiential learning? This might include asking students to follow a current news topic related to the course content for the full semester, creating assignments that require students to engage with community members, or learning about a local problem related to course content (e.g., local water testing in chemistry, or analyzing data from the city on problems like transportation or affordable housing in a data analysis class).

If it is too difficult to rework curriculum to create real-world opportunities, faculty can turn to other means to engage students in real-world experiences. At least 65% of students enrolled in college engage in research with faculty, extracurricular activities with student organizations, or civic participation. That raises the question—are there ways that instructors can create connections between students’ classes and their daily lives and activities outside of class?

What university experiences hinder character development?

Students were also candid in sharing aspects of their lives that can sometimes limit or challenge their capacity to engage in virtue development:

1. Being the “bigger person” in every situation is difficult to sustain. It is difficult for students to engage in perspective taking and practice open-mindedness with beliefs that oppose their own. One student, for example, reflected on how she grapples with expressing empathy with others, especially to those who hold perspectives that oppose her personal values:

I think sometimes it’s really hard to be compassionate and empathetic when I just don’t understand why [someone is] doing that. And then there’s also the idea of being fundamentally different from somebody, and somebody’s fundamental views on life and morals, are just different from my own and so it’s sometimes hard to give people any benefit of the doubt when I’m like, You’re representing something that I fundamentally disagree with.

2. Students expressed feeling uncertain about their future. This can make it difficult for them to prioritize practicing certain civic virtues, such as social action, because they are focused on how to navigate their own uncertainties ahead.

Students expressed concerns regarding navigating an unstable job market, finding a job related to their degree, and ultimately establishing a career that is aligned with their values and how they want to contribute to society:

I’m currently about to graduate and I’ve accepted one job over another job. . . . I did have two [job] offers that I felt like both of them would have been making a positive change in the world, and would kind of get me closer to where I wanted to be in 5 to 10 years, but I picked one over the other largely because I feel really uncertain about where the economy is headed, where, like education in particular is headed. So, I chose a job over Teach for America, because I’m not super sure where the AmeriCorps is going to go. So yeah, I think financial stability matters to me. But I think at this point, making positive change also still really matters to me.

She also went on to share her concerns regarding the longevity of her career path, given current political realities:

As someone that’s studying public health intertwined in education, those are two things that I feel like are really being defunded or not invested in currently by the administration. Also, I got one of my offers rescinded initially, and that really sucked. I think that a huge challenge for me is trying to figure out and navigate this landscape of what do I do? [Do I choose] what I know will be good for my career in five years, post this [presidential] administration, or do I do what I need to do to be comfortable right now with where I’m at?

Young people will inevitably encounter circumstances that bump up against their character virtues. It is our responsibility, as educators, to provide our students with the tools they need to navigate these difficult moments, so they engage in ethical decision making. The best place to start, we’ve found, is by elevating the voices of your students and genuinely seeking to understand how you can best support their character development. So, start there: Listen first and create opportunities for students to stretch, practice, and apply virtues to real-life, day-to-day situations.

Liudmyla Herasymenko, an associate professor at the Ukrainian State Flight Academy in Kropyvnytskyi, Kirovohrad, Ukraine, is one of the millions of educators carrying the invisible weight of supporting her students’ social and emotional well-being despite the turmoil that surrounds them every day.

“Because of the existing threat, which is hanging, you cannot plan your day in advance,” Herasymenko says. “You can have some plans, but everything can be changed in one second, and you need to adapt to be flexible about it. We have alerts, so that means we need to go to the shelter, then schedules of electricity, which means you need to find power and Wi-Fi. So, it’s a lot of stress that we are experiencing.”

Herasymenko is not alone—a rising number of children and educators are currently facing unprecedented disruption and stress due to living in conflict-affected areas. More than 473 million children live in or are fleeing settings of conflict and crisis around the world, and approximately 204 million people worldwide live in areas controlled or contested by armed groups.

Educators in these spaces are navigating burnout, secondary trauma, and constant uncertainty, while they simultaneously hold space for students’ fear, grief, and hope. In these conditions, the question is not whether teachers and students need support, but rather what kinds of support are actually feasible, sustainable, and relevant to them.

Small practices that make the day possible

Despite years of disruption, Ukrainian educators have found creative ways to help students stay connected and engaged. They adapt lesson plans around air raid alerts, maintain routines that foster belonging, and cultivate community across distance and displacement. Social-emotional learning (SEL) practices have become one more tool in that effort, helping educators strengthen the care and support they were already providing.

According to a recent journal article, SEL Kernels—short activities and strategies that are used to support the growth and development of social and emotional skills and competencies—helped support teachers and students in wartime Ukraine. These include games, routines, and activities that target specific skills like emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and building relationships.

When SEL practices are not adjusted to be responsive and relevant to a particular culture, they’re less likely to have benefits. These SEL Kernels, developed by Harvard University’s Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning Laboratory, were modified to fit the evolving needs of educators and teachers in Ukraine. How? Rebecca Bailey and her colleagues started with landscape research to identify what challenges students and educators in Ukraine were actually facing.

“Building on these findings, we engaged in a collaborative co-design process with Ukrainian teachers and a team of LEGO Foundation Ukraine Master Trainers to adapt and refine the Kernels for local relevance and usability,” they write.

They conducted a survey and organized focus groups for teachers to discuss their concerns about student well-being and mental health. Teachers identified areas where additional support could strengthen the work they were already doing, including helping students regulate emotions during air raid alerts, rebuild social connections, and navigate prolonged uncertainty.

Based on the survey and focus group discussions, the researchers identified five priorities for the Ukraine Kernels materials, including cooperation, mindfulness, cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and teacher well-being.

“Finally, we piloted the adapted Kernels materials in diverse classroom settings, gathering data on implementation, feasibility, and relevance,” they write.

After the final revision of materials and rollout of the Kernels, Bailey and her colleagues found that teachers viewed the SEL Kernels as beneficial for both their own and students’ well-being. Teachers reported that the activities helped support emotional and psychological health, made learning more engaging and meaningful for children, and provided practical tools that eased the demands of teaching.

For example, Herasymenko has found that short mindful moments help ground both her and her students. Having students name their rose, thorn, and bud for the day—having them reflect on something positive, naming a challenge, and looking ahead to something they’re excited for—have helped them hold on to hope.

Additionally, she leads a five senses grounding practice with students to reconnect the mind and body without taking up a large amount of time during the learning day. In high-stress environments, practices like these work because they are small enough to hold, even on hard days.

“I cannot imagine my teaching being the same as it was before the war,” Herasymenko says. “Everything is different now. So, I prioritize my students’ well-being more than their academic achievements. I think that now it’s more important for them to be OK and to be without stress in my classes. This is my priority now.”

The impact of Ukrainian conflict in neighboring countries

Data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre show that internal displacements—people who have been forced to flee or leave their homeland to avoid the effects of armed conflict, violence, or violations of human rights—increased from 20 million in 2024 to 32 million in 2025.

Schools in Poland have been significantly shaped by the conflict in Ukraine, and many educators are experiencing new emotional and practical challenges while supporting students. Małgorzata Lidacka, an educator in Kraków who works with displaced Ukrainian students ages seven to 10, has had to approach teaching in a much different way to help her students acclimate to the new environment—often slowing down and reminding herself not to rush to solutions while navigating both lesson plans and emotional responsibilities.

“When you’re a subject teacher, no one tells you that you will then have to be a coach, or some kind of therapist,” Lidacka says. “You can make a mistake and then it can influence these kids. So I feel this burden that it’s a lot for one person to combine those roles.”

The cultural barriers have also made it difficult for her to connect with parents, and some students have fallen behind because they refused to learn Polish when they first arrived, thinking that the stay in a new country would have been over much faster. The anger, fear, and hopelessness that her students are experiencing make it increasingly difficult to focus on academics, and Lidacka empathizes.

To support herself and her students while carrying this increased mental load, Lidacka turned to social-emotional learning strategies. She now routinely advocates for play to promote shared joy beyond language barriers and encourages small acts of kindness—like lending a pencil or a book to a classmate. Additionally, when working with parents, she began asking open-ended questions and practicing mindful listening, which she found made a huge difference in connecting and finding common ground.

“During the workshops with parents, I just listen,” Lidacka says. “And they are creating such great ideas about the future—for them and for their families.”

Despite the challenges Lidacka has faced with her students, she has also seen how remarkably adaptable they are. Many have learned to transition between online and in-person learning at a moment’s notice, they support classmates navigating similar disruptions, and most really dove headfirst into learning the new language and culture.

“The best part is small acts of kindness on a daily basis, and also a huge determination from Ukrainian kids to learn Polish,” Lidacka says. “They really wanted to learn very fast. And we have some pupils in the first grade that are fluent in Polish, even though their parents aren’t. So I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ Of course, it was a requirement, but not everyone succeeds.”

Supporting the supporters: Teacher well-being in real time

While searching for additional support and resources for her classroom and her own well-being, Lidacka found the Greater Good Educators Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP offered a space for educators across the globe to connect with one another and learn science-based practices focused on purpose, awe, self-compassion, gratitude, and kindness and compassion for others.

For educators like Lidacka, who had already experimented with small, bite-sized SEL practices, the Greater Good Educators CoP created a space to expand on what she already knew. The practices emphasized that teacher sustainability begins with teacher well-being, and the community conversations helped her see she was not alone.

“After these three years, I see among my peers that we are exhausted,” Lidacka says. “More and more often, we are searching for places to debrief or to just sit and talk about how difficult it still is to manage this.”

Alongside learning SEL practices like mindful listening and self-compassion, the educators who joined the CoP were encouraged to practice the shared community invitations of curiosity, compassion, and respect with each other. These invitations helped create a supportive environment where teachers could connect across experiences and process challenges together.

Herasymenko is one of the many educators Lidacka was able to virtually connect with, and she shared similar sentiments about the importance of having an outlet to support her own mental well-being.

“It’s great to have some kind of community of teachers during all these hardships,” Herasymenko says. “Before the war, I didn’t pay so much attention to my well-being, and now I understand that this is an important part of a teacher’s job. To think about taking breaks, to think about how to recharge yourself.”

Educators like Lidacka and Herasymenko are not waiting for ideal conditions to create caring learning environments. They have continued teaching, adapting, and building community through years of uncertainty. SEL initiatives are not a one-size-fits-all cure for the challenges they face, but they offer additional support for work they are already doing. By investing in educators’ well-being, we help sustain the people who make learning, connection, and hope possible—even in the most difficult circumstances.

Buddy the dog and Snuggles the bunny are two of the five resilience habit animals that children at a Milwaukee school are learning to help themselves thrive. Buddy reminds kids they are not alone, and Snuggles represents kindness.

A violence prevention grant brought me into kindergarten through third-grade classrooms in early 2025 to help children use mindfulness and self-compassion practices to self-regulate, and we just wrapped up our time together. In my work as a teacher, I found myself learning just as much from them as they did from me about how these skills take root.

If you are a parent, teacher, or clinician, you might wonder how to translate abstract concepts like mindfulness and self-compassion into something a seven year old can actually use. Over a decade of teaching these skills in classrooms and with families, I’ve found that playful animal characters, when practiced in relationship, can become a voice children can carry inside to help them face hard moments with kindness.

Identifying your animal character

When I teach a lesson, I observe what causes children to lean in, and what makes them push back or disengage. One major thing I’ve observed is that kids love learning from animal characters and other kids. A group of children helped me create the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, which features animal characters and real kids sharing their experiences throughout the two-volume series. Children also taught me that they enjoy activities that are playful and authentic.

This has been true across different contexts, including the Milwaukee school I’m working in, where 97% of students live in poverty and 1 in 5 have a special education plan. In my first year in the school, there was a large second-grade classroom that had a lot of self-regulation challenges and diverse reading abilities. Nonetheless, when I shared images from the workbook of animals or real kids talking about their feelings, students’ hands would soar in the air to read their quotes and share their own experiences on the interactive whiteboard.

We started our lessons each school year with an animal quiz. Our first year, kids did the Feelings Habit Animal quiz to uncover their habits around feelings. During our lesson time together, kids learn about five different patterns: Bear explodes with feelings, Beaver obsesses about feelings, Chameleon hides feelings, Deer feels ashamed of feelings, and Flame the dragon has a mix of these habits. The feelings habit animals offer children the opportunity to observe their patterns around feelings without judgment.

Sometimes at the beginning of a lesson, we play games of charades to playfully act out the animal habits. Kids feel affection toward the feelings animals, and they also know that each animal represents feelings habits of themselves and their classmates. Observing their own behaviors through an animal lens provides cognitive distance that can pave the way for wiser choices over time.

Once children have a way to notice what they are experiencing, the next step is learning how to respond. Our second year, students took the Resilience Habit Animal quiz to identify the animal habits that felt helpful when they struggle. Kristin Neff describes self-compassion as having three core components: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. In my work with kids, these components come to life through three resilience habit animals: Spots the giraffe helps kids notice their feelings, body sensations, and five senses; Buddy the dog reminds kids they are not alone; and Snuggles the bunny represents kindness.

Play is the language of children, and this is especially true for self-compassion. While kids are generally uninterested in practicing self-compassion when it’s called self-compassion, they are often eager to try the “Spots habit” or the “Buddy habit.” Not only are kids more engaged in the practices, but some kids report imagining the animals’ voices in their minds when they are struggling. This is true both in the classrooms I teach in as well as in research on the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Children and Caregivers program, which I developed as an adaptation of Neff and Christopher Germer’s Mindful Self-Compassion program.

Each year, I saw students eagerly engage with the quiz to find out which animals they had an affinity toward. Once they did, they felt more curious about the animals’ habits, and especially connected to “their” animals. While I didn’t know it at the time, there’s research that suggests that using animals to teach children can help them acquire social-emotional skills at an early age.

Animal stories, role plays, and songs

Modeling and practice between sessions are essential for building these habits, but without time for educator training, I had to get creative about helping kids practice more during our time together. I partnered with Brienne Barrows-Gallardo, a gifted early education teacher who works with preschoolers with autism, to help me develop engaging materials kids could use to practice.

We wrote a story for each resilience habit animal so kids could see the helpful habits in action. Then my own children helped me create story videos and songs, which aided kids in internalizing the resilience animals’ voices. I also made role-play kits with different phrases each animal could say.

For example, in one story, Flame the dragon was feeling upset, and Buddy reminded her that everyone feels upset sometimes. Because Flame can have multiple feelings habits, kids were able to choose how she responded using the choices in the role-play kit.

The children also had a picture of Buddy the dog to decorate or color, along with phrases that Buddy might say to soothe them.

As kids colored, the classroom teacher and I moved about the room engaging in role plays with them. One of my favorite moments was hearing the teacher pretend to be Flame with big Bear feelings, and a kindergartner responded, “Ms. B., it’s OK to feel like this. Everyone gets upset sometimes.”

Another week, after talking about how Bear has big feelings, the kids and I did a group role play on the carpet helping Bear with the Snuggles habit. Then the kids had the opportunity to decorate Snuggles the bunny while we rotated around to practice. A child who often has big feelings didn’t like how she was coloring her page, so she ripped her paper in half and threw it on the floor. I walked over to her desk, and acknowledged that she was having big feelings. She looked up at me, and her eyes flashed with recognition. She was having the Bear habit! Instead of spiraling, as she often does, she picked up her paper, and we taped it back together. This is the power of awareness.

The feelings habit animals not only help kids with awareness (the Spots habit), they also help kids to feel less alone with big feelings. Kids know that other kids share their feelings habits, and, in this way, common humanity (the Buddy habit) is linked with the animal.

Barrows-Gallardo also created social stories that could be used with the children with autism in her classroom. Research suggests that using animal characters can help children on the autism spectrum learn social-emotional skills. In the classrooms, I noticed that a number of neurodivergent children were highly engaged in learning about the resilience and feelings habit animals. One child astutely observed that we didn’t need to practice the feelings animal habits because they are already “built in.”

Children also loved embodying the action-oriented resilience animals, like Super Snuggles and Doodles the dolphin. Doodles encourages kids to take helpful actions like moving their body and trying their best.

When they step into these animal roles, children aren’t just learning the habits; they are becoming them. Research has found a similar effect: When children imagine themselves as strong or capable characters like Batman, they are more likely to persist through challenges.

One parent whose son did the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids told me that her son, who also had the Bear habit, had to do vision therapy. He had a little stuffed bear that represented the bear from the workbook that had big feelings. When he felt frustrated with his vision therapy, he would look at his bear, and it would comfort him. For him, seeing his bear feelings animal helped him remember “I am not alone” and “I can handle this.”

The role of the caregiver

As beautiful as it is to see children practicing self-compassion with the animal characters, I know it’s not enough for the practice to fully take root. The work we started through the violence prevention grant will only go deeper if the teachers understand, practice, and reinforce self-compassion next school year. The principal of the school and I are trying to arrange inservices for the teachers next year to help them grow their own self-compassion practice and support students with continued practice. This is because my relational four-step framework for helping kids grow self-compassion begins with the caregiver.

As parents, teachers, and caregivers, the best place to begin is with our own mindfulness and self-compassion practice. We can do this alongside a child, or on our own. When we model being mindful of struggles, it helps kids remember that everyone struggles sometimes. And when we model self-kindness, it helps kids learn to do the same. Children learn from watching us say, “I feel upset, and I know that everyone gets upset sometimes. I’m going to be OK.”

Kids also internalize how caregivers speak to them. We want to be the voices of Buddy and Snuggles, reminding kids, “You’re not alone. I care about you.” There are many ways to help kids grow self-compassion in daily life, and our presence is just as important as our words.

Self-compassion takes root through supportive relationships and playful animals that bring it to life. From Sesame Street to Daniel Tiger to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, children have always learned emotional skills through the characters they love. Over time, these characters can become something even more powerful: a compassionate inner voice that children carry with them for life.

Can you teach someone to provide care that isn’t simply accepting of differences, but actually tends to all the ways those differences are impacting a patient’s health? 

The faculty at Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy can. In fact, they must. They’re required to do so by the accreditation body that sets the standards for the education of pharmacists.

In addition to teaching students information like the physicochemical properties of drugs or the mathematical calculations involved in dosing, pharmacy programs are required to help their students develop complex interpersonal skills such as cultural and structural humility, advocacy, and interprofessional collaboration. The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education requires that all pharmacy programs prepare students to provide “whole-person care.”

Whole-person care, according to the World Health Organization, requires that providers learn to see that a patient’s health is not just the result of biomedical factors. Psychosocial, cultural, and environmental forces also shape our well-being. Providing whole-person care means crafting treatment plans that address all of those forces. It’s impossible to provide this kind of integrated care without strong interpersonal skills. Graduates of accredited pharmacy schools—like other institutions that train health care professionals—must know how to “actively engage, listen, and communicate” and “to mitigate health disparities by considering, recognizing, and navigating cultural and structural factors.”

How, exactly, does an institution help students engage with each patient as a person with their own needs, beliefs, and cultural norms and as a person whose health might be impacted by structural forces like environmental racism or anti-fat bias? The McWhorter School of Pharmacy offers a helpful model in teaching people to care in complex, comprehensive ways for people who are different from them.

The “other culture” assignment

Jonathan Thigpen has come up with creative, impactful strategies for teaching these skills during his tenure as assistant dean of Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy.

Thigpen and his colleagues have crafted a curriculum in whole-person care that runs throughout a doctoral student’s time at Samford. One of the assignments he gives first-year students—the “other culture” assignment—is emblematic of this work. Thigpen created the assignment in response to an unsettling observation. Across many years of teaching, he noticed in his students a growing reluctance to get out of their comfort zones. He says he saw an “increasing unwillingness to try something new, to take a risk, to put yourself out there.” It was disconcerting because, as Thigpen says, “you have to be able to do that as a health care provider.”

The assignment involves:

• Visiting a site or event that is part of an “other” culture. It can be any culture about which the student is curious; it just has to be different from the student’s own background. The student should ask permission to attend if necessary.
• Staying immersed and present for at least one hour. The student must go have an individual experience. They can’t bring a friend or go with a group of people from class. The student must stay off of their phone and avoid taking photos, pictures, and notes or do anything else that might take them out of the experience or make them seem like a “tourist” in the place.
• Writing a two- to three-page reflection essay. The reflection should connect the student’s experience to topics they have discussed in class, covered in readings, or analyzed in other assignments. The results were remarkable. Samford is a private Christian university outside Birmingham, Alabama, and many of Thigpen’s students use this assignment as an opportunity to experience a new faith community. Protestant students have attended Catholic services. Catholics have attended Protestant services. Other students have chosen to experience events or spaces associated with classes, races, and genders other than their own. One young woman went to a car auction, an event that’s typically more popular with men. Another student who has a white-collar career ate lunch at a blue-collar cafeteria.

Sometimes the “other” culture a student chooses to experience is one that they’ve been taught to fear or avoid. One student grew up with a family member who had a gambling problem, and they had been warned of the dangers of gambling for as long as they could remember. They had never stepped foot inside a casino but harbored plenty of curiosity. This assignment afforded them the opportunity to better understand a place that held such charge for their family. 

Overwhelmingly, students report having positive experiences and share significant insights about the power of connecting with different people and cultures. An international student who chose to visit a cattle stockyard in Texas noticed there’s a big difference between consuming media about a place and interacting with it themselves. In their paper, they observed, “Even though I have heard and seen a lot about Texas, it felt so different when I experienced it in real life. I think to know a culture, it is not enough to just watch their movies or read about them in magazines. What we feel and experience when interacting with them or join[ing] some of their traditional events is so much more valuable.” 

When a white student visited a Black church, they realized that encountering other cultures can be easier than expected. They noted, “This experience taught me that all my anxiety about being in a different cultural setting was my own issue. I was surrounded by people different from me, yet everyone treated me like family. No one cared about the color of my skin, and I realized that my initial fears had been unnecessary. I had worried that my presence might be disrespectful, but, instead, I was welcomed with kindness.”

After administering the “other culture” assignment for many years, Thigpen made an unexpected observation. Students don’t need to encounter a dramatically different culture or bridge an emotionally charged divide in order for the cross-cultural experience to have a deep impact. Sometimes crossing a small bridge can create big change.

Take Briana Watson’s story. Watson decided to visit a European antique store that happened to be owned by a member of the Samford faculty—a white woman of European descent. Watson is Black and hails from a small town a few hours outside of Birmingham.

Watson recalled feeling a bit guarded as she first entered the store. Her body remembered childhood excursions to stores full of delicate items, being told to hold still and don’t touch anything. But when she stepped through the doors, her professor warmly welcomed her and the tension melted away. Watson and the professor struck up a conversation and discovered they share more in common than they expected.

“There was so much to unpack beyond the antiques,” Watson said. “She comes from a military family as do I,” she remembered, “so really connecting over the understanding of service and the love of service and the work ethic that comes behind that started to bridge the gap.”

Watson started the day thinking I’m going to see my professor, but, by the end of the visit, she had a level of connection and trust that became the foundation for a deep, long-lasting relationship. Watson ended up returning to the store many times. This professor became one of her most trusted mentors, and they even went to Spain together on a study abroad trip.

The experience helped Watson develop an awareness of the ways in which the roles of professor and student or pharmacist and patient can create a structure or hierarchy that isn’t always useful when you need to build trust or ask for support. She explained, “I think when we’re always in these structured learning environments, we tend to look at our relationships as that structured dynamic, too. After breaking away from that and . . . getting to know more about her culture, we’re more inclined now to ask her questions if we need help. We’re more inclined to just sit in her office and talk now.”

The experience also gave Watson a chance to reflect on how someone creates an interpersonal encounter that actually feels welcoming and fosters connection. She wants to carry those lessons into her work as a pharmacist. “What stuck with me the most,” she said, “is how I have to be intentional about creating that space with anyone, whether it be a friend or a patient. . . . It’s more about leaning in and asking the follow-ups and being intentional and also having the humility to accept viewpoints that are different than your own. It’s like, OK, this is the person that I want to be in the world and I’m going to make strides towards that.”

Noticing who we want to be in the world and taking repeated action to become that version of ourselves are important components of character development. It’s clear that Watson engaged with the “other culture” assignment as a character-building experience. That’s no accident.

Designing for character development

Character scientist Elise Dykhuis notes several features built into Thigpen’s assignment that make it more likely that students have a character-building experience instead of a simply memorable one, whether you’re looking to strengthen your own capacity to care across differences or you’re responsible for helping develop the character of others.

Establish trust and relevance. If you’re designing an experience for someone else and especially if you’re making it mandatory, like Thigpen does, take the time to build a foundation of trust. All Samford pharmacy first-year students take the “Foundations of Health and Pharmacy” series, and this assignment comes toward the end of the semester, after students have been through lectures and readings about bias and cultural humility. Thigpen has had time to build trust with his class, demonstrating the curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that he wants his students to exercise.

He has also introduced why this experience is relevant to their professional development. He establishes it as an opportunity to do something that researchers call “self-expansion.” Research finds that there are many benefits to understanding difference not only as something to tolerate or to manage, but as an opportunity to learn, to broaden one’s perspective, and to expand the self. When people have strong motives to self-expand and they anticipate growth from an interaction, they report greater interest in engaging with people from different groups and they show patterns consistent with more high-quality contact in their interactions with people from different groups.

Leverage curiosity and autonomy. This assignment is driven by curiosity. Thigpen asks his students to consider their own curiosities. Are there cultures or groups of people that have stoked their curiosity? Curiosity gives students the leverage to get over the barrier of discomfort and take the first step. Students are also afforded the autonomy to choose the experience they want to have. Dykhuis explains that, according to self-determination theory, autonomy is one of the key factors “when we’re thinking about what we can use to promote intrinsic motivation in the long run, which is what we really need as adults in order to change something about ourselves or develop ourselves.”

Reflect. Thigpen’s reflection paper is key to the assignment’s efficacy. Dykhuis notes that multiple literatures about self-development stress the importance of reflecting on an experience right after it happens, but we often struggle to provide ourselves with the opportunity to do it. If we pause, reflect, and make meaning after an encounter, we’re more likely to let ourselves be changed by it. 

Prioritize encouragement and enjoyment. Thigpen’s assignment is a one-time experience, but there are things we can add to the experience to help encourage longer-term development. As Dykhuis and her colleagues explain, the personality and character change research says if we want people to change or develop on their own long-term, encouragement and enjoyment are key. Encouragement comes from being integrated into a community and forming relationships. When we’re part of a community of other practitioners and practitioners-in-training (like the pharmacy students are), we’re reminded to stick with it. When we build connections to people whom we care about, they help keep us accountable. Plus, we’re surrounded by people modeling the attitudes and skills we want to develop.

Don’t forget the fun. Many students report that once they muster up the courage to try their first formal bridging encounter, they realize that it’s not as hard as they thought it would be. It’s actually quite enjoyable to connect with people who are different from them and to have new experiences.

No one is going to learn how to provide whole-person care over the course of one semester. It could take an entire career of deep dedication to live up to the standard of care that professional organizations like the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the American Pharmacists Association set for their fields. The systemic factors that shape social determinants of health are complex and dynamic. The contexts in which health care providers meet and tend to patients are ever-changing. However, when we focus on developing the character strengths we need to connect across differences, we can keep building our capacity to meet and care for people where they are, in their full complexity. And, as a bonus, we get to bring the courage, curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that we’ve cultivated into other areas of our lives, as well. How fun is that?!

To my right, a friend of Jamie’s struck up a conversation with my mom. They looked like an incongruous pair: a five-foot-tall Chinese American grandmother, with short silver hair, and him a six-foot-plus-tall white young man, bending his head so he could hear her faint voice over the music and party chatter. I leaned closer to listen in. She inquired about his undergraduate major in economics and philosophy, and shared that she’d received a Ph.D. in economics herself, with a focus on demography.

Their conversation struck me at the time as an anomaly. He listened with courtesy and interest, asked polite follow-up questions about her demographic interests, and didn’t seem the least bit eager to cut it short to join his peers. Did he realize that Gen Z wasn’t supposed to behave this way? According to social media and many commentators, they are supposed to be scared to talk to strangers and buried in their phones, too stunted by social anxiety and naval gazing to engage with the world around them. After all, this generation grew up in a “challenging and constantly changing global environment,” as Nisreen Ameen and colleagues note in a 2023 paper—which is one of the factors that led them to experience higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness than prior generations. 

But over the course of the weekend, I encountered young person after young person who seemed open to learning and evolving. They were engaged in creative discovery and expression, seeking to change their community for the better, deeply caring about their peers and the relationships they had made in the previous four years.

“Obies” (as Oberlin students are called) aren’t alone. A series of in-depth interviews on multiple college campuses found that “the typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity, and non-hierarchical leadership,” according to research led by Stanford University professor Roberta Katz. A McKinsey & Co. analysis of the newest members of the workforce, a few years ahead of this year’s graduating seniors, describes them as “socially progressive dreamers” who are pragmatic, seeking purpose, and deeply concerned about climate change and inequality.

As these new graduates navigate the months and years ahead, I reflected, these characteristics will serve them as well as any of the facts and figures they’ve learned in college. I left the graduation weekend thinking that, perhaps, the future is in good hands after all with the newest generation of workers and future leaders. Could it be that the reinforcements have arrived?

A gloomy future?

This graduation season has been marked by doom and gloom. Amid the bleak job market, disruption from artificial intelligence, and global violence, new graduates could be forgiven for embarking on their foray into the working world with trepidation. Indeed, commencement speeches on the promise of AI drew boos from the graduating seniors at other universities, such as the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a not-so-warm response.

I admit that I’ve harbored some fears about how my children will navigate the future, too. After all, I wrote an entire book about the dramatic increase in mental and behavioral disorders in this generation, and spent over a decade in journalism covering how economic disruption affected working families and their pocketbooks.

It’s a perfect storm of uncertainty: social, economic, geopolitical, and technological change like a black cloud over this time of transition. One student told me that she’d sent out over a hundred resumes, with not a single response. Throughout the graduation weekend, I resisted asking seniors I encountered about their plans for the future, for fear of bringing up an anxiety-laden topic. It gave me a pang to sense the unease in the air, when I’d wish that new graduates feel the world is at their feet, with many possible promising paths ahead for career and life.

Oberlin holds a unique place among institutions of higher learning, being the first to admit women and the first to admit Black students. The tradition of social action continues today. The college achieved a goal of carbon neutrality in 2025 and hosted student demonstrations against the war in Gaza over the past two years.

Students continue to push the administration on divestment from war, support for undocumented and immigrant students, preventing sexual assault, and supporting student-run housing and meal cooperatives. They complain that the college leadership focuses more on revenue and growth than Oberlin’s core values, both the president and the board of trustees, which denied the student divestment proposal.

At this year’s graduation ceremonies, when the chair of the board of trustees took the stage, the graduating class stood up and turned their backs to him. For the duration of his remarks, they held white pieces of paper in the air bearing a variety of messages, such as “Protect Trans Students” and “Divest from Genocide” and “Become a Sanctuary Campus.” When they crossed the stage to accept their diplomas, a number of students handed the paper to Oberlin President Carmen Ambar before shaking her hand. I was impressed at the respectful display of their principles, a compromise between outright boos and doing nothing.

At a picnic hosted by the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, I saw this confident leadership on display again. The student-run, non-profit corporation feeds and houses many Oberlin students, including my son, serving up giant vats of lentils, trays of bread, and other hearty fare three times a day through the school year. The commitment is significant: five shifts a week on a planning, cooking, or clean-up crew, and shared decision making.

Jamie had already told us about the experience of voting on policy changes, which had to be unanimous—meaning deliberations could truly drag on. His coop involvement made sense with our family’s values of hard work and community service: My husband Brian served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, which paid for the vast majority of Jamie’s college tuition, through the G.I. Bill.

The outgoing OSCA president, a graduating senior, gave a speech as professional as any I’ve heard through most of my career, thanking that day’s crew for feeding hundreds of alums, graduating students, and families; sharing the organization’s mission; and updating the assembled picnickers on lease negotiations with the college administration. She thanked her leadership team and her mother, and her poise gave me a flash-forward of the future day when she might be leading a political campaign or acknowledging donors to a nonprofit.

Creativity and connection

Art and music threaded throughout the graduation weekend. We walked through the senior art studios and photography lab, admiring the innovative collages, black-and-white photography, and textured prints exploring a range of themes: identity, relationship, nature, and design. At a showcase for graduating film students, we watched short films exploring interpersonal relationships, the impact of a hoarder’s death on her daughter, and an Oberlin conductor’s connections between his Venezuelan roots and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed under the thumb of the Soviet government.

One short documentary about couples who met late in life, filmed at the Kendal retirement community abutting the campus, struck me in its portrayal of how these relationships can be ones of convenience or deep love, depending on the situation. I felt surprised that a college student would find old-age love a compelling topic, and that the filmmaker succeeded in drawing out 80-somethings to discuss their sex lives, loneliness, and other intimate topics. Talking later to the student, I discovered that her professor had encouraged her to trim the film to 15 minutes, but she couldn’t bear to cut any more portions of her interviews.

In the film showcase and throughout the campus, visual arts shone, as well: delicate animations that conveyed the passing of time and eye-catching graphics and murals. Our oldest daughter remarked that students generally seemed engaged in conversation, not buried in their phones. When festivities hit a lull, I’d often turn around to find my son and his friends engaged in a game of cards or Scattergories.

Their house seemed like a revolving door of housemates, relatives, neighbors, and friends, including recent graduates returning to celebrate the next crop of Obies. Everyone was unfailingly friendly and kind, greeting me and my parents with interest, engaging Jamie’s sisters in conversation, and open to getting to know anyone who happened to be in the same space. When tables or counters became crowded with dirty plates and cups, there always seemed to be a student taking out the trash or doing dishes. And they cheered each other on by attending each other’s screenings, recitals, concerts, sports games, and open studios.

I left the weekend feeling unexpectedly moved by the other students, in addition to seeing my own accept his diploma, of course. The thousands of 20-somethings on this campus aren’t alone in creating art and music that probes who we are as a society and what our relationships mean, or in taking action to change their communities. This is the generation that walked out of elementary school to protest gun violence and launched the careers of David Hogg and Greta Thunberg. This is what young people have always done, push human society to be the best version of itself. It’s often when times are the darkest and most uncertain that we turn to them for comfort and hope. Whether the writings of Anne Frank in the Holocaust or the voice of Joan Baez in the Vietnam War era, these voices carry unexpected and needed messages. The answer is in our relationships, in our commitment to and caring for each other.

As author Rebecca Solnit argues, the hero is often the collective, not a lone charismatic figure. We ignore at our peril “that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly emerge or implode, that history often takes sharp turns, that something that has held for decades or centuries can suddenly snap,” she writes.

Ultimately, none of us know what the future holds. We are building it in the present, every day. With these idealistic, creative, community-minded young people joining the ranks of changemakers, I feel optimistic for the first time in a while.

We also invite you to join our summer community of practice, Bridging for Belonging: Exploring Empathy, Curiosity, and Intellectual Humility for the Greater Good. This seven session community of practice for educators explores aspirational ways of bringing people together—in the spirit of connection, authentic listening, and healing. Learn more and register here.

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For parents and educators, this solution may feel easy and effective, as it appears to involve restoring social harmony quickly while also teaching children responsibility and compassion. But, although we may believe that we are encouraging moral behavior and helping students feel better, we are actually teaching them that forgiveness and apologies result by simply saying the words without understanding the meaning and process behind these moral actions, according to May Yuan and her colleagues in a 2021 article.

In fact, forgiveness and apology require emotional readiness, perspective taking, and empathy. According to Emma Kemp and her colleagues, who examined children’s emotional forgiveness in another 2021 study, these skills develop with time and gradually throughout childhood and adolescence. It goes beyond just saying the words “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you.”

Specifically, forgiveness involves a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and negative behavior toward one’s offender, while fostering the undeserved qualities of compassion, empathy, and goodwill toward the offender. Notice that in this definition, one has a right to resentment and that the offender does not deserve compassion and goodwill because of their hurtful actions—but we give it to them anyway.

Although frequently confused with forgetting, acceptance, condoning, excusing, pardoning, and denying anger, forgiveness is none of these. When we forgive, we decrease our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward the offender. Over time, we may increase our positive thoughts, feelings, and sometimes behaviors toward the offender. We can also only forgive for the way that we were personally impacted by an offense. Depending on the situation, sometimes forgiveness involves simply wishing the offender well.

Although students are expected to give and receive forgiveness, often on demand, few have been educated on what forgiveness truly means and looks like. In this article, I use quotes from college students who took my interpersonal forgiveness class to illustrate their thoughts about apologies and forgiveness. These highlight how important forgiveness education is for students of all ages. For example, a student in my interpersonal forgiveness class reflected on what she learned about forgiveness and apologies growing up:

When conflicts arose between my sisters and me, we would often say “sorry” simply because it was expected of us or because an adult told us it was the right thing to do, not necessarily because we fully understood the meaning behind the apology. At that age, forgiveness felt more like a routine than a heartfelt process. It was not until I grew older that I began to grasp the deeper emotional and relational aspects of forgiving someone: acknowledging the hurt, understanding their intention, and choosing to let go for the sake of healing and growth.

Many students report similar early lessons in “forgiveness on demand,” which often lead to misconceptions about forgiveness as compliance rather than a process or a choice. They also report that they wish they could have received forgiveness education earlier in their schooling. In a 2024 paper, Corinne Den Hartog discusses her research with teachers, illustrating that forgiveness education can be beneficial for students and that schools can play a critical role in teaching students what forgiveness means and how to forgive, and what effective apologies look like.

Here are my research-based thoughts on how to better teach forgiveness and apologies.

The problem with premature forgiveness and coerced apologies

I began studying interpersonal forgiveness in 1987 as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the guidance of Robert Enright. At that time, forgiveness was primarily a focus of philosophy and religion and had not been widely examined from a psychological perspective. Our main goal was to define forgiveness as a psychological construct and moral virtue, distinct from concepts such as reconciliation, forgetting, and condoning, and then to clarify what the process entailed.

We developed one of the first comprehensive models of forgiveness, known as the Enright Process Model. The model includes four phases, as described by Robert Enright and colleagues in a 1991 book chapter:

• The uncovering phase, where individuals admit that they were hurt and recognize and explore painful emotions;
• The decision phase, in which the decision to forgive is made after exploring what forgiveness is and is not;
• The work phase, which involves expanding one’s view of the offender, recognizing the offender’s humanity, and developing empathy and compassion for them; and
• The deepening phase, in which individuals find meaning, emotional relief, and freedom from resentment.

When parents and educators put pressure on children and adolescents to forgive immediately, both parties feel compelled to skip phases and use scripted words before they genuinely feel remorse or understand their behavior. Research shows that young children can distinguish genuine from coerced apologies, and that forced apologies often fail to reduce negative feelings or may even increase resentment. As Craig E. Smith and his colleagues argue in a 2018 paper:

Coercing your child to apologize is going to backfire. Other kids don’t view that apologizer as likable. The teachable element of having the child apologize has gone away and the goal of the apology prompt—to help your child express remorse, soothe someone else’s hurt feelings, and make your child more likable—is lost.

The other problem with forced situations is that the injured party is pressured to forgive immediately after receiving an apology. Research has illustrated that forgiveness does not usually occur immediately, as it is a gradual process that involves emotional awareness and regulation, moral choice, and cognitive understanding as discussed in the curriculum. Asking a child to forgive before they’ve had time to process their pain and express their feelings short-circuits important emotional work and teaches them to suppress their feelings instead of understanding, expressing, and then moving beyond them. A student in my forgiveness class related to being pressured to forgive before she was ready:

One thing I really connected with was the reminder that forgiveness takes time. I grew up hearing phrases like “just forgive and move on,” but that never worked for me. Trying to rush it only made me feel like I was failing at forgiveness. Learning that quick forgiveness doesn’t always lead to real forgiveness makes me feel validated. My process was slow, and maybe that’s why it felt real when I finally reached it.

Although parents and educators often want to jump to the last phase of forgiving, peace and reconciliation (if possible), a more effective approach encourages the injured to take as much time as necessary to work through their emotions before forgiving. As discussed in my and Eva Chen’s 2023 paper, true forgiveness requires time and self-reflection. It cannot be demanded by others or achieved instantly through words alone. Skipping steps fails to recognize the complexity involved in the process of forgiveness. It also teaches children that forgiveness and relationship repair are more about listening to adults than listening to their hearts.

In our 2010 study on a sample of the general population’s understanding of forgiveness, we found that another common misconception about forgiveness is that one cannot forgive unless they receive an apology from the offender.

That may be true for reconciliation, but not forgiveness. Forgiveness is something individuals can do all on their own, for their own well-being, without any response from the offender. Forgiveness can sometimes lead to reconciliation between the injured party and the offender, but it does not have to. One may require an apology for the friendship to continue, but if that is not desired or possible, forgiveness can still occur. If we require the offender to apologize before forgiving, we give the offender control and power over our forgiveness and healing.

Uncomfortable emotions and validation

This entire process can involve some powerful and uncomfortable emotions. As psychologist Lisa Damour reminds us, unpleasant emotions are not “bad”; they are normal, healthy, and necessary. She prefers the term uncomfortable emotions to “negative” ones because the latter implies that feelings like anger, sadness, or anxiety are wrong. She writes that “psychological health is not about being free from emotional discomfort, but about having the right feeling at the right time and being able to bear the unpleasant ones.”

As Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, explains in a 2025 conversation, our skill in dealing with emotions influences how much success and well-being we can achieve. Educators and parents can nurture this skill by teaching that all emotions are normal and natural, and it is what we do with our emotions that can be considered good or bad. When we teach children that uncomfortable emotions are normal and survivable, we empower students to express, rather than suppress them, a crucial part of forgiveness.

Phase One of Enright’s forgiveness process model helps individuals process their feelings after experiencing hurt from or conflict with another. Having an adult validate their feelings helps children recognize that their emotions are acceptable and important. Without validation, students may learn to suppress and distrust their feelings. As described by Sarah Gonser in a 2022 article, emotional literacy is the ability to recognize, name, and express emotions in healthy ways and is an important part of social-emotional learning.

As child therapist Violet Oaklander emphasizes in her 2007 book, Windows to Our Children, it’s important to help children recognize and express all emotions, including anger. “Anger is an honest, normal feeling,” she writes. “Everyone gets angry. I get angry. You get angry. It’s what we do with these feelings—whether we can accept them, how we express them—that causes all the trouble.”

Unfortunately, children often receive mixed messages about anger. They experience adults’ anger but are discouraged, and sometimes even punished, from expressing it themselves. As a result, they learn to suppress, deflect, or deny anger, which, as Oaklander observes, can become a “hidden block to one’s sense of wholeness and well-being.”

Helping kids choose apology and forgiveness

There is an alternative. When adults validate children’s emotions, they model that forgiveness is not denial of pain, but healthy processing of it. It also teaches children that they can handle their pain and helps them develop resiliency for future challenges.

Consider two seventh-grade students, Amelia and Andrew. During a group project, Andrew made a hurtful comment about Amelia’s presentation skills in front of their classmates. Amelia felt embarrassed and angry, and the teacher told Andrew that he was out of line. After reflecting and discussing with the teacher, Andrew sincerely apologized: “I’m sorry for what I said about you in front of everyone. It was mean, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

Although Amelia appreciated the apology, she still felt hurt and wasn’t ready to forgive. Instead of insisting she do so immediately, the teacher validated her feelings: “It’s OK that you’re still upset, Amelia. What Andrew said was hurtful, and it’s natural to need some time.”

That simple validation allowed Amelia to process her emotions. Over the next few days, as Andrew treated her with kindness and respect, her hurt subsided. Eventually, when she felt ready, Amelia told Andrew she forgave him. This experience not only repaired their friendship but taught both students that forgiveness takes time and is a personal choice when one feels ready, rather than a response to pressure.

As we see in Andrew’s example, a sincere apology requires acknowledging specific harm, taking responsibility, expressing remorse, and making amends. When these components are present, apologies are associated with reduced anger and greater empathy, as found by Andrew Howell and colleagues in a 2012 study on guilt, empathy, and apology. Here is some practical guidance for parents and educators in helping children craft good apologies, as described by Kara Newhouse in a 2023 Mindshift article and podcast:

• Pause and validate. Normalize all feelings. When a child is hurt, start by naming and validating their feelings: “You look really upset. That makes sense—I’d feel angry, too, if someone did that.”
• Encourage empathy through reflection. Ask the child who caused harm to reflect: “Tell me what happened from your point of view. How do you think that made your _____ feel?” and “What can you do to make amends?”
• Teach a complete apology. Example of structure to use: “I’m sorry for [specific behavior]. I see that it made you feel [hurt/angry/sad]. I will [action to make it right].”
• Avoid forcing closure. Give children time to process their feelings and behavior before asking them to forgive or apologize. Healing does not occur on a timeline. Encourage the injured child to respond honestly: “Thank you for apologizing. I’m still hurt and need more time.”
• Model emotional honesty. Adults can share their own feelings calmly and respectfully. Children will learn that expression of all feelings requires strength, not weakness.
• Celebrate progress, not perfection. Praise effort toward understanding and the development of empathy and compassion, not just compliance with expected behavior.

These steps show that forgiveness is a process and unfolds gradually, not immediately. Children need time to build up their moral muscle, and education on forgiveness and effective apologies help children develop these skills—and learn to make their own choices. Children benefit when they understand that forgiveness is voluntary, something they can choose after working through their emotions. As one student in my Interpersonal Forgiveness class emphasizes:

Another thing I would want the educator to be sure to stress is the involvement of choice. Unless it is the hurt party’s willful choice to forgive another, no true emotional or personal healing will start. They will keep harboring the feelings of anger and resentment, without giving them the space to be expressed. Forgiveness happens on our own timelines. No one else can decide how we move through the process.

Forgiveness and apology are powerful, but only when they are sincere and reflect emotional honesty. By teaching children that forgiveness is a process, not an obligation, adults help them develop moral strength and emotional literacy.

That line from 2014 movie Ex Machina keeps surfacing as I watch my students navigate a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Whether or not powerful AI ever becomes conscious remains an open question. What feels inevitable is its trajectory toward a kind of intelligence we might call godlike: systems that can generate knowledge, solve problems, and perform tasks at a scale and speed far beyond human capacity.

This raises a fundamental question: What makes a human life meaningful when machines can replicate or even surpass many of our abilities? This is not a question students will face someday. It is a question they are expressing right now, in plainer language.

AI has given new urgency to the oldest student complaint: When am I ever going to need this? Why wrestle with the novel A Brave New World when AI can summarize it in seconds, in language you already understand? Why spend weeks observing cell behavior or ecosystems when a simulation can generate the results instantly? These questions aren’t just about convenience, they expose a deeper issue. Students aren’t only asking about usefulness, they’re asking about meaning. Or, to put it even more simply: What matters most right now, for me as a student and a person?

Learning was never really about utility. It has always been about meaning, about whether what happens inside a classroom connects to anything worth caring about outside it. That it largely doesn’t shouldn’t be surprising. According to Gallup, fewer than two in ten students strongly agree that what they are learning in school feels important, interesting, or relevant to their lives. AI hasn’t created that disconnection. It has simply made it harder to ignore. We have been driving students into the future while looking in the rearview mirror.

The loss of purpose within education reflects a broader crisis beyond it. The structures that once gave life clear meaning—religion, community, stable work, and shared civic identity—have weakened, leaving what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a fractured “moral horizon”: a shared sense of what matters and why. AI didn’t cause this fracture, but it may accelerate it. Its deeper risk is not moral corruption, but moral passivity. As more choices are automated, we risk losing the practice of judgment that forms our values. We have more freedom than any previous generation and less certainty about what to do with it. The result is visible: rising depression, loneliness, and anxiety in the most materially comfortable generation in history.

The meaning crisis has found its reckoning machine in AI. Education has long been organized around a single instrumental purpose: preparing students for careers and economic life. That purpose pushes pedagogy toward what is easiest to standardize and assess—procedural learning, information retrieval, correct answers to predetermined questions. This is precisely what AI does best. It is not merely a threat to the instrumental model. It is that model’s apex expression, perfected and made instantaneous. The race against the machine is not coming. It is already over.

While AI can amplify critical and creative thinking, within an educational model still focused on task completion rather than meaning, its overuse risks doing the opposite. There is growing concern that reliance on AI to complete work may weaken the very capacities education aims to develop. A recent study from the MIT Media Lab warns that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy,” diminishing students’ ability to think independently and critically.

What it cannot do is transform a person. I believe that AI has done education a favor it didn’t ask for. By rendering the instrumental model obsolete, it has forced us back to first principles. And the first principle of education, it turns out, was always meaning: forming people who can examine their own assumptions, construct a coherent set of values, and ask seriously what kind of life is worth living. These are not soft skills. They are the only work that cannot be automated.

For over twenty years my teaching has been organized around two questions: How do we know what we know? And what does it mean to live a good life? These are not questions to be solved. They are questions to be lived. My students explore how knowledge is constructed, how meaning is cultivated, and how identity is shaped through choice and ethical reflection. Not to perform understanding but to practice the examined life. These questions have always mattered. AI has made them urgent in a way nothing else could.

Education has long been justified by its link to productivity, not because everything taught is job training, but because much of it has been framed that way to students: learn this to succeed, to be useful, to secure a future. But as AI takes over more of the tasks that once defined that usefulness, this justification begins to weaken. If machines can perform the work more efficiently, then preparing students to replicate that work can no longer be the primary goal. What remains is a deeper choice: continue treating education primarily as preparation for the workforce, or reimagine it as the cultivation of judgment, purpose, and the capacity to think and choose well in a world where productivity is no longer the defining measure of human value.

We are living through a decision window. What we do now will shape the inheritance of every generation that follows. The stakes echo biologist E.O. Wilson’s warning that humanity faces a crisis because we possess “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” He wrote that before AI could produce work that teachers can no longer distinguish from their students’. The diagnosis has only sharpened. If AI is to be aligned with human flourishing, education must evolve alongside it—helping young people develop not only technical fluency but the wisdom to question, interpret, and responsibly shape the tools they inherit.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans without the wisdom to govern it. Every mythology since has offered its own variation on that warning. We have always been better at expanding our powers than questioning whether we should. More sophisticated in our science than in our ethics. More capable in our technology than in our judgment. This asymmetry has never been more consequential. We are giving the next generation extraordinary power without the wisdom to wield it. The most important question education can ask—the one Socrates never stopped asking—is also the simplest: What is the wise thing to do here?

What is character education? The definition varies from place to place, shaped by history and culture, and can be integrated into curricula in many different ways, as we will discuss. Moreover, there’s tension in many countries between traditionalist and progressive education approaches.

Traditionalist viewpoints see character as being rooted in a culture’s history, customs, and practices, often based on passed-down authority and group norms. Traditional approaches to character education emphasize identifying specific virtues through a moral storytelling framework.

Those coming from a progressive standpoint view character as a civic and political obligation—and it may even ask students to question cultural standards and received wisdom. For progressives, there is a stronger focus on a democratic process that encourages exploring which morals feel most relevant to the student, often through discussion.

There may not be a single model to replicate, but our interviews with educators in many countries reveal key insights about how character education is shaped and taught. It can be understood as a return to one of education’s original purposes—and for many, character education responds to the reality that many teachers have been reduced to only teaching content, when their deeper vocation is to form people.

The educators we interviewed shared the core need for an integrated approach that orients students toward “something that’s larger than ourselves,” says Cheryl Maurana, provost and founding director of the Kern National Network for Flourishing in Health. What’s often missing is not the values themselves, but the structures that allow them to be practiced and shared at school.

These differing approaches offer educators the opportunity to learn from one another, discover commonalities, and implement these practices in their own culturally responsive ways.

Character takes root when it’s woven into everyday learning

In Singapore, this type of education is referred to as character and citizenship education, standing at the intersection of Eastern and Western traditions. It is understood that these teachings are integral to the holistic development of students and they are included in the national classroom curriculum.

Ng May Gay is a research fellow at the Singapore Centre of Character and Citizenship Education who works on establishing the theoretical and philosophical foundations of character and citizenship education through education research. She stresses the importance of having parents who support discussion about character and its growth.

May explains that they have adopted an integrated approach to address students’ development of values, character, social-emotional well-being, and citizenship dispositions. From this framework, flourishing is not just about individual success or subject well-being, but also valuing the importance of social harmony, collective responsibility, and the common good.

“Singapore affirms personal aspirations and excellence, but at the same time we are also a communitarian society,” Gay says. “As [students] grow in character and competence, they remain grounded in belonging and responsibility to the community.”

By placing greater emphasis on including educators, students, and their families in ongoing conversations about values and growth, character education in Singapore becomes deeply interwoven with teaching and learning itself.

This holistic approach to character education intentionally builds reflection into every lesson and experience, with students being prompted to think about who they are becoming, how they relate to others, and the choices they make. This offers a framework that can work in classrooms around the world.

“I really feel very strongly that this form of assessment actually will create a meaningful shift in the teaching and learning by moving from an outcome-driven to a process-oriented approach,” Gay says. “It really positions assessment as being ongoing, collaborative, reflective, and I feel that this is essential for nurturing responsible, reflective citizens.”

Verónica Fernández Espinosa is a professor at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria and director of the Virtues and Values Education Centre. She explains that in Spain character education is rarely named explicitly in policy as a standalone field—but it still tends to be embedded within a competency-based curriculum. Specifically, in areas such as citizenship, school climate and relationships, well-being, tutoring, and digital competence.

“From my research perspective, this creates an important reality: Character is present in intentions, but it is often diffused in implementation and can be reduced to ‘values talk’ or civic content unless schools adopt an intentional whole-school approach,” Fernández Espinosa says.

In this way, character education is not just a missing element, but the thread needed to hold the learning experience together.

Character can be formed through cultural and spiritual traditions

Maneeza Dawood, a research scientist and program specialist at Stanford SPARQ and research director of Muraqaba Education, explains that Islam sees character as inherent in our nature—the concept of fitrah. Dawood says:

It comes from a space of abundance rather than deficit, with the goal of character development to refine what already exists in our nature. In contrast, a lot of contemporary character education tends to focus on the deficit and correction side. Starting from that place of abundance rather than deficit could really change the way character education is approached in schools today.

From an Islamic perspective, concepts like patience, gratitude, and jihad al‑nafs—the battle against one’s lower self or ego—are not just “nice traits” but religious duties that help build a relationship with God and promote moral accountability. This tradition of moral formation and ethical behavior is framed as part of worship, naturally infusing character education into daily life. 

In many African countries, according to research, the idea of Ubuntu plays a key role in character development. One researcher writes that Ubuntu “defines the individual in terms of humanity or interdependency with others…and leads to the expression of certain virtues, namely those of hospitality, friendliness, caring, and sharing or compassion and generosity, openness or accessibility to others, sympathy and empathy.”

Peter Kingori is the director for character education programs at the Center for Character and Leadership in Nairobi, Kenya. He explains that in their programming, they emphasize Ubuntu and discussion about love.

“In Africa you have to talk about love,” Kingori says. “Love goes beyond boundaries—boundaries of tribes, boundaries of race, boundaries of ethnicity, and trying to embrace each other as brothers and sisters.”

Rather than working alone and driving the element of individualism and selfishness, this manifests in encouraging students and educators to raise their consciousness beyond self-interest and focus on what can bring people together. Kingori says:

How can they build relationships—the relationships between the teacher and the principal, the school and the community, the teachers and our teaching staff, and, of course, the teacher and the learner. How can they be mentored? How can they be guided? How can they be connected with each other? We always say that a problem shared is a problem half-solved.

Students need agency to internalize values

The drive to ensure that students are able to form core values as part of their own desire to maintain a sense of self is often the topic of discussion when it comes to character education. It raises the question: How do educators ensure that students feel an innate sense of self when it comes to their values and their morals—and not as another requirement or box to check off?

Verónica Perez Mendoza, director of the Dandelion Center for Character and Leadership in Argentina, aspires to transform education and promote a culture of virtues that fosters human flourishing. She emphasizes the importance of surrounding students with meaningful role models and creating environments where they can reflect and grow alongside each other.

Central to her approach is giving students greater autonomy by inviting them to reflect on why they act the way they do so that virtues become internalized as part of their identity.

“It empowers students in a way, because it’s telling them—what you do matters,” Perez Mendoza says. “Who you choose to become, and who you choose to be really matters. Not only does it matter to society, but also it matters for your own happiness.”

This presents special challenges in highly individualistic societies like the United States. Maurana points to polarization and widespread disconnection as signs of a system that has prioritized productivity over the human qualities that sustain individuals and communities. Those cultural forces can make it challenging for students to share and internalize positive values.

“We’re in a period of profound uncertainty and strain,” says Maurana, “But that’s where you really need to have your own inner set of strengths. If you don’t want to be told what to do, you’ve got to have some core value that you’re part of a greater good.”

Even in deeply individualistic societies, she argues, people still seek meaning, contribution, and belonging. Internalization begins when we are able to connect our personal goals to a shared purpose, whether that’s a belief in community, democracy, or even hoping that our contributions benefit future generations.

When dealing with societies that have this engrained individualistic nature, it’s important for educators to highlight that they are not encouraging students to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others, but rather that their flourishing is bound up in the flourishing of others.

Character education is not a new idea, but the urgency surrounding it is. As educators around the world grapple with systems that have overemphasized outcomes at the expense of human development, the question is no longer whether character belongs in education, but how it can be meaningfully and sustainably embedded.

Implicit is the idea that differences should not be entertained, that they are somehow threatening. To a growing extent, children are beginning to believe that differences should not be explored or embraced, but rather should be feared.

While there is no research examining these trends directly over time, there is no doubt that rates of anxiety are climbing in both American and U.K. youth and that contributing factors are the misinformation and social comparisons children encounter in mass media and social media. Children do not embrace cognitive complexity, so they try to construct a predictable and non-threatening reality. This reality can include the mindset that “difference” is a threat.

In 1994, Sally Smith, one of the most acclaimed educators of children with learning disabilities and the founder of the Lab School in Washington, DC, anticipated our current concerns with difference. She did not want children with learning “differences” to be regarded in any negative way, or to be excluded or shunned because of how they learned or expressed themselves. She wrote a book called Different Is Not Bad, Different Is the World targeted for children in grades two to six.

Because Smith was an innovator, her work was derived from case studies of the implementation of her methodologies, both her work with individual students and other people’s work with her Lab School model in other places. But subsequent research has supported her approaches to dealing directly with difference through supportive peer relationships and promoting an appreciation for varied students’ cultures and contexts.

Her book translates into a series of activities, all designed to illuminate the many meanings of the word “different,” and create a positive mindset toward it.

Definition of “different”

Begin by asking students to define the word “different.” Note that dictionary definitions have two foci—“not the same as” and “separate from.” 

The key point is to have students understand that difference is not “bad.” This can be emphasized by asking students, in small groups and then sharing with the whole class, to note all the things in the classroom that can be considered “different.” This would include things on the walls, books and other materials, and, of course, the students.

Follow up by asking students, with regard to what they have noticed as “different,” what are things about them that are alike. Using the earlier examples, “different” things on the wall, books, and students also share some qualities.

For example, if you focus students’ attention on where books are in the room, ask them what are all the things they notice about the books that are different. You can do this as a pair share or in small groups and have students report out. Then, ask them what is the same about the books. They will find that some of the things that are different also are commonalities (such as covers, binding, pages, author’s names, etc.). This helps them pay attention and, indeed, look for similarities alongside differences.

Things that are different

Then, ask students to generate examples of things within various categories that are different. For example, things that can be driven, favorite family foods, colors, ways to play, needing help, aspects of hair, things you are good at, hobbies, feelings. You also can add things relevant to curricular areas you are focusing on (e.g., people in certain historical periods, names of elements, types of clouds, poets).

The main point to communicate with this activity is that differences are not bad; they simply are “different.” In fact, “variety” can be an advantage. This leads to another activity.

Have small groups of students pick an area where they discussed differences and have them creatively generate new examples based on what they discussed—a new type of vehicle, new colors, a new way to play, new ways to give help, something new about hair, a different hobby, etc. With this activity, which brings about creativity and activates all of students’ social-emotional skills, you want to reinforce the value of variety.

People with differences

In her book, Smith identifies a number of individuals who made significant accomplishments despite differences in learning or particular abilities. Here is her list, but you should feel free to add people that would be more salient to your students. Better still, have your students do some research to find examples in various fields (e.g., science, entertainment, politics, sports, the arts, writing and poetry, computers, economics).

• Thomas Edison: invented electric light, had learning difficulties
• Auguste Rodin: sculptor who carved The Thinker, had learning difficulties
• Ludwig von Beethoven: composed many pieces of music while deaf
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: president of the United States with physical limitations due to polio
• Helen Keller: earned a master’s degree and became a writer while deaf and blind
• Nelson Rockefeller: governor of New York and vice president of the United States, had learning difficulties
• George Patton: general who helped win World War II, had learning difficulties

Here are some additional examples:

• Whoopi Goldberg: famous actress and Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award winner, had dyslexia
• Agatha Christie: wrote (or dictated) many mysteries despite dysgraphia
• Carly Simon: songwriter and performer, was affected by stuttering
• Keira Knightley: Academy Award–winning actress, had dyslexia

Create a quilt based on differences

Working in small groups, have your students generate a list of things they do well and things they have difficulty with, up to 30 in total. For example, students will mention hobbies they enjoy, subjects in school in which they do well or struggle, social situations they don’t feel comfortable in, and household tasks they do or don’t feel confident in, like cooking. Items students mention always stimulate additional ideas from classmates, either as things they also do well or things that are challenges.

Tell them they will be creating a quilt made up of both parts of this list, arranged as they wish. Give them 8.5” by 11” pieces of paper and have them put the name of one of these things on each piece of paper and, ideally, draw something on that paper to make the page colorful. Once completed, have each group arrange the pieces as they wish, in a six by five pattern, and share with the rest of the class, explaining how they chose to arrange the pieces as they did. Of course, if your circumstances allow and the students can use fabric instead of paper, you can strive to create a real quilt.

During the sharing, underscore how the collective quilts were all different, and yet all show how every group had a mix of things they did well and things they did not do so well. Help them see that this also is true of each person. Every student could make a quilt with things they are good at and not so good at. Everyone’s quilt would likely be different, but, to use Smith’s phrase, everyone’s quilt would be good.

Through these relatively innocuous activities, educators can set the stage for students to recognize differences, appreciate them, and not fear them or see them in a negative way. This will be of particularly great value to young students as they enter the middle and high school years, and encounter yet wider ranges of difference than they will have seen in their lives to that point.

On April 20, 2026, please join us for our free community meeting to learn from a panel of educators about how to center well-being for neurodivergent students and everyone who teaches and learns alongside them. In this session, we’ll explore how the science and skills of well-being can support neurodivergent students while strengthening the wellbeing of the entire classroom community. Learn more and register here.

To open the clickable calendar, click on the image below. (Please note: If you are having trouble clicking on calendar links with the Chrome browser, try these tips to fix the issue or try a different browser.)

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Now, bring to mind an educator you felt close to. Someone who saw you for who you were and even who you could be. What did it feel like to be around them?

Next, shift your attention to an educator you were not close to. Someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t see you. How did it feel to be near them?

Most of us still carry these experiences with us, decades later. We know firsthand that these relationships shape us long after we leave the school building. The good news is that we know a lot about what makes the positive ones so powerful and how to build them.

Research consistently finds that positive student-teacher relationships have a significant impact on students’ engagement, social-emotional development, and academic success—as well as physical and mental health in adulthood. And the benefits go both ways: For educators, positive student-teacher relationships predict greater teaching efficacy and higher levels of well-being.

Of course, building these relationships isn’t always easy or straightforward. One of the biggest barriers is implicit bias, which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that unconsciously affect a person’s perceptions, actions, and decisions. For example, educators might consciously hold egalitarian personal beliefs while unconsciously associating Asian students with being quiet, compliant, and self-sufficient or Black and Brown students with being loud, disruptive, and aggressive.

Implicit bias can make it harder for us to see our students for who they truly are and could be. But the more we understand about how these biases work, the better equipped we are to move past them and toward the kinds of relationships that change lives.

Implicit bias in education

So, where does implicit bias come from—and how does it show up in schools?

Implicit bias is the result of our brain’s natural wiring for quick, automatic processing and living in a society permeated by the smog of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of prejudice.

Due to our frequent exposure to bias, our brains encode these prejudiced ideas for when we need to make split-second decisions. Because none of us are immune from breathing in the smog, no one is immune from implicit bias—not even well-intentioned, caring educators.

There are certain conditions called “vulnerable decision points” in which people rely more heavily on quick, unconscious processing. These conditions include time constraints, exhaustion, frustration, stress, and even hunger. In her article “Understanding Implicit Bias: What Educators Should Know,” Staats writes: “Given that teachers encounter many, if not all, of these conditions through the course of a school day, it is unsurprising that implicit biases may be contributing to teachers’ actions and decisions.”

In K–12 education, implicit bias contributes to disparities in academic achievement as well as discipline. When looking at relationships, students of color are less likely to have close connections with their teachers, and implicit bias is suspected to be a major contributing factor. In other words, implicit bias can determine whether a student experiences us as the adult who saw them or the one who didn’t.

A plethora of trainings and interventions focus on identifying, reflecting on, and excising implicit bias. Unfortunately, implicit bias is resistant to removal.

Luckily, researchers have found a more effective intervention that focuses on disrupting the implicit bias before it becomes behavior. Even better news? Focusing on changing behavior can weaken implicit bias over time, making it possible to build the positive relationships we hope for with all of our students.

How educators can counter implicit bias

According to neuroscience, there are three ways to disrupt implicit bias before it becomes behavior:

• Identify the disconnect between implicit bias and your values. Implicit bias often operates in direct conflict with what we consciously believe. The first step in disrupting it is recognizing when our automatic reactions don’t match the values we hold.
• Prevent reactive behavior stemming from implicit bias. Once we notice the disconnect, we need the ability to pause before acting on it. Regulation strategies like pausing and breathing give us the chance to stop our automatic reaction.
• Choose a values-aligned response. With that pause, we can deliberately choose a response that reflects how we actually want to show up for our students: one rooted in the beliefs and commitments that brought us to this work in the first place.

Just as we plan for our students’ needs, we as educators can plan for our own needs, too. We’re going to suggest a three-step reflective process for educators that turns these neuroscience insights into a self-awareness that can help replace behavior influenced by implicit bias.

This process can be used at any time during the school year and with any student. To get started, consider a student who is on your mind right now. Maybe it’s someone you’re struggling to connect with at the start of the year, one whose behaviors you find challenging midway through, or one who continues to mystify you as the year winds down. The best time to get started? Right now.

Step 1: Get curious and name what you want to change. The first step is to get curious. There are a series of activities and reflection prompts below that will guide you through looking closely at yourself, your student, and your relationship.

Ground yourself in your values. Before looking outward, look inward and start with what matters most to you. Your values are the foundation for the kind of educator you want to be and the relationships you want to build.

• Identify your top three to five values as an educator by completing this values-based exercise.
• Take a minute to visualize the settings in which you work with students (e.g., class, hallways, after-school club, etc.). What do these values look like in practice? What do you want your relationships with students to look like? How do you want your students to feel?

Choose a student and reflect on your relationship. Now that you have a clearer picture of your values and your vision, it’s time to identify a student you’d like to build a stronger connection with.

Select a student. How would you describe your relationship with them right now? How do you feel about them?

Look at your patterns. When things get difficult with this student, how do you tend to respond? What do you do or say? To what extent are you practicing your values in these moments?

Consider the role of implicit bias. Next, look beneath the patterns you’ve identified. Implicit bias often operates outside of our awareness, so this step asks you to consider what might be fueling those behaviors.

• Think about your and your student’s social identity markers. Which ones feel salient to this situation? What unconscious beliefs might you have absorbed about these identities?
• Reflect on when you’re most vulnerable to snap judgments. Consider the time of day, location, and your state of mind. When are you most tired? Hungry? Stressed? These are your vulnerable decision points.

Name what you want to change. At this point, you’ve grounded yourself in your values, looked honestly at a relationship, and considered how implicit bias might be showing up. Now get specific: What is one behavior you want to stop, and what values-aligned behavior do you want to replace it with?

When I reflect on my values, connection and inclusion rise to the top, and yet (for example) when I think about my student Justin, I can see I’m not living those values. We’ve butted heads since his first week in my class, and somewhere along the way, I stopped asking about him or his interests and shifted into conflict-avoidance mode instead. Thinking about the role implicit bias might be playing, I notice that Justin is a tall Latino male who looks older than his 15 years, and I wonder if I’ve unconsciously held him to a standard of maturity he doesn’t have yet.

As a first step, I want to focus on transitions, which have been the source of most of our tension lately. When I ask the class to shift tasks, Justin resists, and I get frustrated. My new approach is to give him a quiet heads-up before any transition so he has time to prepare, and if he still needs a moment, I’ll check in with him one-on-one rather than calling him out in front of everyone. The goal is to replace my reactive pattern (frustration, public correction) with something values-driven: a genuine invitation to join the class in what comes next.

Step 2: Tune in and try out the response you want. The first step happened in a reflective space. This step happens in real time, in the moments that matter most. When you notice that reactive behavior coming up with your student, that’s your cue to pause and practice. The following process is adapted from Zarretta Hammond’s SODA Strategy, which is described in her 2015 book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.

Tune in. Your body often registers implicit bias before your conscious mind does. Learning to notice those signals gives you the chance to choose your response rather than react on autopilot.

• Tune in to your internal landscape. What thoughts are you having? What emotions are you feeling? What is your body telling you? A flash of heat, a rolling stomach, a clenched jaw? These are all data.
• Take a moment to ground and care for yourself. Grounding practices could include taking a few deep breaths, thinking about a soothing place, washing your hands, or stepping outside. Even a small pause can help you shift from reactive to intentional.

Try it out. Once you feel a little more grounded, try the replacement behavior you identified in step 1. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal isn’t to get it exactly right the first time; the goal is to practice responding with your values instead of bias. Pay attention to what happens; these observations will be important for step 3.

Here’s how this might look in practice with Justin: I give him a heads-up that we’ll be transitioning in a few minutes. He nods, but when the time comes, he still isn’t ready. I feel that familiar frustration tightening my jaw, but instead of calling him out, I walk over and quietly check in. He grumbles a little, but starts packing up.

No matter the outcome, you’ve gathered valuable information about yourself, your student, and the relationship. Move to step 3 to continue the learning.

Step 3: Reflect in community. This step invites you to bring all the work you’ve done so far to people you trust. Other perspectives can help us see what we can’t see on our own, especially when it comes to implicit bias. Find a trusted colleague or group to process with. This could look like a regular check-in with a teaching partner, a group chat with colleagues you trust, or dedicated time in your professional learning community meetings. Whatever it looks like, these are your thought partners.

The process below—adapted from Barbara Dray and Debora Basler Wisneski’s mindful reflection protocol—uses description, interpretation, and evaluation to help you and your thought partners separate what actually happened from the stories you might be telling yourself about it.

Describe your experience. Walk your thought partners through the interaction you had with your student, focusing only on the objective facts of what happened. For example: “I gave Justin a heads-up about the transition, and when he did not transition with his peers, I gave him a private, follow-up reminder, and he then transitioned.” Your thought partners’ job is to listen, ask clarifying questions, and gently flag if you’ve slipped out of description into interpretation or evaluation.

Surface your interpretations. Next, name the meaning you’ve assigned to your student’s behavior. For example, I might say: “Justin didn’t transition with his peers even with the extra reminders. It feels like he doesn’t respect my time or his classmates’ time.” This is where thought partners can be especially useful. By listening and offering alternative interpretations, they can surface possibilities you might not have considered on your own. A thought partner might share, for instance, that they themselves struggle with quick transitions, finding it jarring when lessons shift repeatedly over the course of an hour. Another might wonder whether students sometimes struggle with transitions because they are still deep in learning and not ready to switch gears yet. Could either of those be part of what’s happening with Justin?

Examine your evaluations. Finally, look at the judgments you attached to the interaction. Did you attach positive or negative significance to what happened? My evaluation of Justin’s behavior as disrespectful is a negative one. Your thought partners can help you examine whether your evaluation is grounded in what actually happened, or built on interpretations that may be shaped by bias. Is there a more generous way to read the last interaction with Justin?

Plan your next move together. Come back to the values you identified in step 1. With those values and your thought partners’ fresh perspectives in mind, work together to consider what comes next.

• How do you want to respond the next time you’re in a similar moment with this student? Do you want to try the same thing again? Is there another approach to take?
• What support do you need to make that possible? Can your thought partners offer advice, tools, or positive encouragement?
• Commit to trying again and bringing what you learn back to your thought partners.

After processing my interaction with Justin, my thought partners could help me see that his willingness to transition, even with some grumbling, was actually progress, and that quick transitions may genuinely be hard for him. Next time, I want to try acknowledging his effort in the moment, something as simple as a quiet thank-you. I also might think about how I can design my lessons with fewer transitions to support learners who need more processing time. It might not seem like much, but every time I choose to respond in a values-aligned way, I am getting closer to being an educator who sees Justin.

Author and activist adrienne maree brown reminds us that “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” Every time we choose our values over our bias, we’re not just changing one relationship—we’re shaping the kind of classroom, school, and community our students carry with them. We won’t always get it right, but this work helps us see our students for who they are and who they could be. And in the process, it helps us become the educators we want to be.

In that book, Steele introduced the concept of stereotype threat—the idea that people can underperform when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their group. The research helped explain disparities in academic testing, workplace performance, and many other settings.

Steele is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University (and a former executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley). Over the past three decades, his work has influenced fields ranging from education to organizational leadership.

His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, serves as a kind of sequel to Whistling Vivaldi. While stereotype threat focuses on how stereotypes affect individual performance, Churn explores the broader tension that can arise when people from different backgrounds interact in situations that matter.

When the Commonwealth Club World Affairs, in San Francisco, invited me to interview Steele about the book, I jumped at the opportunity. Our conversation explored how identity, anxiety, and trust shape interactions in classrooms, workplaces, and everyday life. What follows is an edited version of that on-stage discussion.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Before we talk about your new book, I want to start with Whistling Vivaldi, which came out back in 2010.

Claude Steele: That book described the research journey that led me and my colleagues—Steve Spencer, Josh Aronson, and others—to the concept of stereotype threat.

That’s when someone faces a negative stereotype about one of their identities—such as race, age, or religion—in a situation that matters to them, like a job interview or a test. In those moments, the possibility of being judged through the lens of that stereotype can be distracting and upsetting. It interferes with your ability to perform in the moment. And if you expect to encounter that pressure repeatedly in a particular environment—say, a profession or a field of study—you might decide not to participate at all.

The research became widely known because it showed that stereotype threat could affect something as important as standardized test performance. For example, a highly motivated African American student taking a difficult exam might experience normal frustration and start wondering, Am I confirming that stereotype about my group? Will others see my performance that way? That extra pressure can undermine performance.

Over the years, researchers have seen this dynamic in many contexts—athletic performance, negotiations, academic settings, and more.

Eventually, I began to think people were missing the broader significance of the idea. The same kind of tension often appears in interactions between people of different identities. In diverse settings, people may worry about being seen through negative stereotypes. That concern can make them hyper-aware of how they’re behaving, what they’re saying, and how they’re being interpreted.

JAS: You’ve compared that experience to multitasking. A person under stereotype threat is juggling extra mental tasks while everyone else can focus on the main activity.

CS: Exactly. If I’m in a group composed entirely of people like me—say, a group of older men—I don’t feel much anxiety about ageist stereotypes. But if younger people join the group, I might start wondering: Do they think I have outdated ideas? Do they assume I’m not technologically savvy? I know what the stereotypes of older men are…and that I could be judged in terms of them.

Diversity brings us together with people of different identities. When that happens, we lose the security that we won’t be judged by outgroup stereotypes. That worry is experienced as tension. 

JAS: Your new book introduces the concept of “churn.” What does that mean?

CS: “Churn” is my term for exactly the tension I just described. To illustrate, let’s begin by imagining a seventh-grade parent-teacher conference. The parents and student are African American; the teacher is white.

The parents know the stereotypes about African Americans, about their intellectual abilities, about their aggressiveness, etc. So on the way to the meeting, they may worry: Will the teacher see our child’s real potential? Will ordinary mistakes be interpreted as signs of aggression or lack of ability?

As they walk into the meeting then, they’re in a state of churn—a kind of vigilant anxiety about how their and their son’s identity will shape their experience in the meeting and their son’s experience in the school.

Meanwhile, the teacher has her own form of stereotype threat. She knows the stereotypes about her racial identity. She may be deeply committed to fairness but nonetheless worried that anything she says—even constructive criticism—could be interpreted as racism.

Both parties enter this conversation in that state of tension I am calling churn—an agitated concern about how their identities will affect how they are judged and treated (and for the African American parents, how their son’s identity will affect his experience in the school). Both parties wonder: Will I be judged and treated fairly in this meeting? Is there some way I should behave, or not behave, to ensure this? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt? Etc.

Most approaches to diversity stress the need to reduce intergroup prejudices—something I heartedly endorse. But churn is different. It affects the prejudiced and non-prejudiced alike—arising as it does not from prejudice per se, but from the identity threat that all parties in a diverse setting can feel.

Churn is a form of social anxiety tied to identity.

JAS: And you argue that churn shows up especially in important situations.

CS: Yes. In low-stakes settings—riding the subway, sitting in a crowd—it usually isn’t a factor.

But when the stakes are high, the threat of being negatively stereotyped increases. That’s when churn becomes more powerful.

Churn isn’t inherently bad. It is simply the effort to cope with identity threat in a situation. It reflects the existence of that threat—and that the person can’t yet trust the situation enough to feel safe from it.

JAS: Another way of putting it might be that churn prevents people from entering a state of flow, where they’re fully immersed in the task.

CS: Exactly. Let me describe an experiment that illustrates this.

My colleagues and I asked white and Black Stanford students to write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that strong essays might be published in a campus magazine. Two days later, they returned to receive feedback from a white evaluator.

When feedback was delivered in a straightforward way—or preceded by generic praise—white students trusted it. But Black students trusted it much less.

Why? Because they couldn’t be sure whether the criticism reflected the essay itself or stereotypes about their group’s abilities.

But when the evaluator said, “I’m applying high standards to these essays, and I believe you can meet those standards,” Black students’ trust changed dramatically. They trusted that feedback more than anyone else and were far more likely to revise their essays using it.

Why did that work? Because it signaled clearly: I’m not judging you through those stereotypes of your group. I believe in your ability.

That kind of communication builds trust—and trust is the antidote to churn.

JAS: So how do individuals build that trust?

CS: At the individual level, it often comes down to conveying that you see someone’s full humanity.

There’s a term in the research literature—“wise.” It originally came from an ethnography of gay communities in the 1950s. A “wise” person was someone outside the group who understood their humanity and didn’t reduce them to stereotypes.

When people feel that recognition, they begin to trust you. Often the simplest way to show that is through genuine curiosity—listening, asking questions, taking an interest in someone’s experience.

JAS: So curiosity helps create trust.

CS: Yes. When you feel churn, it can be a signal to adopt a learning mindset. Instead of defending oneself, or retreating, ask questions. Be polite. But be curious. People can sense genuine interest, and that can transform the interaction.

JAS: Some people might say that sounds like a lot of work.

CS: Remember, I’m talking about important settings in our lives—classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, athletic teams, and so on. In those places, showing respect and interest in others can be far less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing these things.

Moreover, in these settings, I think many people really want to have ways of reducing churn and feeling more comfortable with and connected to others across identity divides. The chief mission of this book is to give people concrete ways of doing that, of feeling more comfortable in diverse settings, and better able to enjoy their great benefits.

JAS: Let’s talk about how power differences might affect churn and trust.

CS: Sure. I think it’s a lot to expect the groups that have historically been the most disempowered to be the first to trust. That’s a big ask.

And in the current divisive era—when we have leaders who don’t even bother with dog whistles in preference for openly racist messaging—it becomes even harder. For African Americans, for example, but for other groups, too, this kind of behavior and rhetoric makes it difficult to trust that their full humanity is appreciated or even recognized.

I don’t want to diminish that troubling reality in any way. But I don’t want to lose hope either. I still have to get up every day and go to work, and so does everyone else. So the question becomes: What do we do in our everyday lives?

That’s really what this book is about. It’s not about somehow directly fixing the political climate, for example. It’s about what we can do within the diverse settings and relationships in which we actually live our lives, to feel more comfortable and able to engage the riches that our differences can offer us. That’s what motivated me to write the book.

JAS: Do you experience churn? When?

CS: Of course. I’m older, and I work in a world full of young people. Sometimes the question is, “Does he even know how to use a computer?” There are moments like that.

JAS: One of the things I appreciated about the book is that it really made me reflect on my own experiences with churn. As I read it, I found myself developing a sort of taxonomy of churn in my own life. Some of it was trivial, some of it more significant—but I realized I hadn’t thought about it very consciously before. It feels like you’ve put your finger on something we all live with.

CS: I’m glad to hear that. In many ways, this is the American experiment. We’re trying to build a democracy that integrates people from many different backgrounds. That’s inherently challenging.

JAS: There’s something a little neurotic about it. From the outside, people sometimes look at the United States and think, “You people are obsessed with diversity”—and they have a point. Many Americans want a very diverse society, but at the same time we’re afraid of what that diversity means, and we must fight against feeling threatened by people who are different from us. Those two impulses are constantly in tension within the American mind. And the truth is, as a people, we seem to want two contradictory things at once. We want the comfort of sameness and we want the vitality offered by living with many different kinds of people. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now in the United States.

CS: Exactly. And that’s why I keep emphasizing the importance of focusing on the worlds we actually inhabit—the classrooms we teach in, the workplaces we’re part of, the systems of hiring and promotion we help shape.

When you talk only about the larger society, the conversation can start to feel abstract or utopian. But when you focus on concrete settings, that’s where real progress can happen. That’s where the strategies I talk about—practical forms of wisdom about trust—can actually make a difference.

The United States made a legal commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the 1960s when we dismantled the laws that upheld segregation. When I was a child, the system was so rigid it could fairly be called apartheid. Legally, we changed that—one of our society’s greatest achievements. Now the challenge is making equality of opportunity real in everyday life.

And that happens in relationships—through the small things people do that make it easier to trust each other and work together. Some of the examples I describe in the book involve university programs that created conditions where students could genuinely trust their institutions. In those environments, diversity became a treasured feature of their experience, not a problem.

One reason I’m hopeful is that building trust may actually be more manageable than trying to directly eliminate prejudice. Changing someone’s beliefs is incredibly hard. As a social psychologist, I know how difficult that is.

But trust is different. Many of us have done that in our lives. We have fairly good intuitions about how to do it and what’s required. And then, as the trust between us builds, our attitudes and beliefs begin to change naturally. Prejudices start to loosen their grip when there’s a genuine human connection.

JAS: It also seems like there’s an ask here—especially for white people—to try to be trustworthy.

CS: Right. And to understand that the issue isn’t all personal—it’s largely historical. The question is: Can I trust you? Do I carry the memory of the past into this interaction, or can I begin to set it aside with you?

When trust starts to form, the door opens to a very different kind of relationship.

JAS: Whistling Vivaldi spurred years of research about stereotype threat. What would you like to see researchers study about churn?

CS: I’d love to see research testing whether a focus on building trust is an effective way of reducing prejudice. I’ve suspected this for a long time now. It could be the focus of a whole research program.

My intuition is that trust-building has been an under-appreciated factor in bridging identity differences. I heard colleagues say, “I explained everything clearly to my students—why don’t they listen?” But if the students are wary about trusting you, information alone won’t help. If we really talk to them and listen, we may see, as in the experiment I mentioned above, that they are in a situation that makes trust difficult. Before they can fully absorb the information we’re trying to pass on, they need some evidence or signal that their full humanity is appreciated—that they’re not being reduced to those stereotypes that they know exist, and that they know you know.

Once a foundation of trust is there, the road to learning becomes easier. My hope is that this book encourages researchers, and the rest of us as well, to explore that road more seriously in the settings where we live our lives.

From a distance, two children can look almost identical—quiet, withdrawn, their voices disappearing the moment someone speaks to them. It’s easy to think we understand what silence means just by looking at it. I used to believe that, too. Then two little girls taught me that silence can be holding completely different stories, even when the room sees only one.

The first girl arrived in my class in early winter, small for her age and careful in the way she entered the room, almost as if she had practiced taking up less space. At home she moved between two languages easily, switching between them the way other children switch between toys. In school, all that language seemed to vanish. She didn’t ask for the bathroom; she held it until she cried. If an adult asked a question directly—“Do you want water?”—a visible tension passed across her face, something like a wince she swallowed before anyone could name it.

People slowed their speech for her. They repeated everything twice. They thought they were helping, but all that effort made her shrink even more. She understood everything. The silence wasn’t about vocabulary. It was about finding a place where she could exist without feeling examined.

For many bilingual children, silence is not a lack of language—it is a safety response in a new environment, a nervous system choosing observation over expression until trust takes root.

For a long time, she didn’t look at me at all. Then one morning, during quiet work time, she lifted her eyes just enough to meet mine. It lasted no longer than a breath. I smiled—not the bright smile we use to encourage a child, but a slow one, light enough to carry no request inside it. I went back to what I was doing. That was our first conversation.

In the days that followed, those glances returned, small and quick, like tiny tests she was giving the room. So I changed my approach. I stopped asking questions with answers I already knew. Instead, I narrated what was in front of us: “You’re stacking the blue block on top. You’re watching how it wobbles. You’re sitting beside me.” She wasn’t being asked to perform language, only to be seen. I accepted a nod, a point, a hand on the table as an answer.

Weeks later, she whispered a word. I almost missed it. Then another, a few days later, always alone, always with a pause first—as if she were looking for permission in my face. Her voice returned in pieces, like something fragile she was learning to hold again. She never became loud. But she no longer cried when she needed help. She started smiling without checking who might be watching. The classroom had stopped being a place she survived, and had become a place she could enter fully, one small moment at a time.

A few months after that whisper, something shifted. The girl who once entered the room like she hoped no one would notice now lifted her hand during circle time, not to answer, but to straighten the picture book we were reading. It was small, almost invisible if you weren’t watching—but it was her way of stepping forward.

Some years later, another quiet girl walked into my classroom. She was silent, too, but not in the way that hides from attention.

She played alone as if the world in her hands was safer than the world around her—rocking gently from side to side, turning objects over as if she were trying to understand their language. She watched the other children’s games with an expression that was part curiosity, part distance.

Everyone assumed she didn’t speak English. So one day, I asked a classmate to talk to her in her home language. She answered immediately, clear and calm. Language wasn’t the barrier. For many young children who are adjusting to a new environment or new language, silence is not a lack of words—it is a safety response, a way of holding their voice close until the room feels familiar enough to use it.

Young children learn to speak in places where they feel secure. When that security is not yet there, their nervous system chooses observation over expression. What looks like a “delay” often begins as a strategy: Talk later, learn now.

For weeks, she stayed on her island, surrounded by the noise of her peers, but untouched by it. And then one afternoon she crossed the room with sudden purpose, clutching a small plastic figure so tightly her knuckles were pale.

“I want to play,” she said.

“You are playing,” I told her, gently, glancing at the toy in her hand.

She shook her head. Her eyes filled.

“No. I want to play…with those girls. I don’t know how.”

The tears came fast, as if she had been holding them for days. She pressed her face into my chest and sobbed in a way that startled everyone in the room, because until that moment she had seemed so self-contained. It wasn’t fear. It was longing—the kind that hurts when you finally name it.

She didn’t need more time alone. She needed a bridge.

So we built one. I gathered the girls she had been watching and told them something simple: “She wants to play with you. She’s still learning how to start. You can help.” And they did what children do when you give them a way to be kind. They shifted their chairs to make room. They offered a marker. They saved her a turn. Little gestures, but huge in the language of belonging.

She never became the loudest voice in the circle. But she stopped living outside the group. She stopped watching from the edge. She found a doorway into other children’s worlds—and learned that someone would walk through it with her if she asked.

What struck me later was how similar they looked from the doorway of the classroom: two quiet children, both holding their voices close. Yet one was using silence like a shelter, a way to stay safe until the room earned her trust. The other could already see the world she wanted to join, but needed someone to show her how to step into it. Their silence was the same shape on the outside, but it was protecting opposite needs. Responding to them the same way would have meant missing both of their truths.

Those two girls changed the way I understand quiet children. When a child’s voice disappears at school, I don’t start by looking for what is missing. I look for what the silence is doing for them—what it’s protecting. Is it helping them stay afloat in a place that still feels new, or hiding a wish they can’t reach alone? That small shift keeps the focus on meaning, not performance, and it reminds us that silence can be a strategy, not a deficit.

I still think of those two girls when I see a quiet child, because they taught me something I didn’t learn in any training: Sometimes the smallest sound a child makes is the breath before a whisper, the moment they meet your eyes to see if you’ll meet them back. And sometimes the bravest sentence in the room is not a story told to everyone, but a quiet “I want to play,” even when the child doesn’t yet know how.

Explore more keys to well-being with educators working for the greater good in our winter/spring communities of practice. Next month we will be focusing on awe in education. Learn more and register here.

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A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”

Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emeritus of Spelman College and author of the enormously influential book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. In her new book, Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, she offers real-life examples of education leaders who successfully faced these challenges and in the process transformed their institutions.

Drawing from her years as a college psychology professor, trustee, and president, Dr. Tatum brings a breadth of experience to her analysis of the current state of higher education—covering everything from defending free speech campus protests during the War on Gaza to reallocating Spelman’s resources in 2012 to create a broad wellness initiative that swapped varsity sports for campus-wide fitness.

We talked about her new book and how leaders can help chart a path through today’s turmoil. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: In 1997, you published Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria. More than a quarter decade later, where are we with the public conversations around race?

Beverly Tatum: Since 1997, our population has gotten a lot more diverse—a lot of immigrants from places like India and China—and the Hispanic population is growing fast. Today, the population in the United States is maybe 50% white, a little bit less, and children of color are the majority in the school-age population.

In 2001, we had the 9/11 attack. There were the wars that came after that and in 2008 the economy tanked. All of the anxieties associated with a challenged economy and a nation in conflict with other nations made it a hard time to have a conversation about race.

Fast-forward to the election of Barack Obama. Many people saw that as really a culmination of the civil rights movement. But the pushback against the Obama election was quite dramatic— the Tea Party movement and the racialization of him and his wife and the family, all of that. And of course he was followed by Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric, from his announcement of his candidacy, evoked racialized images. The conversation has gotten a lot harder. And it has been symbolic of the nation’s polarization.

HR: Amid these changes in leadership and wars, we faced the murder of George Floyd, too.

BT: Yes–on the one hand, after Donald Trump’s first election, there was a rapid decline in talk about race. Even in his first term, Donald Trump was saying at the federal level, “You can’t talk about race; shouldn’t talk about privilege.” There was a list of words that weren’t supposed to be used in Trump’s first term. But when the George Floyd murder happened, it was so horrible and dramatic—on everybody’s phones, right, in their social media—and there was a great awakening of racial awareness, racial consciousness.

HR: Trump has attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus. What are the effects we can see?

BT: In his first early days in office, Trump issued an anti-DEI executive order. One of the really unfortunate things has been the overreaction of colleges and universities to comply. Nobody wants to be a target. And so people have been scraping their websites and changing the names of their programs—or eliminating programs. Maybe there was an office for diversity, equity and inclusion, and that office has just been eliminated. In some cases it’s been renamed or reorganized. But there are lots of places where they just said, “You know what, we’re just gonna eliminate this.”

That’s really unfortunate. Even if you are a staff person working in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and you’ve now been reassigned to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies Office, and you’re still trying to work with students who are experiencing marginalization on your campus, they may not know how to find you. Programs like the Black Student Union that might have been supported by the division of student affairs, maybe they have a small budget for programming. And now those funds have been completely cut off and the students have to do them on their own—which is an added burden for those students, yet important to their sense of belonging.

So there’s a way in which the structural changes and the fear of being targeted—forced to pay a big fine, or even threatened with loss of accreditation—those things have, particularly at public institutions, really put a damper on the student experience.

HR: What about at the classroom level?

BT: One major thing that has changed is the fear for faculty members. Now you’re not supposed to talk about certain things—free speech and academic freedom are under attack. If you’re working in, say, Georgia, there’s a law that says you’re not supposed to talk about “divisive” concepts. What is a divisive concept? If I’m talking about American history, I am challenging conceptions of the Confederacy and what it meant. Is that a divisive concept? Can a student report me as having broken the law? There are cases like that where faculty members are being removed from classrooms because a student was upset about something they said and felt it was “against the law.” This is a really crazy time for classrooms. I don’t know if I would be able to teach today my “psychology of race” class in some states.

HR: Why is there so much resistance to D.E.I, and what can colleges do to promote these values?

BT: There’s a need for courageous leadership. We need to reframe the conversation. On the face of it, some people are unhappy with those letters, D.E.I. With “diversity,” some people feel left out. If you’re white and male and heterosexual, where do you fit in when someone’s talking about diversity? But of course, diversity includes everyone. I fault the users, us, for how the language has evolved. Some people use “diversity” as a substitute for more racialized terms, like when someone says, “There was a diverse job candidate”—what do they really mean? There was a Black candidate, maybe. Well, just say so.

Inclusion is so important. When you see a photo, you look for yourself. But what happens when you can’t find yourself in it? You say, “What’s wrong with me?” This is the experience of marginalized people on campus.

We need to ask: Who’s missing from our picture? Institutional leaders can foster inclusive communities by their own example (what they talk about, the language and examples they use), through their hiring decisions, and through the use of budgetary resources within their control.

For example, if increasing STEM participation among students of color is a goal, investing in professional development for faculty to learn from experts in inclusive pedagogy could be worthwhile. Launching a speaker series and inviting prominent STEM scholars of diverse backgrounds to campus is another tangible action. Lending support to faculty who are successful mentors of underrepresented students through campus recognition and the allocation of resources signal that those activities are valued. Strengthening connections between alumni and current students through campus programming can also give visibility to underrepresented groups.

HR: How should colleges handle the extreme polarization, which may take form in campus protests against the war on Gaza, for instance?

BT: Dialogue helps. We must create a community, a climate where the expectation of respectful dialogue is our way of being. With the Gaza protests, some campuses were more successful at this—I’m thinking about an example of two students, on Jewish and one Palestinian American, who formed Atidna [a reference to “our future” in Hebrew]. They really wanted to create a space where Palestinian-supporting students and Jewish-identified students could come together and have conversations. They did so without much help from the university, but it’s a model that universities can use.

Presidents can offer support. They can sponsor all kinds of things; they can show up to the talks. Cultivating leadership is not just about the exercise of your own leadership but helping people on your senior team, students, and faculty. To show faculty that it’s possible to disagree with the president. To model it, to give other people space. Students have a right to express their concerns, and we’re not just going to panic when that happens.

HR: In 2012, you reallocated Spelman College’s NCAA budget into a wellness initiative to campus. How did that go, and what lessons did you come away with?

BT: Intercollegiate athletics was not a big part of the Spelman experience, which was one reason it seemed like, “Why are we spending money on this?” Students weren’t coming to game; there weren’t many students playing. But it was not without controversy. Student athletes were not happy with me. Many people didn’t understand that there are no NCAA scholarships.

The main thing was framing it; that led to the success. We talked about not what was going away, but what would come instead. With the same resources, we could create a program to benefit all students. It was a population that really needed to move more, to be more active, to counteract the health trends that were plaguing Black women. We also offered yoga and meditation and sound healing. The big lesson was how to communicate.

HR: Artificial intelligence has entered college campuses. What do you think about this?

BT: It’s amazing how fast this has unfolded. In the spring of ‘23, the conversation the faculty were having was focused around cheating behavior. Fast forward to today, it’s about how we teach students to use AI responsibly. It’s important for us to all get up to speed. We must invest in faculty development so they can do the work with AI that is helpful to students.

A bigger question is what does artificial intelligence mean for work? How do we, as a society, accommodate people whose work has been taken over by machines? It speaks to the importance of colleges as the place where that question is explored, and the exploration of what it means to be human in an AI-dominated world. What are the things that humans most need to know? What are the enduring conversations, critical thinking, problem solving? Where are the empathy and compassion?

The skill of dialog is so important because you develop empathy, you develop mutual understanding. And it seems to me those are the capacities that at least to date AI doesn’t have. I can’t think of a better place to be than a college or university at such a difficult and potentially challenging time.

In fact, a recent Rand Corporation survey found that even in states without formal curricular bans, two-thirds of K-12 teachers have chosen to limit classroom instruction on social issues. In essence, the presence of state-specific restrictions has silenced even teachers who are not subject to them, limiting students’ access to learning about race, gender, historical events, and social movements nationwide.

In our own work, we have spoken with many educators who are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or discouraged in this moment. Yet, as James Baldwin argued in 1963—a year marked by both profound struggle and collective resilience—moments of social crisis are precisely when educational justice work becomes most essential. In a speech to teachers in New York City, Baldwin challenged educators to remember that the obligation of anyone who considers themselves responsible is to examine society and to work to advance justice.

If we take Baldwin seriously and understand the present moment as one in which examining society and advancing justice are especially urgent, the question becomes how educators and students can engage in this work amid intensifying social, political, and legal constraints.

We have spent years researching and writing about how educators across grade levels, from elementary school through college, can nurture students’ capacities to examine society and work toward its transformation. Through this sustained study, we have learned that even in moments when schools and educators are prohibited from explicitly drawing on justice-oriented curricula, pathways still exist to cultivate students’ motivation and foundational skills to recognize, analyze, and challenge injustice and to create spaces that value all human beings.

As teachers, we retain meaningful agency and power in our classrooms. Beyond teaching content, educators are responsible for shaping interactions, relationships, and critical skills—domains through which we can continue to prepare young people to analyze and engage the world around them with clarity and purpose. Here are suggestions for cultivating critical thinking in a challenging time.

1. Use your classroom to model community and practice connected living.

In dozens of ways, through the news, social media, their own communities, and perhaps even in their own lives, young people right now are witnessing people treat other humans with callousness and cruelty.

The ability to truly see one another as human beings and recognize each other’s humanity is the foundation of a just world. Equally important is the ability—and the will—to treat one another as human beings. We likely wish this came as second nature to everyone, yet the world around us, both historically and today, shows us that it does not. Or if it does, we submerge that nature in favor of other things.

Educators have the power and space every day to offer young people relational tools and help them practice the basic skills of communal human living. Even as specific content in curriculum is being sidelined, we can insist that students learn and speak each other’s names, create space for students to meaningfully hear pieces of each other’s histories and stories, and set expectations/norms for how students listen to each other, disagree, and engage with each other.

These small practices strengthen students’ ability to build just relationships and communities outside of school—and each models what connected human engagement can look and feel like. We should not underestimate the power of this skill and desire; relationships are the foundation of a transformed future.

2. Teach analysis skills and frameworks that students can apply to exploring and understanding justice issues.

Most teachers are guided by state standards that call on them to support students’ development of strong analytical skills, whether they are examining literary texts, historical events, scientific hypotheses, or mathematical approaches.

Within these expectations, teachers often have flexibility in choosing the analytic tools and lenses they introduce to students. Educators can make use of that flexibility to introduce students to analytic tools relevant to academic tasks that students can also apply to making sense of the wider world and the social and political forces shaping our lives and communities.

For example, political scientist Iris Marion Young offers a framework in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, with several key questions (see streamlined version below) that can be applied to any number of ideas, histories, or academic concepts:

• Who benefits?
• Who is excluded?
• Who has less power?
• Whose experiences are being discounted or attacked, or who is harmed?

History teachers might introduce this framework to their students to support their rigorous analyses of historical events not currently omitted from the curriculum, ranging from the Industrial Revolution to westward expansion to women’s suffrage.

Science teachers might draw on Young’s framework to ask students to analyze environmental issues (e.g., air or water pollution) by examining who benefits from industrial practices, which communities bear the most significant health risks, whose voices are excluded from decision-making, and whose lives are the most harmed.
Educators can also remind students that these frameworks can be used to analyze any event, including events happening in the present day. As educators, we need to remember that critical questions about power, voice, fairness, and justice are not bound to particular content; they are intellectual habits that can be practiced across texts, disciplines, and genres.

3. Leverage schools themselves as sites for practicing critical social analysis skills.

Our own classrooms and schools can also serve as sites for this kind of analysis, offering students meaningful opportunities to explore fundamental concepts and levers in creating and sustaining injustice, such as power.

For example, teachers can invite students to explore who sets classroom rules, who enforces them, and whose voices shaped the rules in the first place. Students can be invited to analyze a school dress code, asking whose forms of expression are policed or excluded. This practice of noticing and observing power in the everyday spaces they inhabit helps students see power at work in tangible ways and supports their understanding of a fundamental principle of justice. 

Some teachers may have the opportunity to engage students in applying these same questions to events shaping their local or neighborhood communities, but even teachers who cannot have access to ecosystems within schools themselves that provide ample opportunities for critical questioning and reflection. These opportunities build students’ muscles to do this critical questioning in other domains.

4. Teach something you can teach and make it matter.

Almost anything we are charged with teaching can be grounded in concepts related to civic engagement, social change, or justice, even without using commonly associated justice language. No text, theory, or equation exists outside of time, place, and power. Literary canons, scientific paradigms, and mathematical methods reflect decisions about whose knowledge is preserved, valued, and taught.

In conversations about chemistry, we can discuss quantification and precision as epistemic power, or explore how foundational concepts such as yield, waste minimization, and optimization may harbor hidden values. We can teach a Shakespeare play or a Robert Frost poem and invite students to consider: whose interior life is being explored, and whose is not? In history, humanities, or anything that involves text, we can employ resistant reading strategies, documented practices that develop students’ critical thinking. Resistant reading consists of asking students to interpret a text from a different perspective or to scrutinize a text for pre-existing beliefs. This can be done in any text across a wide range of content and perspectives.

Any canon or content can be taught in a way that offers students an entry to deep criticality and consideration of the fundamental questions of civic and just life. This may require some creativity on our end or collaboration with other educators to think outside the box, but we can use anything we teach to build students’ habit of asking questions as they encounter information in the world around them.

5. Leverage schools and classrooms as sites for practicing social action.

To truly advance justice, students also need chances to use the relationship-building and critical thinking skills they are developing, not just talk about them. Shifting from thinking to doing helps students see that their voices matter and that they have infinitely more power when collaborating.

For some of us, the opportunity for students to practice doing already exists in the curriculum. For example, in Massachusetts, all eighth graders complete a student-led civics project focused on real-world topics. The goal is simple: students learn how change happens by actually trying to create it. And for many other educators, current restrictions limit or prohibit this kind of student-led civic work.

Yet, we don’t actually need state-sanctioned curricular projects to provide opportunities for students to practice acting on something they care about or to give students places and spaces to exercise their power.

Fortunately, we have learned from our two decades of research in schools that civic action within the school community or even in the classroom can be as real and meaningful to students as civic action out in the “real world” (because school communities are students’ real worlds). Importantly, civic action within the school or classroom can help students develop the real-life skills they need to engage in social action more broadly.

In a high school in Rhode Island, for example, a history teacher provided her students the opportunity to go through the school handbook to identify a policy they believed was unjust or unfair, and then come up with a plan to change that policy. The students collectively decided to try to change their school’s technology policy governing when they were allowed to use phones, iPads, and laptops, and then set about researching the topic, developing a presentation proposing a new policy, and lobbying their school’s administration to consider these changes. When the school leadership team ultimately agreed to enact the students’ proposed technology policy on a trial basis for the remainder of the school year, the students described surges in their confidence in their ability to effect change.

They also learned essential skills for social change: how to use research to make a compelling argument, how to make a pitch to various stakeholders, and how to write a policy that meets the needs of a wide range of community members. Importantly, they will bring these skills into other communities they are part of, now and in the future.

In times of consistent constraints and change, it can be easy to focus on the power we feel we are losing and to lose sight of the power we continue to have. Alongside the real reasons for concern that educators have, there are also enduring reasons for hope.

As classroom teachers and school leaders, it may be that some of the familiar ways we have supported students in critically analyzing society or preparing for civic and social engagement are no longer available to us.

But educators have always been masters of creativity and adaptation. History reminds us, again and again, that when the outside world closes in and places deep constraints on our work, educators remember the creative power that they have; they innovate, reimagine, and persist. In remembering and reclaiming our power, we help our students recognize the power they inherently hold and can harness to shape the world around them.