Teaching Compassion

Over the past decade, Decision Research Principal Investigator Robin Gregory has led a group of teachers, principals, and decision scientists in efforts to improve the decision-making and compassion skills of K–12 students. This work began in the early 1990s (as part of an award from the US National Science Foundation to Decision Research) with a focus on middle-school teachers in Oregon and Washington (Gregory, 1991) and has now spread to other states in the US, western provinces in Canada, and several other countries (including the UK, Australia, Sweden, and Morocco). The emphasis is on teaching basic decision-making skills to students as a means to improve their confidence and sense of self and agency by encouraging the related skills of listening, compassion, and collaborative problem solving. Materials now include a new trade book for parents and teachers (Sorting It Out, Supporting Teenage Decision Making, co-authored by Robin and Brooke Moore, published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press), a college-level text (Structured Decision Making, 2012), a manual for teachers (The Decision Playbook, 2019), topic-based digital storytelling examples (in collaboration with Meridian Stories), stories about kid’s choices and the role of a helpful dog (Stash and the Big Idea, Gregory 2018), and classroom-ready lessons and video teaching materials (available at the schools-based website www.deltalearns.ca).

Our research has found that when students follow good decision practices, it changes how they talk with each other. Being attentive to decision-making processes encourages them to share their reasoning and listen to the viewpoints of others, which leads to shared learning. It’s a key to compassionate, collaborative discussions in small groups and to the creation of broadly acceptable solutions to problems. People will always have different perspectives about what matters—they care about different things or disagree about the relative importance of different goals. But even when they have strongly diverging values, they can still care about and be respectful toward each other and, in many cases, agree on a choice or course of action.

The goal has been to work closely with teachers to create a wide range of classroom-ready materials that can readily be accessed and used in a variety of age groups, home situations, and school classroom settings. For example, one of the basic decision-making lessons encourages students to distinguish between facts and values: values refer to what matters and guide our priorities, whereas facts refer to an objective reality. When they get muddled, especially as part of social debates where different players spin their sides of a story and distort the evidence, it can lead to discord and conflict. Helping students know how to separate conversations about values (what they prefer) from conversations about facts (what is likely to happen) helps them to be open to other perspectives on an issue, to organize their thoughts, and to work through difficult conversations.

This distinction often comes up in dealing with a behavior that all parents of adolescents know well: how teens tend to create cliques and to trust and hang with people like themselves. This in-group/out-group separation leads them to accept the arguments and stories of people with similar values while discounting evidence from, and the experiences of, people who are less familiar and not in their group. At the extreme, students find it hard to consider people who disagree with them as intelligent or even as equally decent or deserving. Instead, they readily notice flaws in their logic and motivations while being generous and naively trusting about the assumptions and judgments made by people in their own group. This social “tribalism” bias influences and constrains their capacity for empathy and compassion.

Students learn that a good decision maker invites input and perspectives and is open to hearing what others have to say. How we talk about others matters. Learning about what matters to other people and how they would work through tough trade-offs can bring new insights and perspectives that we hadn’t thought about. What someone else says might not change our mind, but it can help us to become more fully aware of how things might turn out or how others might react. This caring about what others think and they might react is the basis of compassionate action and is key to collaborative decision making.

Another distinction is between the terms dialogue and debate, which are often used interchangeably as part of school curricula but are fundamentally different from the standpoint of making compassionate choices. Debate can be great—its intent is to create additional understanding about the arguments on both sides of a question—but in practice it tends to emphasize that only one side has the right answer. As a result, debate can lead students to defend their assumptions and criticize the views of others, with a focus on overpowering the arguments of the opposing side. Contrast this with the goals of dialogue, which assumes that all parties and perspectives hold part of the answer and can contribute to coming up with a common solution. Whereas debate leads to winning, dialogue—rooted in respect, listening, and curiosity—leads to collaboration.

The project continues to develop, with new initiatives planned for 2024 and beyond. This includes new video and classroom materials, publication of the new book (Sorting It Out, Supporting Teenage Decision Making), a second edition of The Decision Playbook, and additional workshops for teachers, coaches and counsellors designed to encourage decision-skills, compassion, and the agency of youth and young adults. Our goals—reflecting input from teachers and students—include (a) web-accessible, classroom-ready materials focused on dialogue and compassionate thinking, along with (b) assessment materials to help teachers learn what does and doesn’t work, (c) creating materials to help students construct digital stories on current topics (e.g., climate change, immigration, and poverty) related to compassion toward humans and other animals, and (d) expanding the range of educational materials available to teachers and parents, including short web-based tutorials (linked to YouTube or other social media channels).