Compassionate School Practices

Fostering Children's Mental Health and Well-Being

This publication is a timely contribution to promote child and youth’s social emotional development. It provides a useful ecological framework and specific practices that educators and specialists may incorporate into their daily work. 

Compassionate School Practices exemplifies Mason’s expertise in the field of Mindful Education, and creates real-world learning for “whole educators” who truly wish to address social emotional issues with their students. Mindfulness, restorative justice, equity, trauma informed care—it’s all wrapped into a single cohesive message here with practical applications for the modern teacher. This is a book every educator must own.

Teaching the facts of mental illness in schools is comparable to teaching students rote math facts without understanding the systems that numbers function in and how this is applied to solve problems. Having basic knowledge of a subject does not lend itself to deeper thinking to promote both individual and systemic growth. Without analyzing our data, identifying areas of need, and altering how we navigate mental illness we will inevitably continue to repeat the same pattern of misunderstanding and inadequate treatment. Compassionate School Practices provides thoughtful exercises to guide your district in identifying specific areas of need, integrating these into your district vision, and developing comprehensive professional development. This is not an expensive initiative that is implemented and forgotten, but rather a process to shift the collective understanding and treatment of mental illness. Building protective measures of resilience and compassion helps to vaccinate your students and staff against complacency and despair that affects generations.

Our schools, our children, our society face a profound moment of reckoning with global pandemic, climate crisis, political polarization, systemic and structural racial and social injustice, and more. These times call for a mindshift of being, thinking, and acting, and that begins with centering compassion, mindfulness, empathy, and kindness within our schools. This book is rich in solid research and practices that supports teaching and learning through mindfulness, trust building, cultivating belonging and awareness, and more. It is a must-read for educators seeking to meet the challenges of our time with evidence-based, equity-centered practices that support growth and learning to heal our school communities and our world.

The authors conceive of a heart-centered, compassionate learning community bound together by trusting, safe, authentic relationships that include the child, family, educators and the broader community.  Central to their vision is a single caring adult who supports each student, and is embedded in both the school and surrounding community. This approach builds a trauma informed school culture that enhances children’s health and well-being. Their strategy is supported by tools and tips that makes the implementation of this creative vision possible. This visionary book would be transformative and is a must-read for everyone involved in helping children grow and thrive. 

Who better to guide our children’s mental health than our educators? Compassionate School Practices gives a comprehensive blueprint to managing our mental health inadequacies in a 2020 pandemic/post pandemic world. Beyond medical diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment, the book focuses on our most at-risk and underserved children. I have firsthand experience with a child who has thrived through services provided at school. As a physician who has worked with diverse communities, I recognize how compassionate  public schools can be a healing force for vulnerable children.  

Finally! As crisis after crisis threatens the future of our children, we have a book that outlines specific and deeply researched ways to approach children’s mental health and wellbeing from a truly holistic, heart centered, community-based perspective. Never has the need for inspiration and resources to change the future of education been greater than now.

Compassionate Schools Practices provides useful tools for confronting the complex nexus of mental health, education and trauma. Importantly, the authors realize that educators cannot pour from an empty glass and must maintain their own well-being in order to effectively support their students in the long term. Mason reassures her audience that while there are aspects of our reality that we may be out of reach for improvement (teacher budgets, state curriculum policies, etc.), there are specific practices and strategies we can implement both on an individual and community level to combat teacher stress and burn out. The suggested resources and insights are invaluable, particularly in this era of wide-spread social instability.