Cultivating Kindness: An Educator’s Guide

A practical guide to understanding and fostering kindness, this book aims to transform the thinking and practice of educators as they seek to cultivate kind classrooms.

Cultivating Kindness sheds light on just how children and adolescents are kind, especially in school. Grounded in psychological and educational research on kindness and supported with illustrations capturing the voices of public school students, this book enhances our understanding of kindness.

Written with educators in mind, Cultivating Kindness draws from surveys and interviews with over three thousand children and adolescents. Author John-Tyler Binfet shares perspectives on kindness from the very individuals from whom we hope to see kindness embraced. Interwoven among examples from students are findings from peer-reviewed studies on topics exploring the role of joy and stress contagions on fostering or thwarting kindness, the concept of kind discipline, and how to measure kindness in school. This book also includes a kindness checklist to guide educators wishing to implement and foster kindness in their classrooms or schools. In addition to practical scenarios challenging the reader to respond kindly, a repository of kindness resources to support the continued kindness education of readers are also included.