Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to present the CARE program to a group of teachers and education professionals over four days at the Sorbonne in Paris. This was in late February 2020, right before COVID-19 became a pandemic. Throughout the week I referred to aspects of this book as I addressed the teachers’ complaints about the oppressive systems they confront each day. Every CARE program I facilitate, anywhere in the world, I hear the same stories. I see teachers who are passionate about supporting their students’ growth, development, and learning, but overwrought by emotional exhaustion and the crushing demands of antiquated systems. As the program progresses, I see these teachers come back to life. As they learn to apply mindful awareness to the stress response and their emotional reactivity, they begin to lighten up and recover.
One of the participants was Luc Shankland, an English professor at Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle University who had arranged for a room in the Sorbonne for the program. At the end of the course, he shared his deep gratitude for our bringing this transformative energy to his university. The Sorbonne is a building in Paris that was the home of one of the first universities in the world, beginning in 1257. Over the centuries, the Sorbonne has transformed again and again to adapt to changes in society and culture. It now houses multiple universities including Sorbonne Nouvelle, the result of a recent transformation.
As I sat in one of the oldest university buildings in the world, it dawned on me that human systems like the Sorbonne have been transforming throughout human history again and again. Now that the rate of change is increasing, we can witness major transformations multiple times within one lifetime, when before it changed slowly and incrementally over many years, or in dramatic ways that only occurred every few centuries. In the twenty-first century, for the first time in human history, we cannot reliably predict what’s in store for us and the complex systems we have created. Our schools, and indeed our world, are facing unprecedented challenges. As the old factory model is crumbling, a new vibrant school is emerging that prepares our children and youth for the twenty-first century and beyond. But this requires us to step up to the challenge, show that we know what is needed, and take the lead to affect the system changes we wish to see in our world. The growing teacher shortage gives us a window of opportunity by providing leverage, but we need to know what to do to use it to transform our learning environments into places like Murry and Community Charter.
The COVID-19 pandemic has opened another opportunity for transformation. Attempts to provide learning remotely have revealed the deep inequities in our communities. Millions of children and youths are missing out on school because they do not have the necessary resources to access the schools’ supports. Teachers are trying to reach to students whose parents may no longer have jobs and are struggling to put food on the table. They may no longer have phone service and an internet connection, or even a home. I sincerely hope that this tragedy motivates all of us in our society to recognize the need to prioritize investments in our children, families, and schools. Further, this pandemic has illuminated the critical need for systems and design thinking at all levels of society in order to successfully coordinate strategies to meet the current crisis and to prevent future catastrophes.
My deep commitment to the teaching profession and to teachers around the world inspired me to write this book. After years of studying teacher stress and developing interventions to help teachers manage the stress, the larger context of the oppressive school system kept looming in the background. I realized that we can develop our emotion skills and become more mindful, which will not only help us manage the stress of the classroom but will also give us an edge to become transformational change agents. As we change the way we think about schools, and ourselves as professionals, we can empower our students keep the spark of learning alive and pursue their dreams. Over time I am confident that we will look back on the coming decade as the Decade of the Teacher.