Customer Reviews

The Compassionate Classroom: Lessons That Nurture Wisdom and Empathy

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There are some great (and gutsy) ideas in here. For example, meditation -- Who'd have thought that would work? Apparently it does. The authors share their experiences with these sample lessons, giving short anecdotes of how students reacted to each one. It seems that students are hungry for lessons on kindness, on music, on grief, etc. Besides helping students, I think this book can help teachers trust their own instincts about what a class needs.

In the beautifully designed book, THE COMPASSIONATE CLASSROOM, Jane Dalton and Lyn Fairchild have provided an excellent guide for teachers to use in the classroom. The lesson plans are very innovative, with specific examples, and will be very easy for teachers to use and very effective in molding students' lifetime perceptions and attitudes. Not only are the lessons well-defined for teachers, but they also would be effective for parents to use at home. All ages will learn from the pages of THE COMPASSIONATE CLASSROOM.

I have read the Compassionate Classroom by Jane Dalton and Lyn Fairchild and I want to encourage every classroom teacher to purchase it! This book is an ABSOLUTE MUST for any educator. It is the first of its kind!!! You will not only receive practial lesson plans but a renewed compassionate zeal for your profession.

I'm always amazed that ideas or lessons drawn from ancient spiritual traditions (whether Buddhist, Christian, etc) are considered "politically correct" or "new-agey". The fact is that practices such as meditation (as described in Compassionate Classroom) have been around for thousands of years because they WORK. Do some research on the success rate of meditation in prisons around the country! If meditation can calm angry minds in prison, imagine what it can do for the focus of a 13 year old with ADD from a dysfunctional home who can't sit still and focus in class? This is problem in our suburban AND urban schools. And perhaps the current state of America's schools - which, by the way, are shouldering far more than their fair share of society's ills - could benefit from teaching kids how to take responsibility for their emotions, how to think and behave consciously and show sensitivity toward others - which these lesson plans do. I think this book does an excellent job of giving teachers concrete techniques (which I have used in my own classroom) and exercises on how to help students discover and practice their own spiritual paths. I highly recommend this innovative book for teachers and parents.

Got this for my middle school Sunday School class. It has a number of suggestions for learning activities and discussion that can span multiple age groups. This gives me flexibility in writing a lesson plan for our class so that i can adjust according to their perspective.
Although we are a Christian church, our kids need to hear and understand a wide range of faiths to help them grow and develop on their own. I highly recommend this for any teacher who needs a resource that does not dictate a single set of belief principles.

As I enter my tenth year of teaching I am at a point where I can dust off the old lesson plans, or I can go beyond the predescribed lessons and create a learning environment that is nurturing and loving. I have chosen the second. Thank you for this book of inspiration. The concepts in this book extend beyond the classroom and into a world that needs help. I am grateful to have been blessed by being a student in one of Jane Dalton's classrooms and I can truly say that she is inspiring and loving. I am going to bring into my own classroom the ideas of harmony and acceptance that todays students need. This book is a must for those teachers who wish to make a difference.

Testing and standards are always needed, but an obsessive focus on them has turned us against the purposes of teaching. We teach because we have a passion for our subject matter and so that students to discover that passion themselves. The Compassionate Classroom helps teachers remember our roots, the reasons why we came into teaching in the first place. After fifteen years of teaching I value the relationships I built in my classroom with individual students and among students. Emotional safety and classroom community are the first orders of business before any academic learning occurs. This book gives you nuggets for sowing the seeds of community every day. The Golden Rule never goes out of style, nor does art, nor does story telling (just some of this book's lessons), and this book is great for teachers of any level and subject area who want their students to feel like they are part of something greater and human and soulful, not just a cog in the wheel of content delivery. I imagine that elementary school teachers will most readily respond to this book, because they often teach interdisciplinary, active lessons, but any teacher will benefit who can take the time to see the seasons of learning in the classroom and the whole person that is each student.

If you believe in character education and the spiritual life of each individual, you'll not only like this book but books by John Miller, Rachael Kessler, and Parker Palmer.

Though a few of the lesson plans may, in fact, be beneficial for students on a middle school level or lower, in general, these plans fall under the category of "any high school student would see through them and roll their eyes at the cheese whiz factor." Though the book and the authors obviously have good intentions, the lesson plans and the attitudes with them reek more of political correctness than reality and seem to gloss over atmospheres that pervade our school systems today.

I was dissapointed with the format itself-- the chapter introductions were chock-full of uninspired teaching antidotes that did nothing to introduce the lesson plans themselves and seemed more of a way for the authors to toot their own horns, so to speak. The book is also organized by "season" which follows no pattern.

In short-- maybe in a suburban private school, these lesson plans and ideas are embraced by students. But in the real world, most high school students wouldn't take a single one of these seriously; especially with such wishy-washy political correct attitudes.