Justin Parmenter is a 7th grade language arts teacher at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte, N.C. He was a fellow with Hope Street Group's NC Teacher Voice Network from 2016-2018 and currently serves on that organization's design team. You can find him on Twitter at @JustinParmenter.
A few years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin set out to answer the question, “Can compassion be learned?” They wanted to see whether practicing the mindset of caring would lead to more caring behavior, and the results of their studywere very promising. After practicing compassion towards friends, strangers, and even people they’d had conflict with, participants showed increased activity in the region of the brain associated with empathy and understanding. Just like learning to write the letters of the alphabet or using the quadratic formula, it was regular opportunities to practice the skill that made it more likely participants would successfully use the skill on their own.
With that in mind, I created an assignment that would give my 7th grade language arts students the opportunity to practice compassion toward each other. I called it “Undercover Agents of Kindness.”
To increase interaction between students who did not normally talk to each other, I had each student draw a random classmate’s name from a bowl. After they drew names, I was shocked to hear some of them had no idea who the other person was—even after being in class together for two months and, in many cases, attending the same school for years. Students had two weeks to perform an unexpected act of kindness for the other person and complete a written “mission report” detailing what they did and how it went.
I heard compliments exchanged about all kinds of things. Students I’d never seen together started offering to carry each other's books and musical instruments to the next class. As the mission reports started trickling in, I read accounts of children studying together, inviting others to sit together at lunch, helping others put football equipment on at practice.
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