second element of caring consists of positive virtues and mindsets that are brought to the pursuit of the aims of caring. These virtues include compassion, empathy, patience, sympathy, and kindness. They include fairness and justice, authenticity, humility, and vulnerability. They also include prudence, transparency, honesty, trustworthiness, and respect for others and their integrity.
Four positive mindsets are particularly important to caring. The first is attentiveness to others. If caring is to address others’ needs and interests, one must be attentive to understand, deeply and genuinely, who persons are and what their needs, concerns, interests, and situations might be. Another mindset is motivational orientation. If caring truly means acting on behalf of others, one must be motivated accordingly, and this orientation cannot be diminished by attention to one’s own needs and self-interests. Attentiveness and motivational orientation toward others do not lead to permissiveness nor abdication of responsibility. Rather, they become a positive basis for the fulfillment of responsibility. As theologian Eugene Peterson argues with regard to the helping professions generally, “If we do not keep our assignment, we do not care.”13
13Peterson (1994, p. 71).
A third type of mindset consists of personal and professional identities related to caring. How persons see themselves as caring or uncaring human beings and as capable or incapable of caring will likely affect their efforts to be caring. Likewise, how persons see themselves in a professional role, what they perceive the norms of the profession to require of them, and what they perceive as others’ expectations for them in their role may influence caring. A fourth mindset is playfulness. This mindset reminds us that caring is not a dour enterprise. Although difficult and taxing at times, it can be joyful and fulfilling. Moreover, playfulness is a way of knowing, seeing, and engaging with others that encourages creativity, inventive thinking, and flexibility. Playfulness can reveal the world through others’ eyes—a view that is essential to understanding others, their situations, and ways to be caring of them.
Competencies of Caring
In addition to aims and positive virtues and mindsets, to be caring requires competency. According to Benner and Gordon, professional practice “is always bound up in knowing and doing.”14 Effort and sincerity are important and may be appreciated, but particular actions and interactions may not be perceived as caring or very helpful if they are uninformed, inadequate, misguided, or poorly performed.
14Benner & Gordon (1996, p. 50).
In caring, one important area of competency is knowledge and authentic understanding of others and their needs, problems, joys, concerns, and situations. If educators have inaccurate understanding of who students are and what they want and need, they may make well-meaning attempts to be caring but ultimately miss the mark as to what is caring and helpful in the eyes of students. Developing such understanding is related to one’s ability to inquire, listen and hear, observe and see, assess and understand, and learn about others. Social-emotional intelligence is particularly important to caring and caring school leadership. Also important is understanding persons’ and groups’ races, classes, genders, sexual orientations, languages, cultures, religious beliefs, and relevant contexts. Education scholar Audrey Thompson argues that “the possibility of adequate responsiveness to others depends upon our being able to understand their situations in ways that do not simply reduce them to projections of our … assumptions.”15 She continues that “[school] administrators need to understand the full picture of the worlds in which their students move.”
15Thompson (1998, pp. 541, 543).
A second area of competency concerns understanding the relative effectiveness of strategies to address the needs and concerns of others and to promote their interests. This includes knowledge and skills to engage these strategies successfully. Caring requires knowledge and skill to develop or select, adapt, and enact practices that pursue the aims of caring; that bring virtues of caring to life; and that align with the understanding of others, their situations, and their joys, needs, and concerns. Caring further requires the ability to wrestle with ethical and practical dilemmas posed by different and competing needs and considerations.
A third area of competency concerns knowledge of self and the ability to develop and deepen one’s own capacity for caring. Knowledge of self involves understanding one’s orientations and inclinations, strengths and limitations, and predispositions and prejudices. Recognizing the sources of one’s fears and joys may be crucial in thinking and acting in a caring manner.
A fourth area of competency, especially important to school leaders, consists of knowledge and skills for developing caring among others and creating organizational contexts conducive to caring. This area includes understanding how to think about caring as a property of classroom and school organization, not only as a quality of interpersonal relationships. It includes knowledge and skill related to professional learning and development and organizational change. It encompasses knowledge and skill to create supportive structures and processes, to design work and social arrangements, and to develop organizational cultures imbued with the virtues and mindsets of caring.
How Does Caring Work?
As we mentioned earlier, caring is associated with a number of positive outcomes for students. These outcomes can accrue from caring both big and little. By this we mean that caring can be expressed in major decisions and pivotal actions and interactions. Equally important and strongly influential are the small, routine ways that caring is expressed through everyday actions and interactions that nurture feelings of respect, trust, support, and dependability. Small gestures of caring can make big differences.
Explanations of Outcomes
There are three general explanations for how and why caring may lead to these outcomes. The first focuses on psychological mechanisms triggered by caring. Attachment theory suggests that positive social relationships—in this case, caring relationships—promote feelings of safety, security, and comfort through the mediation of threat and stress. These emotional states are important preconditions for exploration, facing stress and uncertainly, risk-taking, and engagement in learning. Self-determination theory suggests that for persons—children and youth in our case—to become motivated, needs for relatedness, competency, and autonomy must be addressed. Adults can meet these needs through caring, providing clear rules and expectations, and giving children freedom to make their own choices. If these needs are met, children will be more confident and motivated to engage in learning activities. Consequently, they will learn more and achieve at a higher level.
A second explanation comes from logical arguments that link different factors related to caring found in theory and research. For example, care and support received by students have been found to be related to student affiliation and sense of belonging in schools and classrooms. Care and support have also been found to be related to students’ sense of competency and self, notably academic self-concept and self-efficacy, among other positive psychological states. Care and support are also related to student motivation to learn and academic engagement. Through these intermediary outcomes, care and support—along with academic rigor, challenge, and press—promote social and academic learning. In short, caring social relationships power up certain psychological states of students, which deepen engagement—and that, in turn, fuels social and academic outcomes.
A third explanation is that caring may promote actions that provide tangible provisions and services to address the needs and interests of others. As such provisions and services are provided, benefits may accrue. For example, out of caring by a teacher or principal, a child may receive eyeglasses that help them see better in class, become more engaged in learning activities, and be more successful academically. Out of caring, a principal may initiate an antibullying
