Cultivating Skillful Means of Care in Schools Through Compassion Practice and Individual and Joint Inquiry.

Objectives: We examined the extent to which compassion practices helped guide skillful means of care among educators. We engaged educators in a collaborative design (co-design) process that foregrounded two components: (1) contemplative practice and (2) developing skill in how social interactions are embedded within wider systems through individual and joint inquiry. We analyzed the ways educators developed awareness of social suffering and set intentions to alleviate suffering. We examined how co-design fostered an understanding of compassion and new ideas about how to respond skillfully to suffering in schools. Methods: Using qualitative methods, we analyzed data from educators who participated in co-design, including their written reflections, field notes, semi-structured interviews, and surveys. Results: Educators identified multiple opportunities for acting with compassion, including approaching school-based interactions with compassion, cultivating compassion for themselves, and envisioning school change through a lens of compassion. Educators' experiences in co-design directly informed how they imagined compassionate action in their schools. Specific elements highlighted were contemplative practice, reflection, and individual and joint inquiry. Conclusions: The adaptation of a general program on compassion training can benefit from attending to how to show compassion in the context of concrete interactions in schools, and this can support educators in developing skillful means of care. Our analyses provide insight into the components that supported educators to offer compassion and suggest that educators' skillful means of care can be cultivated through both contemplative practice and inquiry into social suffering. We offer a conceptual model for developing skillful means of care educational settings.

Implementation of Evidence-Based Practice In Human Service Organizations: Implications From Agent-Based Models.

Much of the impact of a policy depends on how it is implemented, especially as mediated by organizations such as schools or hospitals. Here, we focus on how implementation of evidence-based practices in human service organizations (e.g., schools, hospitals)is affected by intraorganizational network dynamics. In particular, we hypothesize intraorganizational behavioral divergence and network polarization are likely to occur when actors strongly identify with their organizations. Using agent-based models, we find that when organizational identification is high, external change agents who attempt to direct organizations by introducing policy aligned messages (e.g., professional development emphasizing specific teaching practices) may unintentionally contribute to divergence in practice and polarization in networks, inhibiting full implementation of the desired practices as well as reducing organizational capacity to absorb new practices. Thus, the external change agent should consider the interaction between the type of message and the intraorganizational network dynamics driven by organizational identification.