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 program, which increases student physical and psychological safety and promotes engagement and learning.
Of course, these several explanations can be bound together to provide a robust understanding of how caring works. An important additional point is that the outcomes of caring are best understood in terms of the totality of caring—the systems of caring—that persons experience across settings, including family and friendship networks, schools, churches, and other institutions. Histories of caring or noncaring relationships and experiences are important also. Systems of caring are dynamic, and their elements likely influence each other. For example, while the close relationships students have with family, teachers, and close peers may affect them most, relationships with other adults in extended families, schools, and communities and with other peers will also have an effect. Elements of a system of caring relationships may be differentially strong, weak, or absent for different students. Caring may be particularly strong for some students in family and community but weak or absent in school—or vice versa. The strength of caring in some relationships may compensate for weakness in others. Again, it is the totality of caring that is important.
Caring can have important benefits for the ones caring—in our case school leaders as well as teachers and other staff. It can lead to joy and personal and professional satisfaction and fulfillment. It can increase self-esteem, motivation, agency, persistence, and overall mental health. These positive outcomes can, in turn, enhance the prospects of ongoing and deeper caring. The experience of caring can lead to more caring as it satisfies a sense of personal and professional calling. It can propel a virtuous cycle of caring.
Influence of Contexts
Several related contexts can affect caring and its outcomes positively or negatively (see Figure 0.3). Noddings observes that caring occurs in and through social relationships that constitute an interpersonal context.16 Most conducive to caring are interpersonal contexts that are enduring; that are personally deep, open, honest, and revealing; that are characterized by trust; and in which attention is given both to the present and how the present relates to the past and the future. In interpersonal contexts that are shorter in duration, are more shallow, are lacking in transparency and honesty, grow from mistrust, or fail to acknowledge the past or consider the future, caring is less likely to form and grow.
16Noddings (2013).
Figure 0.3 Surrounded by Care. Nicholas Fogg, Grade 12
Organizational contexts can also enable or impede caring. Particularly relevant to caring in schools are structures that create opportunities for students, teachers, principals, and other staff to interact and learn about each other; to form long-term, deep, and trusting relationships; and to engage in caring action and interaction. These structures include the ordering of programs, goals, roles, responsibilities, and relationships. They include the organization of time and work, systems of social and academic support, as well as academic press—performance expectations and means of accountability. They also include incentives and rewards that can direct attention and action toward caring.
In addition to structural elements, school organizational climate and culture can affect caring. By climate we refer to the perceptions that students, teachers, and administrators have of each other, of their relationships, and of the school as a place for caring and learning. Particularly important to caring and other supportive behavior is how students and adults perceive the ethical climate of the school. A school’s organizational culture—that is, its system of orientations, taken-for-granted assumptions, and values as well as the symbols, rituals, and routines by which they are communicated—sets expectations for caring and establishes a foundation for mutual accountability in caring. Other aspects of organizational context can be important for caring in schools. Power and authority relationships and processes of school decision-making create conditions that can support or impede caring. How a school balances collective and individual interests and how it engages in competitive and adversarial or consensual and constructive politics can be important to caring. Also relevant is how a school may rely on consolidated or expansive and inclusive distribution of power and influence.
Beyond the school are extraorganizational contexts that can affect systems of caring. These contexts include families, communities, and broad policy and social-historical-cultural environments. Notable are social resources in families and communities and characteristics of the broader environment.