Making Caring Common

A Project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Making Caring Common (MCC) is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education that helps educators, parents, and communities raise children who are caring, respectful and responsible toward others and their communities.  MCC is working to make these values live and breathe in the day-to-day interactions of every school and home.  MCC is working to make caring common.

MCC uses research and the expertise and insights of both practitioners and parents to develop effective strategies for promoting in children kindness and a commitment to the greater good, to influence the national conversation about raising and educating caring, ethical children, and to develop partnerships that enhance our work and our common message.

Through a combination of original research reports (drawn from MCC’s work with schools), outreach and public forums, MCC conducts national media campaigns to elevate the importance of kindness and commitment to the public good and to promote concrete strategies in schools and homes designed to develop these capacities.

MCC works with middle and high schools across the country as part of their Caring Schools Initiative (CSI).  Schools in the CSI use survey data and research-based strategies to promote safety, caring, and respect, and to develop responses to reduce bullying and students’ behavior-related troubles. This initiative is built on the prior success of MCC’s work with 94 schools and more than 30,000 students.

Click here for more information about Making Caring Common.

HEAR Program Author

Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.
Making Caring Common Co-Director
Senior Lecturer on Education

Faculty Director, Human Development and Psychology Program
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Richard Weissbourd is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he directs the Human Development and Psychology Program, and a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on moral development, vulnerability and resilience in childhood and effective schools and services for children. With Stephanie Jones, he directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice and other key moral and social capacities. He is currently conducting research on how older adults can better mentor young adults and teenagers in developing ethical, mature romantic relationships.

He is a founder of several interventions for at-risk children, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives. With Robert Selman, he founded Project ASPIRE, a social and ethical development intervention in schools. He is also a founder of the Lee Academy, a pilot school in Boston. He has advised on the city, state and federal levels on family policy and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs.

He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time. His most recent book, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.

HEAR Program Author

Stephanie Jones, Ph.D.
Making Caring Common Co-Director
Associate Professor of Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Stephanie Jones is the Marie and Max Kargman Associate Professor of Human Development and Urban Education Advancement at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Jones is a developmental psychologist whose work focuses in two primary areas: (1) basic developmental research on the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of social-emotional problems and competencies in childhood and adolescence; and (2) programs and pedagogy that are designed to integrate social-emotional and academic learning. Jones is a principle investigator with colleagues Larry Aber (NYU) and Joshua Brown (Fordham University) of a recently completed 5-year, school-randomized, experimental evaluation of the Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution Program (4Rs). The 4Rs is a universal school-based intervention designed to integrate social-emotional learning with literacy instruction, and to be implemented during the standard literacy block during the school day.

In 2002, Jones received her doctorate in developmental psychology from Yale University. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate at Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty. She was awarded the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Education for her work with Edward Zigler and Walter Gilliam on A Vision for Universal Preschool Education, published by Cambridge University Press.

HEAR Program Contributor

Trisha Ross Anderson
Making Caring Common Program Director
Sr. Program Manager, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Trisha Ross Anderson is a Sr. Program Manager at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she serves as the Program Director for the Making Caring Common (MCC) project. Trisha has spent the last decade supporting educational non-profits, schools, and school districts by developing, evaluating, and facilitating educational programs and training. She has also worked as a classroom teacher.  Interested in the translation of research to practice, Trisha’s recent work has centered around the creation, implementation, and evaluation of research-based interventions and materials that support positive school climate, youth development, and social and emotional learning. She holds an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. from Boston University.

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