Ep.55- Conversation with Kara Cosby: Compassion in the School System

Gissele overdub: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Giselle. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our worlds. Don’t forget to like, and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’ll be talking about bringing compassion into the school system, and we’ll be talking to Kara Cosby, who is the Compassionate School Project Teacher at Englehart Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky she has delivered the Flourish curriculum in grades K to five for six years and is a Compassionate Schools Project Flourish teacher trainer.

She’s also a certified mindfulness director with Whole School Mindfulness. She has completed a master’s degree in elementary education and teaching from the University of Louisville, and has a master’s in education and educational leadership and administration from [00:01:00] Asbury University. Please join me in welcoming Kara.

Hi, Kara. Hello. Hello. Hello. I’m so excited to talk to you because I think compassion in the school system is so, so needed, especially at this time. I was wondering if you could tell the audience a little bit about how you started in this work. How is it that you became this compassionate schools.

Project teacher.

Kara: Okay, so I was a fourth and fifth grade teacher in JCPS. I moved away to Denver, Colorado. I taught for two years there. And then when I decided to come back to Louisville, I kept seeing these positions called the Compassionate schools project. I had no idea what it was but I saw there was several.

So I applied for them. And then I, of course, after applying, started investigating to see, okay, what is this compassionate schools project? What do they do? And then when [00:02:00] I dove a little deeper and found out like what it really involves, I thought, wow, because. I am totally into vision boards, and I had had on my vision board for about a year that I was going to teach yoga.

And so when I found out that this position actually incorporated mindful movement I was so excited. And so that’s how the whole journey began.

Gissele overdub: I love vision boards, and I love being able to kind of align with your manifestation. So that’s, that’s pretty exciting.

Kara: That’s what it felt like, that full circle moment.

Gissele overdub: Yeah, for sure. I love it when life happens like that. Tell us a little bit about what sort of, curriculum you delivered to the young people and maybe perhaps how you define compassion.

Kara: Okay, so the curriculum is broken into 7 units. It starts from the beginning where it’s all about self and, and just learning how to be your [00:03:00] best self and just what is compassion. And so we dive into that first. It’s a very short unit, but then it travels after you introduce compassion into emotions.

Unit three is like all about being your best self. self. So we talk about like what we need to be our best selves. I love the emotions unit because it gives me the chance to show inside out, which is literally one of my favorite cartoons. And so Oh, as it goes from self, it moves into friendships and relationships.

So we moved from self to friendships, relationships, just how we interact with others. Then the last two units are like community based. So it moves out of. I mean, it’s still about relationship building, but much more on a wider scale. And so we finish out with unit seven, which is a community service project.

You come up with the project for your school and it’s something that you guys do for the community. And that’s how it all ends every [00:04:00] year. So for me, In terms of like what compassion is in my definition probably has changed so many times, but ultimately, you know, when I ask the kids, what is compassion, you know, they’re like being