Kindness and Gratitude at St. Margaret's

Dear St. Margaret’s Families,

I am overwhelmed with gratitude by the love and support I felt at yesterday’s event. It is an incredible honor to be installed as St. Margaret’s fifth head of school by Bishop Taylor, and to have the clergy, the entire student body, the professional community, my family and lifelong friends, current and former trustees, parents, alumni, parents of alumni, grandparents and so many community leaders there to support this transition in our school’s history. It is profoundly impactful. To you, our current families, thank you for your partnership and the trust you place in us every day with your children. These young Tartans are the true essence of hope and goodness in the world. 

As many of you have heard me say, one of the numerous reasons I chose St. Margaret’s almost two decades ago was because of the positive student culture. I could see it in the way students interacted with each other and the adults on campus. There is a culture of gratitude that is strong on this campus, and I see it everywhere I turn. When I first started teaching at St. Margaret’s, I experienced something so simple, yet so telling, about the culture of this school. After my first class, the students began filing out and every one of them thanked me. Although I had worked in schools for most of my life, I had never experienced students thanking me after class. I was so curious about this behavior that I asked the teacher next door why they thanked me. She was a longstanding teacher at St. Margaret’s with over 20 years of experience and she looked at me with a puzzled expression. She said, “They thanked you for the lesson. They always do and they always will.” She was right—for the entirety of the eight years I taught AP psychology, my students thanked me after every lesson. This is not something that is taught or mandated, it is what they do – it is the culture of gratitude that is abundant on our campus.

I could truly write for days about examples of gratitude and kindness I see daily, but I want you to know why it is so important and why it is so critical to our mission of educating both hearts and minds of our young people for lives of learning, leadership, and service.  

Gratitude, as it turns out, is not just a wonderful feeling. It is an essential component of human well-being. In his landmark book Flourish, Dr. Martin Seligman, former President of the American Psychological Association and founder of the field of positive psychology, cites research on the power of sharing and recording gratitude. It is one element of a burgeoning body of research that continues to shape the science of human thriving. Scientific research in psychology has traditionally been geared toward healing suffering, a critical and laudable pursuit, yet incomplete when considering the totality of the human condition and the pursuit of optimal well-being.

According to Seligman, “If positive psychology aims to build well-being on the planet, well-being must be buildable.” He continues by writing, “for sound evolutionary reasons, most of us are not nearly as good at dwelling on good events as we are at analyzing bad events. So, to overcome our brains’ natural catastrophic bent, we need to work on and practice this skill of thinking about what went well.”  His advice is to spend time each night writing down three to five things that went well and make that a practice. What Seligman has found is that students will often report that this simple practice has profound effects that many report as life changing. 

In their early research on recording gratitude, Dr. Robert Emmons and Dr. Michael McCullough found that those people who kept a gratitude journal and recorded their feelings of gratitude, as compared to other experimental conditions, exercised more frequently, reported better physical health, felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the week ahead. In his research on the impact of gratitude at work, Dr. Emmons writes, “…you literally cannot overplay the hand of gratitude; the grateful mind reaps massive benefits in every domain of life that has been examined.”

I have shared this research with my students over the years and with the St. Margaret’s professional community. At the beginning of this year, our professional community in-service day in September was led by our Director of Institutional Research Dr. Stephanie Capen and focused on those elements that lead to human thriving and a reflective gratitude experience. It was powerful to sit with other members of our professional community in Chapel and to think deeply about the people and experiences for which we are grateful. I also had the opportunity to share this practice with the Lower and Middle School students in recent homilies. For our youngest children, gratitude is a complex word, so we discussed it differently. I explained to them that when my own children were small, part of our bedtime routine was an exercise called “three happies.” Each night we would choose three things for which we were grateful and share them with each other at bedtime. I offered this practice to our Lower School students and have been so touched by the many students who have been excited to share their three happies with me when I see them arrive to school in the morning.

It is a joy and an honor to lead our remarkable school and to build on the great work accomplished before me by the four previous Heads of School, our founder The Reverend Canon Ernest Sillers, Mark Campaigne, Marc Hurlbut and Will Moseley. In this moment of Thanksgiving, I hope you all know how enormously thankful I am for your love and support. I am grateful beyond measure.