Older and Younger Hands, Building One School
At John M. Palmer Elementary School in Chicago, kindness has been cultivated over time and in ways students can feel. The school serves about 750 students from pre-K through eighth grade, and for seven years it has been using Teach Kindness resources to help students grow in empathy, self-regulation, and connection. Teachers Tracy Caronia and Renee Robinson help lead that work in a school community where older and younger students know one another, where service and reflection are built into the year, and where kindness is not treated as a one-day event. It is part of how the school comes together.
Palmer defines kindness as being respectful, fair, welcoming, helpful, and caring toward others. That shared understanding is reflected in a wide range of Teach Kindness lessons, but the ones that stand out most in Palmer’s story are Kindness Buddy, The Courage to Be Kind, Using Social Media for Good, and ART of Apology. They support the exact kinds of growth the school wants to see: students who can care for younger peers, make thoughtful choices, repair harm, and move through friendship and conflict with more maturity. Ms. Robinson also demos lessons in classes across the school, helping the language and skills feel consistent from one room to the next.
One of the clearest examples of how this becomes lived experience is Palmer’s Buddy Day, which the school has now done multiple times over the past two years and brought into World Kindness Day as a centerpiece. Older students are paired with younger students, and buddy teachers create kindness-centered activities for them to share. The older students lead. The younger students listen, participate, and learn by being alongside someone a little further ahead. Teachers step back and watch the interaction unfold. The school has seen those buddy days deepen empathy, strengthen impulse control, and build patience and responsibility in older students while helping younger students feel included and supported.
There is also history behind this effort. Palmer participated in Teach Kindness’ 2020 Ready for Kindness cohort and received the program’s Illinois Kind School Award in 2021. The school was also featured in a spotlight video in 2025 that showed what a Kind School can look like in practice. Those details point to continuity: this is work Palmer has been building steadily over time.
Kindness at Palmer is not only taught in lessons or spoken about in assemblies. It is carried from older students to younger ones, from classroom to classroom, and from one year to the next. In a school that stretches from the earliest years into early adolescence, Palmer is showing what can happen when children are given the chance to grow up looking out for one another.
