Empathy and Education

Six East Antrim primary schools have taken part in a unique scheme aimed at reducing levels of aggression amongst schoolchildren.

The innovative Roots of Empathy programme involves bringing a baby and parent into a classroom once a month throughout the school year, giving youngsters the opportunity to track the infant’s milestones.

Kristin Powers currently lives and works in Seattle, where she works with a strategy and design firm called Intentional Futures. She loves teaching art and English, collecting salts, and reading about black holes.

Kristin is passionate about empathy in the classroom, neuroscience, oxytocin research, playful learning, and serious games.

When teachers think empathically, and not punitively, about misbehaving students, they cultivate better relationships and help reduce discipline problems, Stanford research shows.

The findings showed that giving teachers an opportunity to express their empathic values – to understand students’ perspectives and to sustain positive relationships with students when they misbehave – improved student-teacher relationships and discipline outcomes.

According to a new study, empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half and improves student-teacher relationships.

A recent study out of Stanford University set out to answer some of these questions. This study found that adopting an empathic mindset and empathic discipline strategies strengthened student-teacher relationships, encouraged better behavior from students, and cut school suspension rates in half...

Clearly, students benefit when teachers adopt a more empathic mindset. But what does that look like on a daily basis?

Here are some suggestions for cultivating an empathic mindset and practicing empathic discipline as an educator:...

• 1. Reframe the questions you ask when a student misbehaves...
• 2. To better connect with students, explore your shared identity...
• 3. Make empathy part of your school culture, starting with staff...

By Mariah Flynn

In a world of interaction and complexity — one that relies on collaboration for success and contribution — the stakes for every child mastering empathy have never been higher. Team-of-teams is a way of working that is highly interactive, and individual integrity, a premium standard in this system, is directly proportional to change pursued for the good. Also, rules can’t keep up with this level of change, making cognitive empathy-based ethics essential in our everyday leadership and changemaking.

Youth learning must, therefore, be calibrated so teens are practicing cognitive empathy-based ethics, co-creative teamwork (team-of-teams), a new kind of leadership in which everyone on the team is an initiatory player, and changemaking. Learning in the early grades must be focused on the mastery of empathy as a fundamental skill needed for success and contribution in today’s dynamically changing world.

The Circle School is part of the 2016 Big Give SA. At The Circle School, we teach empathy, by having our children volunteer, raising money for causes all over the world, and participating in local marches and protests. We believe that our children can and will grow up to change the world.

This video was dreamed up, scripted, and acted out by some of my amazing 8th grade students from Kalispell Middle School. The vision was to create a thought provoking short film that instills a challenge to the viewer to look at their own life, their own relationships, and their own sphere of influence, and see where a little empathy could help change the world around them.

In working in a middle school for the past 5 years, I've seen the power that a single act of empathy can have on a hurting student, and hope that this message will inspire viewers, just as my own students have inspired me in creating this. Please share in our vision for a more empathetic world.

How mindfulness training helps build a foundational social and emotional skill

I wanted to reflect  a bit on empathy and mindfulness. Humans are social beings and positive relationships are important for our happiness. Empathy is a capacity that allows us to understand the minds of others and to resonate emotionally with those states.

Empathy forms a cornerstone of social cooperation.

As you probably have heard, mindfulness has been linked to a range of positive effects and is being integrated into medicine,2 mental health3 and education.4 Here, I address two important questions:

First, what’s the relationship between mindfulness and empathy?

Second, can mindfulness training enhance empathy?

Written by Matthew Brensilver

Hardly can you find 10-year-old kids feel empathy towards other children. However, this one boy created Buddy Benches for his kids at school so that nobody feels alone during recess. His Buddy Bench led more than 2,000 schools to follow suit.

Christian Buck came up with the idea three years ago, when he and his family were contemplating of moving back to Germany. While looking for a possible new school, he saw a picture of a Buddy Bench, a place where lonely kids can sit during recess, so as to signal other kids to invite them to play.

Video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob2OsHYQ7PM

By Snow McDiggon

This video is about Empathy

Four Ingredients that Move Students from Apathy to Empathy:

1. Margin..
A number of neuro-scientific experiments have been conducted, where brains were scanned to study how empathy emerges. Neuroscientists, like Dr. Thomas Lewis of UCSF, remind us that empathy is taken from two roots:

Em – to be within
Pathos – to feel or suffer with

Question:

How can you model more clearly the virtue of empathy each day?

How can you find time to tell stories of those who’ve embodied empathy?

Tim Elmore

Restorative justice empowers students to resolve conflicts on their own and in small groups, and it's a growing practice at schools around the country. Essentially, the idea is to bring students together in peer-mediated small groups to talk, ask questions, and air their grievances. (This four-part tutorial from the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation is a wonderful primer.)

For the growing number of districts using restorative justice, the programs have helped strengthen campus communities, prevent bullying, and reduce student conflicts. And the benefits are clear: early-adopting districts have seen drastic reductions in suspension and expulsion rates, and students say they are happier and feel safer.

A new study out of Stanford shows that when teachers maintain an empathetic mind frame, students are less likely to be expelled.

The study was conducted by Jason Okonofua, Stanford psychology post-doctoral fellow and lead author on the paper, psychology researcher David Paunesku, and Stanford associate professor of psychologyGregory Walton and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

According to a press release on the study, these results came from the culmination of three separate experiments on inspiring empathy in teachers. ....

Approaching discipline with empathy works it practice too, according to 2016 Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Hayes explained that students need to be allowed to be kids and to handle problems from the point a student is at, not the point an educator feels the student should be at.

by Abby Payne

School suspension rates have risen in recent years. And since the punishment is linked to more severe problems later in life, such as dropping out of school or ending up in prison, researchers at Stanford University have been looking for ways to prevent it.

Researchers asked one group of math teachers to complete a 45-minute online activity about how important it is to respect and humanize students. Meanwhile, another group of math teachers read about how to use technology in the classroom.

By the end of the school year, suspension rates were 50 percent lower for the empathy-trained teachers compared to the control group — at 4.8 percent instead of 9.6 percent.

Jason Okonofua, who led the study, said that more teacher empathy promotes classroom harmony as well, because the educators are not viewed simply as stern authority figures.

“She reinforced that essential value of empathy that my mother and my grandparents had taught me. That is something that I carry with me every day as President,” he wrote. “This is the simple and undeniable power of a good teacher. This is a story that every single kid in this country, regardless of background or station in life, should be able to tell.”

By Emily Underwood

One group of math teachers completed a short online exercise emphasizing empathy, which included readings about research that showed how caring relationships with adults contributed to student success. It also included writing prompts in which teachers shared their insights about empathy in the classroom.

For example, one teacher wrote: “I feel I need to earn my students’ respect and trust. I know many of them have had poor experiences with past teachers so I need to prove to my students that I am there for them and will not let them fail.” A second group completed a similar exercise. But instead of empathy, they read and wrote about the importance of technology to student development.

In contrast, only 4.6% of students whose math teacher had completed the online exercise on empathy were suspended, the team reports today in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hardly can you find 10-year-old kids feel empathy towards other children. However, this one boy created Buddy Benches for his kids at school so that nobody feels alone during recess. His Buddy Bench led more than 2,000 schools to follow suit.

Christian Buck came up with the idea three years ago, when he and his family were contemplating of moving back to Germany. While looking for a possible new school, he saw a picture of a Buddy Bench, a place where lonely kids can sit during recess, so as to signal other kids to invite them to play.

Video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob2OsHYQ7PM

By Snow McDiggon

Empathy is one of the most important skills to teach children, according to Parent Further. Focusing on empathy in applying school discipline is essential in making kids become more matured and emotionally stable people.

On the other hand, many educators feel that focusing on punishments and harsh consequences can traumatize children and worsen their behavior.