Empathy and Education

The benefits of empathy in education include building positive classroom culture, strengthening community, and preparing students to be leaders in their own communities.

3 Benefits of Empathy in Education

1. Empathy builds positive classroom culture.
With the diversity of students entering classrooms each day, paralleled by an increase in globalization, it's more necessary than ever for teachers to actively construct a positive classroom culture. ...

2. Empathy strengthens community.
Given that the definition of empathy involves understanding another's feelings without having experience, empathy sets students up to deepen relationships with their current classmates and people that they know outside of school...

3. Empathy prepares your students to be leaders in their community.
Leaders must understand the people that they lead and be able to show that they care. Leadership articles emphasize human development as an essential leadership quality...

In our fast-paced, digital world, it can often feel like our students are more disconnected from one another than ever before. Four TED-Ed Innovative Educators share tips for how we can combat that by cultivating empathy in the classroom and building perspective-taking skills among students.

Jennifer Hesseltine

Leaning into discomfort: Encourage students to embrace difficult and courageous conversations to build understanding and empathy.

Nola-Rae Cronan

Expand collaboration opportunities: Build or modify an activity that asks the students to interact with another student, teacher, parent, or friend outside of their classroom. 

Corey Holmer

The world is your classroom: Create a class of global literate students that have greater empathy and understanding.

By Emily Graham 

Promote a Holistic, Non-Brain Centric View of Learning
Empathy be a behavior, but it has a physiological underpinning. In an empathetic state, the body relaxes and brain activity shifts to the higher centers. To an extent larger than generally realized, this shift is mediated by the heart. Further, the physiology of the heart—in the form of heart rate variability, which affects the messaging to the brain—is influenced by emotions. All the emotions associated with empathy, such as openness, humility, gratitude, and compassion, affect the heart positively.

View Empathy as the Foundation
Old schemata for learning, such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, need to be replaced by iceberg models that give us better insight into behaviors that matter in the world, including social awareness, self-awareness, and attitudes that lead to connection with others. This includes replacing the term ‘social-emotional’ learning, an industrial hangover from a time in which academic and social skills could be distinguished, with a strengths-based focus that binds intellect, passion, and skillfulness into a whole. Teaching SEL skills is on the rise, but teaching the core strength—openness, curiosity, and empathy—and acknowledging empathy’s   fundamental role in cognition and achievement is the next step.

Turn Empathy into an Outcome
Empathy can be learned, demonstrated, and evaluated, but it needs to be defined in terms deeper than ‘I like others.’ Empathy is the first step in the design process.

By Thom Markham

The classroom project relates to the book Habits of Mind, by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, which Regional School Unit 9 and many other districts is using to help students develop life skills for the classroom and beyond. CBS has adopted 12 of the skills and is focusing on five or six of them this year. For December, Principal Nichole Goodspeed said, the school decided to embrace the skill of Empathy.

Students in each classroom, nearly 20 in all, came up with their own designs to capture Empathy, relating to the Habits of Mind skill of listening with understanding and empathy. Designs ranged from popular books and movies the students had seen to emotions, animals and colorful collages.

Empathy: The Ultimate Classroom Management Skill
Meet Mary, a high school teacher serving "at risk" students in Phoenix. She has been struggling with her classroom. Students were being distracted and causing distractions. Students were blasting their music from their phones, talking to each other (not related to any learning), texting friends, and terribly unengaged in general. It spread and worsened throughout the year. She tried strategy after strategy... nothing was working. It was a strange year indeed, she never had these kinds of issues, and she felt stuck and disempowered in her own classroom.

Feeling stuck is usually a sign that we are seeing the world from a limited perspective. By expanding our perspectives, we can expand our options, and then make more empowered choices. One way to include new perspectives is developing deep empathy for someone, stepping into the shoes of another person, and seeing the world from their point of view. Gaining understanding of why Mary's students were disengaged can help Mary gain the perspective she needs to get unstuck.

By the time the students returned to school last month, she’d come up with an answer: A required course focused on building community and fostering citizenship.

The goal of the one-semester course required of all ninth-graders was simple: “To teach empathy in the midst of a society where that doesn’t seem to exist.”

At a time when the country has been divided by a series of controversies — most recently, the dispute between President Donald Trump and NFL players over protests during the national anthem — Davenport and educators across the region say they feel compelled to show students a different path.'...

She pulled together a group of teachers and had them develop the course. “We needed to start teaching empathy,” she said. “Whether you are a Democrat or Republican you need to get along with everyone. … We have to form a community that we could be proud of.”

Today Jason Okonofua is a newly minted psychology professor at Berkeley whose research focuses on empathy. As a Ph.D. student, he examined how helping couples understand each other’s feelings enabled them to talk to, not at, each another.

Then he began applying the idea to education: How can you help teachers understand the ways adolescents make sense of the world? Tackling the problem from the teachers’ instead of the students’ perspective was a novel approach. If he could change the behavior of a single teacher, could he improve the chances of a whole classroom of Jason Okonofuas?

David L. Kirp

2. Show Empathy
Taking steps toward self-compassion will prepare you emotionally to reach out to others. But let’s face it: Empathy is not the norm in many workplaces. In fact, lack of empathy and even the depersonalization of others are symptoms of the emotional exhaustion that comes with burnout. Here are a few tips to make empathy part of how you deal with people at work:

Build friendships. Most people can rattle off a dozen reasons why you shouldn’t be friends with co-workers. We believe just the opposite. Real connections and friendships at work matter—a lot. 

According to the Harvard Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development, having warm relationships is essential to health, well-being and happiness. Other research shows that caring for and feeling cared for by others lowers our blood pressure and enhances our immunity.

By Annie McKee and Kandi Wiens
Jul 18, 2017

Some school districts are taking that idea seriously and integrating the research into teaching practices. Oakland Unified School District, for example, is piloting a program called Roots of Empathy in 20 schools across the district. The program teaches students how to be empathetic by bringing a baby and the baby’s parent into K-12 classrooms.

The students are asked to think about the baby’s experience as it explores the classroom, while a trained facilitator helps them name the baby’s feelings and emotions. Focusing on the baby and its vulnerability allows students to practice empathy, making it easier to identify their own emotions in the future. As they become more self-aware they’re better able to develop respectful and caring relationships.

Katrina Schwartz 

At its simplest, empathy is the awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. It goes beyond sympathy, which is often thought of as feeling for someone, and instead, is feeling with that person.

Overview

Summary:  Discusses importance of, the why, and the how ,to teach empathy to preschoolers.

Definition: 

• awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people.
• is feeling with that person.

Benefits: 

• -  bully
• - uncontrolled aggressive behaviours
• -  antisocial behaviours
• -  behaviour problems.
• + live a more peaceful existence.
• +  share
• + help others
• + social skills
• +  successful 

Training:  Many Ways To Build Empathy

• attachment to a pet
• look at the varying needs
•  gardening
• Connecting with other cultures

Author:  

ALEXA ERICKSON
AUGUST 1, 2016

Here’s why.

Empathy is healthy.
Today we know that positive emotions enhance well-being, health, relationships, and personal strengths.

Empathy promotes whole-child learning.
Empathy is estimated to activate the heart. Positive emotions such as gratitude and appreciation, the close cousins of empathy, show pronounced, positive effects on brain processes.

Empathy triggers creativity.
Empathy, design, and collaboration are interconnected pieces of the creative puzzle. Therefore, empathy may be a necessary component of an educational system increasingly tilted toward design and inquiry.

Thomas Friedman’s concept of ‘STEMpathy’
Friedman’s most significant point in the talk can inform teaching, lesson design, and assessment. The future, Friedman said, isn’t about what we know. “Nobody cares what you know, because the Google machine knows everything,” he said. Rather, he argued, the future is about what we can do with what we know.

The thing that makes us uniquely different from computers, Friedman pointed out, is our humanity and empathy. If we can unite that with STEM education, students will be armed with “STEMpathy” that cannot be found in an algorithm. “The faster the world gets, the more everything old and slow matters, the things you can’t download,” he said.

figure it out in three hours surely somebody who has been in it for years and years can figure it out,’ which is not the case,” she said.

Roll, the social work professor at California State University, says the simulation is an effective tool to build empathy so long as it’s employed properly. If it’s not contextualized correctly, “it does look like this game, we’re playing this game and those are people that I don’t know and oh, it’s too bad for them, and why don’t I put a check in the mail to the food bank and not get my hands dirty. And that’s where I think the problem is,” she says.

Roll says she used the simulation with her students for about five semesters and she took surveys that indicated about a third of her classroom had experienced poverty at least some point in her lives. She says she made that clear to the students to ensure they realized poverty affected people they knew and not a

Like other aspects of modern life, education can make the head hurt. So many outcomes, so much important work to do, so many solutions and strategies, so many variations on teaching, so many different kinds of students with so many different needs, so many unknowns in preparing for 21st Century life and the endless list of jobs that haven’t been invented.

What if we discovered one unifying factor that brought all of this confusion under one roof and gave us a coherent sense of how to stimulate the intellect, teach children to engage in collaborative problem solving and creative challenge, and foster social-emotional balance and stability—one factor that, if we got right, would change the equation for learning in the same way that confirming the existence of a fundamental particle informs a grand theory of the universe?

By Thom Markham

Mary Gordon recognizes our huge crisis of connection with so much alienation. “We don’t have the capacity or the will to empathize with the humanity of the ‘other’. We don’t consider them in the same category of the neighbor. We identify from whatever orientation we have as a group. I’m hoping we can help children to see the other as ourselves, and that we can reach across the divides to see the other as self.” Amen, I think.

CS Please tell me about how Roots of Empathy works.

MG Well, the idea has been (in terms of our practical involvement) to find a parent and young infant (we start at 2 months old) where there is a secure, clearly attuned relationship between parent and child. The parent and baby come to the classroom and the class focuses on what is going on in the child and in the relationship.

CS Do you teach children empathy?

MG You really can’t teach empathy. Actually we engage the children by asking them to share their perceptions of what is going on with the baby and the caregiver. What we do, coach the children to help them understand a child’s signals and what they mean.

Teachers have the power to create an environment in their classroom that is one of inclusiveness, tolerance, and optimism, despite whatever is going on outside in the world. One of the fundamental ideas of social and emotional learning, which is becoming a critical area of academic focus in recent years, includes feeling and showing empathy for others.

Empathy is defined as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another, without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner—putting yourself in someone else's shoes.

Teaching empathy in schools can help students understand multiple perspectives of the reality of others, and learn compassion for their emotions as well.

The level of empathy taught in students’ homes is uncertain and not guaranteed, which could lead to biases and prejudices that may go unchecked throughout childhood and adolescence. Teachers, counselors, and administrators can teach empathy to ensure their students are getting exposure to these kinds of social and emotional learning topics to emphasize their importance.

The Compassionate Schools Project is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of a 21st century health and wellness curriculum in an elementary or secondary school setting. Facilitating the integrated development of mind and body, the project interweaves support in academic achievement, mental fitness, health, and compassionate character

. The research aims to have a major impact on children’s education Nationwide in terms of academic performance, physical education, character development, and child health policies­ due to its extraordinary scale of 50 schools and 20,000 children over the project’s six years.

One of the most interesting ways KiVa teaches this bystander empathy is through computer games and simulations.

In one of the games, the kids take control of cartoon avatars that are put in a variety of bullying situations they might encounter in school.

"For instance, they might witness a bullying incident and they have to decide what to do; whether to defend the victim or do something else," Johanna Alanen, KiVa's International Project Manager, told Upworthy in an email.

"There are different options on how to defend the victim," Alanen explained. "Their choices have consequences and lead to new situations.

Basically, the programs are kind of like choose-you-own-adventure stories for bullying, allowing the kids to see what consequences might come from certain actions, all in a virtual setting.

Empathy is a topic that was repeatedly part of conversation at the 2017 ILA convention in Orlando, FL this weekend.  It is a topic that is timely, relevant, and necessary.  About a year ago, I wrote a post on Edutopia discussing how empathy and reading comprehension can intersect. 

Discussing and practicing empathy in the classroom is a practice that benefits both teachers and students, and it reaches into both the social-emotional and academic experiences of a classroom community.  It provides a lens through which to view peers, texts, and the world at large. 

Take a look at this post for ideas on how to use empathy to boost comprehension.  If you give any of these ideas a try, I would love to hear from you! 

2. Show Empathy
Taking steps toward self-compassion will prepare you emotionally to reach out to others. But let’s face it: Empathy is not the norm in many workplaces. In fact, lack of empathy and even the depersonalization of others are symptoms of the emotional exhaustion that comes with burnout. Here are a few tips to make empathy part of how you deal with people at work:

Build friendships. Most people can rattle off a dozen reasons why you shouldn’t be friends with co-workers. We believe just the opposite. Real connections and friendships at work matter—a lot. 

According to the Harvard Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development, having warm relationships is essential to health, well-being and happiness. Other research shows that caring for and feeling cared for by others lowers our blood pressure and enhances our immunity.

By Annie McKee and Kandi Wiens
Jul 18, 2017

According to Nelson, there are five ways you can help your preschooler learn empathy:

1. Recognize and address your child’s needs.
A child’s needs and wants aren’t always convenient. If adult schedules interfere with nap time, it’s tempting to tell your child, “You can wait a few minutes.” But a “few minutes” can seem like an eternity to a sleepy 4-year-old. Validate your child’s feelings by saying instead, “I know you’re tired, and we’ll get home as soon as we can and then you can go right to sleep.”

2. Focus on feelings.
Read books about feelings, and encourage your child to identify their own emotions, as well as those of others. When you notice a child who is happy or sad, remark on it.

Zoe, the mother of 5-year-old Sofia, said to her daughter recently, “Your brother was very quiet tonight. Do you think he might be sad because Daddy’s out of town?” Another time Zoe said to Sofia, “Your friend Michael was jumping up and down when you got to school! Didn’t he look happy to see you?”

3. Teach verbal and non-verbal cues....
4. Use pretend play...
5. Encourage inclusion...

What It’s About
Get Empathy is a youth leadership program for schools and community groups. It focuses on empowering young people to foster a culture of empathy in their environments.

The Challenge

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan found that college students today are 40% less empathic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years. A 1996 brief by the American Society for Curriculum Development warned that the “charge of enabling each student to achieve individual promise, including economic potential, often stands at odds with the broader need to prepare all learners to be good citizens“. It goes on to say that while “career preparation is a valid function of education, democracy demands much more. Democratic life requires critical inquiry, collective decision making, civic participation, and a commitment to the common good”. With a focus on preparing students to compete in the labor market, the culture of public education may neglect the basic lesson of empathy, leading to a culture that rewards peer humiliation and bullying.

Story Telling Tools
Storytelling naturally builds connection. When students have a deeper knowledge of each other’s life experience, their empathy toward one another is activated. When students receive empathy, they feel more connected to their own values and get clearer about how their challenges have inspired leadership.