Into the Driver's Seat

Teaching cognitive empathy

Stress can come from anywhere, Fraga says—an emotional interaction with a teacher or parent, a challenging assignment, even a missed phone call. These events often leave students feeling as if there is no relief from the anxiety and that no one else—especially adults—can relate to what they’re feeling.

This is where cognitive empathy comes in.

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From Blade Runner to I, Robot, the big screens of Hollywood have predicted the rise of the machine. Automated intelligences will wait our tables and drive our cabs. They will serve us by performing menial tasks. But fact is now surpassing fiction. Automation has moved beyond the factory assembly line as computers are diagnosing illnesses, providing legal counsel, and make financial and political decisions. And if artificial intelligence really is faster, smarter and more reliable, what are we left with?

The answer is precisely that element which makes us less efficient and slower. Our humanity. But rather than being seen as a weakness, this is actually our strongest suit. It’s one we need to empower, because studies show that as the world becomes increasingly automated, computerised and digitalised, we are losing the very skills that define us as human. Just when we need them the most.

Our empathy is something that computers will always struggle to emulate. We need to celebrate what makes us different from even the smartest of the machines. While the future belongs to those who are able to navigate this increasingly digitalised world of ours, the choicest spoils will fall to those who can combine technological fluency with emotional intelligence.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Empathy

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Emotional+intelligence

By teaching students these skills in an authentic, applicable way, will they see each other differently? It’s worth finding out. With so many curricular and time restraints on teachers, how can we be expected to explicitly teach empathy in a meaningful way?

A Definition Of Empathy

Webster’s dictionary defines empathy as: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either in the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Empathy