Empathy Can Be Taught

This week’s article summary is Can You Teach People to Have Empathy.

One of our goals as an elementary school is to help our students develop a sense of belonging.  It feels good (it’s in our ancestral DNA as a crucial need for survival) to be a part of a group.

Yet also in our ancestral DNA is the tendency — through omission and commission — to exclude others, especially those who are different from us.

Last week’s article highlighted that some of us naturally possess and demonstrate social skills and competencies in kindergarten while others need much practice and guidance in being able to work get along, and cooperate with others. 

Similarly, some of us are more naturally empathetic than others. 

The point of the article below is that empathy can be taught—thus, trumping any natural tendency we may have to exclude others or to be wary of difference.

Like learning academic skills, we all need to learn, practice, and be constantly reminded of social skills, including empathy. 

The article has a link to an interesting test: seeing how well you can determine a person’s mood just from looking at his/her eyes. My guess is most of you will score above the average (26). I scored a 29—although my wife insists I must have cheated as all too often I don’t correctly read her!

Look in class for any opportunity to help your students practice and display empathy.

Enjoy the weekend and thanks to all for making the start of school so special for your students and their families!

Joe

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Empathy is a quality that is integral to most people's lives - and yet the modern world makes it easy to lose sight of the feelings of others.

But almost everyone can learn to develop this crucial personality trait.

Open Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird and one line will jump out at you: "You never really understand another person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

Human beings are naturally primed to embrace this message.

According to the latest neuroscience research, 98% of people (the exceptions include those with psychopathic tendencies) have the ability to empathise wired into their brains - an in-built capacity for stepping into the shoes of others and understanding their feelings and perspectives.

The problem is that most don't tap into their full empathic potential in everyday life.

You can easily find yourself passing by a mother struggling with a stroller on some steps as you rush to a work meeting, or read about a tragic earthquake in a distant country then let it slip your mind as you click a link to check the latest sports scores.

The empathy gap can appear in personal relationships too - like when I find myself shouting in frustration at my six-year-old twins, or fail to realize that my spouse is doing more than her fair share of the housework.

So is there anything you can do to boost your empathy levels?

The good news is that almost everyone can learn to be more empathic, just like we can learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

A good warm up is to do a quick assessment of your empathic abilities.

Neuropsychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has devised a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes in which you are shown 36 pairs of eyes and have to choose one of four words that best describes what each person is feeling or thinking - for instance, jealous, arrogant, panicked or hateful. The average score of around 26 suggests that the majority of people are surprisingly good - though far from perfect - at visually reading others' emotions.

Going a step further, there are three simple but powerful strategies for unleashing the empathic potential that is latent in our neural circuitry.

Make a Habit of ‘Radical Listening’: "What is essential,' wrote Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and founder of Non-Violent Communication, "is our ability to be present to what's really going on within - to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing at that very moment."

Listening out for people's feelings and needs - whether it is a friend who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer or a spouse who is upset at you for working late yet again - gives them a sense of being understood.

Let people have their say, hold back from interrupting and even reflect back what they've told you so they knew you were really listening. There's a term for doing this - "radical listening".

Radical listening can have an extraordinary impact on resolving conflict situations. Rosenberg points out that in employer-employee disputes, if both sides literally repeat what the other side just said before speaking themselves, conflict resolution is reached 50% faster.

Look for the Human Behind Everything: A second step is to deepen empathic concern for others by developing an awareness of all those individuals hidden behind the surface of our daily lives, on whom we may depend in some way. A Buddhist-inspired approach to this is to spend a whole day becoming mindful of every person connected to your routine actions.

So when you have your morning coffee, think about the people who picked the coffee beans. As you button your shirt, consider the labor behind the label by asking yourself: "Who sewed on these buttons? Where in the world are they? What are their lives like?"

Then continue throughout the day, bringing this curiosity to who is driving the train, vacuuming the office floor or stacking the supermarket shelves. It is precisely such mindful awareness that can spark empathic action on the behalf of others.

Become Curious About Strangers: I used to regularly walk past a homeless man around the corner from where I live in Oxford and take virtually no notice of him. One day I stopped to speak to him.

It turned out he had a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford. We subsequently developed a friendship based on our mutual interest in Aristotle's ethics and pepperoni pizza.

This encounter taught me that having conversations with strangers opens up our empathic minds. We can not only meet fascinating people but also challenge the assumptions and prejudices that we have about others based on their appearance, accents or backgrounds.

It's about recovering the curiosity everyone had as children, but which society is so good at beating out of us. Get beyond superficial talk but beware interrogating people. Respect the advice of oral historian Studs Terkel - who always spoke to people on the bus on his daily commute: "Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer."

As the psychologist and inventor of emotional intelligence Daniel Goleman puts it, without empathy a person is "emotionally tone deaf".

It's clear that with a little effort nearly everyone can put more of their empathic potential to use. So try slipping on your empathy shoes and make an adventure of looking at the world through the eyes of others.

Social Skills in Kindergarten

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is the one I referenced at the opening faculty/staff meeting: a twenty-year study on how social skills demonstrated in kindergarten predict future success in school and life.

I’ve highlighted one particular sentence (in the second to last paragraph) that gave me pause. The sentence states that kindergarten students with more developed social competencies continued in subsequent grades to get along well with classmates and teachers, which then led to success beyond school—in other words, a positive snowball effect.

I couldn’t help but think about the kindergarten students who for whatever reason didn’t demonstrate those those important kindergarten social competencies: What happened to them in subsequent school years?

I was fortunate as a student in that I did demonstrate those social competencies in kindergarten and in later grades. Based on the research study below, because social skills came easy to me, so did school. Yet I needed a lot of help and support in others areas of school: my lack of interest in reading and writing (not unusual with boys), ineptitude with anything related to art or music, reluctance/shyness asking questions in class. 

All of us were shaped by great teachers who built upon our strengths and innate gifts but who, more importantly, saw our weaknesses/deficiencies and who then pushed, urged, supported, nurtured, and challenged us.

As teachers we have the exciting but daunting responsibility to guide all our students—those with innate abilities and qualities and those who need support, guidance, and scaffolds.  

Regardless of where I went to school, I would have most likely become a friendly, nice, socially-adjusted adult, but the teachers who impacted me the most helped me become an avid reader and confident writer and an unabashed questioner—I still, however, fall short in music and art (no matter how great my teachers, my artistic inability and limited aptitude won out). 

Especially as we close our first week of school and continue to get to know our new students, let’s commit to supporting all of them, particularly those who will need your help, support, guidance, and care in order to succeed and thrive. 

To me, a better ending for the article below is that all the kindergarten kids in the study — even those with poor social skills in kindergarten — ultimately flourished in school and life because of the teachers they had!

Joe

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According to a new study, kindergartners who share, cooperate and are helpful are more likely to have a college degree and a job 20 years later than children who lack those social skills. Kids who get along well with others also are less likely to have substance-abuse problems and run-ins with the law.

The research, which involved tracking nearly 800 students for two decades, suggests that specific social-emotional skills among young children can be powerful predictors for success later in life.

These are skills that probably portend their ability to do well in school, to pay attention and to navigate their environment.

The study suggests that early-childhood education programs and schools should identify children with weak social skills early on, when they are still very receptive to learning how to behave differently.

The study is based on data collected beginning in 1991 at schools in Nashville, Seattle, rural Pennsylvania and Durham, N.C. Teachers of 753 kindergartners were asked to rate each student’s skill level in eight areas:

·      Resolves peer problems on his/her own.

·      Is very good at understanding other people’s feelings.

·      Shares materials with others.

·      Cooperates with peers without prompting.

·      Is helpful to others.

·      Listens to others’ point of view.

·      Can give suggestions and opinions without being bossy

·      Acts friendly toward others.

Researchers then tracked those students for two decades, using police records, reports from parents and self-reports from the children. They then used statistical models to filter out the effects of factors such as a child’s socio-­economic status, family characteristics and early academic ability to isolate the impact of early social skills on life outcomes.

Children who scored “well” on social competence were four times as likely to get a college degree by age 25 as those who scored “a little.”

Children who scored higher were also more likely to have a full-time job by the time they were 25. 

Similarly, children who scored on the lower end of the scale were more likely to have negative interactions with the police and spend time in juvenile detention. They also had a higher chance of being arrested, of recent binge drinking and of being on a waiting list for public housing.

The research does not say that the ability to share causes one’s life to go more smoothly or that refusing to share causes one’s life to be difficult. But coupled with the growing body of research on social-emotional skills, it provides more evidence for what seems like common sense: Children who interact well as kindergartners are more likely to make friends and get positive feedback from teachers and, therefore, are more likely to like school and stay in school.

The children in the study represented a cross-section of society, with a somewhat higher proportion of at-risk children than the general population. Of the sample, about half were white, 46 percent were black and 4 percent were from other ethnic backgrounds. Fifty-eight percent were boys.

What Lies in the Heart of a Great Teacher

This week’s article summary is a list of qualities from an article I read this summer entitled “What Lies in the Heart of a Great Teacher” (sorry, no link available to the actual article).

As we complete our preplanning days, move into and get adjusted to our wonderful new Learning Commons, prepare for Visitation Day on Monday, and are poised to embark on a new school year, it’s important to remember the tremendous impact and influence all of us will have on students—and colleagues, parents, and others.

The list below reminds me to take stock of what I aspire to be every day, not only at school but in everything I do.

Some may want to put these qualities on your desk, laptop notepad, etc. and periodically ask yourself how well you show these qualities that  are “simple to understand  but not easy to achieve.”

I want to thank all of you for very productive (and fun and collegial) preplanning days—where I saw the qualities of a great teacher on full display!

Enjoy your last weekend of summer vacation and let’s make the 2015-16 school year  special and memorable for our students, their families, our colleagues, and ourselves!

Joe

What lies in the heart of a great teacher?

You are kind: A great teacher shows kindness to students, colleagues, parents, and those around him/her. Being a kind teacher helps students feel welcomed, cared for and loved.

You are compassionate: Teaching is a very humanistic profession, and compassion is the utmost feeling of understanding, and showing others you are concerned about them. A compassionate teacher models that characteristic to students with his/her actions.

You are empathetic: Empathy is such an important trait to develop in ourselves and our students. Being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes and see things from their perspective has a powerful impact on our decisions and actions.

You are positive: Being a positive person is not easy. Staying positive during trying situations has a tremendous, positive impact on students and everyone around us. Looking on the bright side always seems to help make things better.

You are a builder: A great teacher bridges gaps and builds relationships, friendships, and a community. Building a community is something a great teacher seeks to do in the classroom and extends that to the entire school and its community.

You inspire: Everyone looks at a great teacher with the result if wanting to be a better students, a better teacher, a better parents, a better person.

Grant Wiggins and the Challenge of Trying to Teach Everything

For those of you who are new to Trinity, every Friday during the school year I send out  a summary of an interesting, provocative article I’ve recently read.

I also post this on my blog site, yet more people seem to prefer getting the article summary via email. 

The purpose is to have the articles be a catalyst for thinking about why and how you teach and what your philosophy of education is. Sometimes you might agree completely with an article’s premise, recommendations, or conclusions—other times you might passionately disagree. Some of the articles will resonate with you—others won’t. It’s not ‘required reading’ but I hope most of you most of the time find the weekly article interesting.  

As we close out a great first week of preplanning, the article below--which was originally published in 1989 but was recently re-published in memory of Grant Wiggins (Learning by Design curriculum guru) who died last spring--is a good example of the vital balance I discussed on this week between the educational extremes of knowledge acquisition and student empowerment. 

The article is entitled The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance. 

Wiggins influenced me as a teacher by posing a challenging scenario: Pretend you only have one hour with your students. What would you share with them and have them learn (in my case it was 8th grade history) in that hour that you normally have an entire year to cover.  

This question helped me to see that I had been teaching history as an endless list of facts and concepts. I then focused my class on discussions around open-ended questions. 

In class we debated questions like ‘ Are humans innately selfish or selfless’, ‘Is the study of history about the study of mankind’s continuous progress?’, ‘Is democracy the best form of government?’ My students loved debating these questions and used evidence from history to support and substantiate  their ideas.  Rather than have history’s facts be the outcome, students used them to justify their opinions. History class was much more fun, interesting, relevant, and interactive for my students — and for me!

As we continue to plan for a new school year, think about Wiggins' sage advice below about the danger of trying to teach so much content.

Thank you all for a productive first week of preplanning: I am always awed by the amazing talent and creativity you all posses.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

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What’s worth learning by high-school graduation.

Those who would treat schooling as designed to educate students on all important subjects are doomed to encounter the futility that faced Sisyphus: the boulder of ‘essential content’ can only come thundering down the (growing) hill of knowledge.

The inescapable dilemma at the heart of curriculum and instruction must, once and for all, be made clear: either teaching everything of importance reduces it to trivial, forgettable verbalisms or lists; or school is a necessarily inadequate apprenticeship, where ‘preparation’ means something quite humble: learning to know and do a few important things well and leaving out much of importance.

The negotiation of the dilemma hinges on enabling students to learn about their ignorance, to gain control over the resources available for making modest dents in it, and to take pleasure in learning so that the quest is lifelong. They must leave school with the passion to question, without the fear of looking foolish, and with the knowledge to learn where and how the facts can be found.

My concern is that curriculum coverage, committee-written textbooks, didactic teaching, and short-answer tests turn education into Trivial Pursuit. Under this regime, it’s very difficult for students to acquire solid habits of mind and high standards of craftsmanship and understand that some ideas are much more important than others – touchstones of such power that our own worldviews must change as a result of encountering them.

The acid test for modern curriculum is whether it enables students, at any level, to see how knowledge grows out of, resolves, and produces questions.

In short, the aim of curriculum is to awaken, not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.

Curriculum should therefore be organized around essential questions to which content selection would represent (necessarily incomplete and always provocative) ‘answers.’

Some examples:

-   What is a “great” book?

-   Is “history” the same as “progress”?

-   Does art imitate life or vice versa?

-   What is an adequate proof?

-   Is there a fixed and universal human nature?

-   Are there really heroes and villains?

We need to rethink and reorganize the curriculum, spelling out clear inquiry priorities in each course that help organize and give meaning to the facts.

This calls into question the traditional lesson plan, since teachers and students should be following the essential questions where they lead within the syllabus, using textbooks as reference books, not as the curriculum. Like the music or athletic coach and the vocational education teacher, the classroom teacher’s job is to help the student ‘play the game’ of the expert, using content knowledge, as contextually appropriate, to recognize, pose, and solve authentic knowledge problems.

Much more important than accumulating facts is acquiring these intellectual virtues:

-   Knowing how to listen to someone who knows something you don’t know

-   Perceiving which questions to ask to clarify an idea’s meaning or value

-   Being open and respectful enough to imagine that a new and strange idea is worth paying attention to

-   Being inclined to ask questions about pat statements hiding assumptions or confusions

Knowledge’ remains a forgettable patchwork of adult sayings in the absence of our own questioning and verifying. The ultimate test is whether an idea illuminates student experience or provokes new thought. Anything that doesn’t do that clutters up the curriculum.

Curriculum needs to make students more thoughtful about what they know and don’t know:

The most essential habit of mind we can provide students is the ability to suspend disbelief or belief as the situation may warrant. For example, one school prompted students to ask, From whose point of view did that argument originate? What is the evidence and how credible is it? How do things fit together? What if? Could it have been otherwise? What are the alternatives? What difference does it make? Why should I care?

All students don’t need to learn the same things. This comes from the painful realization that there are far more important ideas than we can ever know. The teacher should be an intellectual librarian constantly making it possible for students to be challenged anew to pique their curiosity and raise their standards and expectations.

If teachers say everything is important, then nothing will seem important to students. Teachers need to abandon adult logic, specialized priorities, and coverage and ask:

-   What must my students demonstrate to reveal whether they have a thoughtful (as opposed to thoughtless) grasp of the essentials?

-   What will successful student understanding actually look like?

The ultimate test is when students say, without adult prompting, This is important! A sign of successful curriculum and instruction, where priorities are clear, can be found in the students’ ability to anticipate the final examination in its entirety and provide accurate self-assessments of their finished work.

Curriculum is inseparable from assessment. Standard school tests don’t challenge students. What’s needed are authentic performance tasks in which students show what they know in real-life situations – sometimes in idiosyncratic ways. Craftsmanship and pride in one’s work depend on ‘tests’ that enable us to confront and personalize authentic tasks.

The essentials are not the basics. We should teach the minimum basic content necessary to get right to essential questions, problems, and work, within and across disciplines. Pride in one’s work leads to greater care for the basics; pride depends on authentic and engaging work, and a product ‘owned’ by the student.