Session Description

Teaching students to be more conscious of other people’s feelings creates a more accepting and respectful school community. In this webinar, get tips, tools, and ideas for integrating empathy into your classroom.

• Sympathy states “I know how you feel”. Empathy states “I feel how you feel”.

• Sympathy often involves a lot of judgement. Empathy has none.

• Sympathy involves understanding from your own perspective. Empathy involves putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and understanding WHY they may have these particular feelings.

• Sympathy’s favorite expression is “poor you”. It creates a sense of pity over the plight of the person. Empathy’s favorite expression is “I can understand how it feels. It must be really hard”. This helps a person to feel heard, understood and validated.

• Sympathy often involves giving unasked advice or being told what to do. Empathy requires active listening.

• Sympathy tends to suppress your own and others emotions. Emotions get pushed aside and avoided until it culminates in an intense fit of pain. Empathy acknowledged your own and others emotions.

Source: The Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy is a key ingredient of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others. Here are some of the ways that research has testified to the far-reaching importance of empathy.

• Empathy reduces bullying: Studies of Mary Gordon’s innovative Roots of Empathy program have found that it decreases bullying and aggression among kids, and makes them kinder and more inclusive toward their peers. An unrelated study found that bullies lack “empathy”.

• Empathy reduces suspensions: In one study, students of teachers who participated in an empathy training program were half as likely to be suspended, compared to students of teachers who didn’t participate.

Empathy in the Curriculum

There are many ways to introduce, discuss, and encourage empathy in the classroom, including tackling empathy directly by including it in the curriculum (Crowley & Saide, 2016). For example:

• If you teach language arts, have the class define empathy and identify characters in literature that demonstrate empathy.

• If you teach public speaking, emphasize the importance of empathizing with one’s audience – students should think about who their audience is, what interests them, etc., before stepping to the podium.

• Reading stories from the perspective of characters similar to your students.

• Following a students schedule for a day.