The Impact of Educator Empathetic Mindset

The Impact of Educator Empathetic Mindset on Expectations of Students and Perceptions of Student Performance

The word “empathy” refers to both the capacity and action of awareness, understanding, and sensitivity to the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of another person (Merriam-Webster).

National Context

“The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy and avoid the collapse of civilization in time to save the Earth,” Senator Barack Obama probed during a 2006 Northwestern University commencement address while conveying his opinion that the “empathy deficit” is more detrimental to our society than the federal deficit (Zaki, 2019). In subsequent years, stark division has split the American electorate to the point that our democratic principals have been significantly tested in the 2020 presidential election and NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway has declared that American capitalism will collapse without a foundation of empathy (Shapiro, 2020).

The Dependency of Empathy on Context

Although empathy is often perceived as an automatic response, several studies have indicated it is context dependent. Perhaps because empathy is a motivated phenomenon in which observers are automatically driven either to experience empathy or to avoid it, based on context (Zaki, 2020).

Empathy as a Skill Set

Research suggests that empathy is not a trait, but a skill set that can be developed. Mind perception, mentalizing, and experience sharing are all subject to the observer’s motives, according to the motivated model of empathy (Zaki, 2020, 2014).

Educator Empathetic Mindset

The context of the environments we choose to create in the classroom influences the mindsets and empathy skills of the students with whom we interact; therefore, we can increase collective empathy by developing a malleable mindset to further advance our individual empathy skills by empathizing with purpose (Zaki, 2019).

A researcher who agrees that empathy is based in interaction and is taking action to decrease the empathy deficit is University of California, Berkley Professor of Psychology, Jason Okanofua, who has developed a training for teachers in empathetic discipline to foster student empathy-mindset growth (Zaki, 2019). In childhood, before cognitive-control regions in the brain have fully matured, external resources like trusted teachers may be essential to guide children’s empathy development (Okanofua, et al., 2016).