Bringing empathy into the classroom

“Here! we made a small Ganpati for you!” said one of my students.

“What for?” the mausi asked.

“Just like that.”

“Thank you,” she replied while flashing a million-dollar smile.

The mausi at the school got rather teary as she draped the gift in her red pallu.

The students had seen her making mud balls non-stop for two hours for their eco-friendly Ganpati. I call moments like these — magic moments. As I was stringing such moments filled with kindness and gratitude together, I started thinking: What can our schools do to create more magical moments in our student’s lives? I haven’t come to a definitive answer yet, but as I browse through the news feed and see ‘educated’ people spew hatred and violence every day, I am convinced that the answer is — empathy. I want every student to learn to empathize to become a better citizen of this world, become a better leader in their lives, a better co-worker, a better friend, a better parent and most importantly a better human being. It is important to bring empathy into our classrooms so that our students learn to build better social relationships, become better listeners, lead with compassion and be happier in life.

We often think of empathy as a single trait — the ability to feel what others feel. According to an HBR (Harvard Business Review) article, empathy is actually of three kinds:

• The ability to understand what the other person is thinking — cognitive empathy
• The ability to feel what the other person is feeling — emotional empathy
• The ability to know the call for action for the other person’s needs — empathetic concern

We need all three kinds to be truly empathetic.

Let me paint a picture for you. Fatima and Shanaya are best friends. Shanaya has been missing school for the last two weeks. She comes back and picks fights with Fatima over trivial matters. Fatima, as a result, is very upset and hurt. What does she do? She talks to her teacher or Shanaya’s mother to understand what Shanaya is thinking (cognitive empathy). She comes to know that Shanaya’s grandmother, who she was very close to, passed away because of cancer. Fatima feels sad and thinks back to the time she lost someone close. This is feeling what Shanaya is feeling (emotional empathy — the most familiar form of empathy). There is no point in knowing and feeling Shanaya’s emotions if Fatima doesn’t know how to make her friend feel better. She talks to Shanaya and helps her vent her feelings. Fatima shows all three kinds of empathy to help her friend. We not only need to teach children how they can put themselves in other’s shoes but we also them how to help fix those shoes.

Let us walk through the ABC’s of bringing empathy into the classroom:

A for ‘Acting the part’

‘Preach what you pray’ should be a teacher’s mantra. Before we teach our children about empathy, we need to model empathy as teachers — not only to our students but to our co-teachers as well.

What does empathy look like for a teacher?

• Greeting each student with a warm smile when we meet them.
• Actively listening to our students when they are expressing themselves.
• Knowing the parents’ and the student’s background to gain insight into their behaviour.
• Developing ways to individualize acknowledgement for students in our class.
• Helping our co-teachers whenever possible.

B for ‘Building Vocabulary’

By building vocabulary, I don’t mean verbal vocabulary but also a visual vocabulary of emotions. This means that the children need to know what different emotions look like; as well as how to articulate and express their emotions. Following are a few activities you can do in your class to build the visual and verbal vocabulary of emotions:

Pass the face

• Gather the students in a circle and ask them to close their eyes.
• One person begins the game by choosing a feeling that he or she can express with their face. The student will turn and gently tap on the shoulder of the student sitting beside them. At this point, the student will look at the face and pass it to the next person.
• Students will only see the face once (when it is “passed” to them).
• Once the last person has “received” the face, allow the group to guess which feeling was portrayed.
• The teacher asks the students to share a time when they felt that emotion, what caused the emotion and how did they deal with it.

Feelings Journal

• Students can maintain a ‘feelings’ journal where they write down all the feelings they experienced during the day.
• Whenever the students are unable to express an emotion, the teacher helps the students visualize how the emotions look and the triggers to that emotion.

Emotions charades

• The students pick any one of the emotions from a list of emotions. He/she enacts the emotion using their face and their bodies.
• The rest of the class guesses the emotion and shares an instance when they felt that emotion.

The above activities can be done as energizers before the beginning of the class or during a mid-class break and also during class assembly. They can also be integrated into a language class where the child steps into the character’s shoes and expresses the emotion the character is feeling and play emotion charades in context with the story characters.

C for ‘Current Affairs discussions’

In the digital age, people tend to forget that there is a human on the other side of the screen. It is paramount that our children learn to empathize with not only the people around them but also with people around the world. A small step to achieve this goal is to discuss current affairs and facilitate empathetic discussions. For example, the teacher talks about the recent Kerala floods and discusses the various emotions of the survivors. The teacher can then ask what the students think will help them and what they can do as students. Along with talking about current affairs, the teacher can also talk about people who are role models for empathy in the real world.

D for ‘Do Storytelling’

Children are hardwired to be storytellers and language classes are hotspots for stories. Following is an example of a story that can be used to start a discussion about what empathy looks like and help the students visualize empathy in their daily lives:

Elmer, The Patchwork Elephant by David McKee — This is the story of a patchwork elephant who feels so different and wants to be like everyone else. Along with emphasizing individuality, Elmer is a great story for young readers to understand empathy.

• The teacher asks:

— Why did Elmer feel he was different? (Cognitive empathy)

— How would you feel if you were Elmer? (Emotional empathy)

— Before the story ends, ask the students how they think they can help Elmer feel happy. (Empathetic concern)

• The teacher talks about how each one of us sometimes feels different. As a class, can we help other students who feel different?
• The teacher gives different scenarios like a student not playing with everyone else or no one talking to a student and discusses how they can show empathy — what the other person is feeling, why are they feeling so and what will they do to make him/her feel better.
• The teacher can build the framework of the three kinds of empathy into any story:

— What do you think the character is feeling at this moment? How do you know?

— Why do you think the character is feeling the emotion?

— What do you think will make him feel better?

The teacher can relate the scenario to real-life classroom situation to make it relevant.

E for Expressing empathy

Empathy, like every skill, is learnable and the more we practice it with our children, the more they will learn.

How can we create a space where our children can express empathy?

• Have daily morning meetings to check how everyone in the class is feeling.
• Have circle time at the end of the day where each student shares how they are feeling. Have the students remove basic emotion words like ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. Encourage them to use other words like angry, frustrated, elated, proud, etc.
• Encourage as much group work as possible by giving students opportunities to understand different point of views.

If we create small magical moments in each of our classrooms, we will soon be scrolling through news feeds filled with compassion and love.

References:

• Goleman, Daniel. “The Focused Leader.” Harvard Business Review, hbr.org/product/the-focused-leader/R1312B-PDF-ENG.
• Social Intelligence. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.characterlab.org/social-intelligence
• Start Empathy Toolkit(2018). [Ebook]. Retrieved from https://startempathy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/StartEmpathy_Toolkit.pdf
• 8 Activities to Build Your Child’s Emotional Vocabulary. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/activities-to-increase-emotional-vocabulary-2086623

As first published in Teacher Plus on March 2019