Empathy in its purest form is the ability to connect and relate to others. A leader who grounds their interactions on empathy has the ability to harness creativity, growth, and innovation from those they lead.
This skill is not only being a good listener but also extends to being able to adapt and build on strengths in order to discover new opportunities for collaboration. All that I have mentioned is impossible to do without empathy.
I believe in mankind. I believe in the goodness and kindness that there is in people. However, it still makes me uncomfortable that our world is filled with apathy and that my children will one day be exposed to it. Therefore, our moral imperative as educators, in my opinion, is to teach our students to value and embrace empathy. It’s not easy. It took me a couple of tries to get it.
My 8th graders just spent weeks on a unit about Values and Traditions. A huge takeaway for me was:
1) that my students did not only know how to define these terms,
2) they were equally lost in what forms values and traditions manifest itself in the environment around them.
That’s where we started.
After that was when my students were able to make connections to another culture’s practices and perspectives. It was at that point then that we were able to expand this by identifying problems in our community and abroad and we asked ourselves what can we do as to contribute to the wellbeing of others.
After weeks of my students and I grappling with this, here’s my big message for teachers: Empathy must be the lens in which we examine all our units of study if we truly believe as educators that we are preparing our students for life in the 21st century.
How does empathy shape our interactions with parent-teacher communication?
Recently, I tweeted an instance in which I had just finished a parent-teacher conference for my own 4-year-old daughter. Hindsight, it was absolutely the best "professional development" that I had ever gone through to teach me about being considerate to the feeling of every parent that I will ever interact with in the future.
See tweet below:
One comment stated that we as teachers need to be sensitive as parents advocate for their child. We are on the same team and everyone is in this for the well being of the child.
“All you need is love,” but I have to add… What we really need is love and empathy.
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This tweet was retweeted 57 times with 217 likes as of February 14, 2018. It had 29 THOUSAND impressions and not one snarky comment was ever posted. I am a believer in humanity.
I will bet on the goodness in people. I hope you will too. #Trendthepositive.
