Empathy is a concerned reaction towards other people’s feelings involving feelings, thinking, and physical responses that indicate you care about other people’s feelings.
It is essential to become a helpful and responsible member of the community and school. It is also a key component of achieving success in school and your career. Children and teenagers have a natural capacity for empathy, but it does not mean they develop it independently.
Therefore, teachers need to teach students what empathy is and how to achieve it from a young age. Some of the steps you can follow as a teacher to teach your children how to develop empathy include:
Teach them what empathy is and its importance
First, you need to explain to your students what empathy is and help them through school and future careers. Tell them that empathy means noticing and understanding other people’s feelings, and to have compassion, you have to care about the other person.
You should also explain that empathy should be for people close to the students, people outside the community, and even people with physical or mental differences. Give your students examples of showing empathy like listening and comforting another person, helping with challenging tasks, or showing kindness.
Model empathy
While you might spend a lot of time explaining empathy and its importance, your students are likely to follow your example. Therefore, ensure that you always show compassion regardless of how you feel or who you are dealing with.
Whenever you feel frustrated or impatient with your students, pause, take a breath, and relax, then determine the best way to deal with that without making them feel bad. You should also speak about people kindly, comfort your students and other people if they are sad, and always be ready to help.
You should also study your students’ non-verbal cues and follow up instead of lashing out at them and scolding them. Finally, always look for opportunities to let students give their opinion and feedback on certain issues.
It would help if you also encouraged parents to model and empathize with their kids at home because students often pick up what their parents do and say.
Practice empathy
Teach your students to practice empathy by including class discussions, ‘what would you do’ scenarios and role-playing. For example, if you deal with small children, give them activities like stress-reducing activities or wheels of choice to help them control and overcome complex emotions, then teach them how to approach the situation calmly.
It would help if you also touched on empathy barriers like stereotypes, fear, stress, and feeling distant or different from others. Demonstrate how they can calmly but firmly overcome those stereotypes and show empathy anyway.
Foster social and emotional skills like overcoming frustration and anger and utilize evidence-based social and emotional learning programs to demonstrate how students can calm down and solve conflicts.
Be there for your students
Sometimes you might not know what is going on in your students’ life, and that may hinder them from showing empathy to people. For example, if you notice a student is always quiet, sad, or angry, talk to them and know what is happening.
They could be undergoing problems outside or inside the school, like being bullied, making them irritable.
There are many things to teach students under empathy, and you need to ensure your lessons are well organized. Writing worksheets from Adobe Education Exchange is a good solution. You can choose the worksheet that works best for you, like writing worksheets for 3rd grade.
