What is Empathy?
Empathy is the awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. It is a key element of Emotional Intelligence; empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Why teach and model Empathy at school?
Educating our youth in becoming committed Empathy role models, is beneficial to them, their peers and the communities they might find themselves in. Young people who show Empathy, are less likely to bully. It helps them to understand and work with others in a calm manner, which ultimately will lead to academic and then eventually career success.
Teaching empathy in the classroom promotes selfless compassion and action on behalf of another person or group.
There are 3 different types of empathy
- Cognitive Empathy: this is a much more rational and logical type of empathy where rather than engaging in someone’s emotions you put yourself in someone else’s place, seeing things from their perspective. – empathy by thought rather than by feeling
- Emotional Empathy: this type of empathy is the most emotional one; mostly seen in people who move into caring professions such as nurses and doctors. People who display emotional empathy not only put themselves in someone else’s shoes but they also experience all the emotions that this person is experiencing.
- Compassionate Empathy: feeling someone else’s pain and taking action to help. Like sympathy, compassion is about feeling concern for someone, but with an additional move towards action to mitigate the problem.
At Shelanti Private School, we discussed the meaning of Empathy during our Shine Circle time and then extended to being kind with our words as a sign of Empathy. We learned that we must be “heart warmers” and not “heart wrinklers”.
A poem was shared:
We also discussed what it means to think before you speak:
At Shelanti we will strive to not wrinkle hearts, but make them warm and happy with showing Empathy!
