UNIT 4: How to Develop Empathy
UNIT 4: Social Skills
- First and foremost, you – the teacher - must be a positive role model. When you model empathy the learners will learn from you and look to you for social and emotional clues on how to behave in certain contexts.
- Help your learners to think about the differences in ways of thinking between one person and another, and how to be respectful and tolerant of these differences.
- Any activity or task that helps to promote the learners’ active listening skills will have a positive impact on their ability to empathise with others. By setting up clear classroom expectations and routines you can help your class to listen to one another, to take turns when speaking and to follow the classroom expectations when they want to add a comment; these are all key learning points for your learners that will help them to become more empathetic.
- Develop ways for the learners to work together – to collaborate and cooperate with care and compassion for each other. Having group and pair tasks helps the learners to listen and discuss/exchange ideas together. They learn to accept or politely reject others’ ideas, with a good reason for doing so. They learn to feel how their classmates feel and be sensitive about how they communicate.
- Look for ways to enable your learners to talk to and interact with different types of people. By listening to other people’s ideas and comments, your learners will be able to evaluate their own thinking.
- Last, but by no means the least, encourage your learners to be curious. Encourage your learners to find out about other people – either in real-life, or in books. This can really help them to develop their empathy for others. Reading as much as possible - literature/novels and non-fiction - has been shown to be a very good way of learning to empathise with others and of understanding the ways other people live, think, speak and so on.
Last modified: Monday, 9 October 2023, 4:39 PM