Empathy: The Most Important 21st Century Skill




On Superintendent’s Conference Day, September 3, 2019, during the introduction to NHP-GCP’s Portrait of  a Learner, approximately 170 of us (teachers and staff) played a game of Kahoot, and agreed that empathy was an important skill for our learners to acquire while they are here with us at NHP-GCP.

I subscribe to AJ Juliani’s blog. He claims that empathy is the most important 21st Century Skill. See below for more information and if  you like, follow him on Twitter @ajjuliani .




Empathy: The Most Important 21st Century Skill

Many confuse empathy (feeling with someone) with sympathy (feeling sorry for someone), and even researchers who study it have muddied the waters with many definitions. But the author of The Empathy Effect, Dr. Helen Riess does a good job of untangling that and explaining the many dimensions of empathy.
Empathy, she writes, involves an ability to perceive others’ feelings (and to recognize our own emotions), to imagine why someone might be feeling a certain way, and to have concern for their welfare. Once empathy is activated, compassionate action is the most logical response.
The question is, can we teach empathy?
Riess (who is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston) has done the research to show it can be taught: Our neural networks are set up to interact with the neural networks of others in order to both perceive and understand their emotions and to differentiate them from our own, which makes it possible for humans to live with one another without constantly fighting or feeling taken over by someone else.
Research has shown that empathy is not simply inborn, but can actually be taught. For example, it appears that medical training can actually diminish empathy, but on the other hand, physicians can be taught to be more empathic to their patients. Interestingly, their increased empathy also increases patient satisfaction and compliance with treatment recommendations.
It seems the two most common ways to teach empathy are through modeling (being empathetic yourself and reflecting on what this looks like) and through stories (literature that mirrors our world).
In this article we talk about the power of stories for learning and how we can teach empathy.
Thanks,
AJ
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