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
More From A.J. Juliani
Comments
Post a Comment