Empathy & Compassion

Hello Everyone,

 

I hope you are having a great day. We are in the final weeks of school with many moving parts. This week, the seventh and eighth grade students are off on their class trips. The eighth grade is in Moab, Utah, and the seventh grade is at Camp Cheley, near Estes Park. Next week, the fourth graders will head up to Estes Park, and the third graders will go to the prairie. One of my favorite things about Dawson is the fact that our kids do these trips, beginning with the overnight at the zoo in second grade. As they get older, the trips get longer and/or farther away. Because of their earlier experiences, our students are ready for each new adventure. Eventually, several of them will travel to another country either during a Winterim trip or during an immersion program. These life experiences help our students develop resilience, confidence, and empathy.

 

As educators, we work hard to instill empathy in our students, because empathy is key to one of our core virtues, compassion. In one of my all-time favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch tells his children, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Interestingly, some evidence shows that empathy comes naturally to us and can be seen in humans even during their infancy. That being said, empathy is a skill that can be practiced and honed. And the more students take the time to reflect and put themselves in someone else’s shoes, the more they will value diversity, communicate effectively, and develop strong relationships.

 

And, as mentioned above, there is a strong link between empathy and compassion, in that empathetic behavior inherently leads to compassionate behavior. If you’re not sure what the distinction is between the two terms, essentially empathy is the practice of feeling the emotions of someone else – not simply feeling sorry for them when they are going through something difficult (that would be sympathy). This then can lead to compassion, which implies taking some action. The only way we can truly practice compassion is to first practice empathy. And it really is something that can be improved with practice. If we can take time each day to truly place ourselves in others’ situations, we can develop a strong sense of understanding and a desire to help.

 

There are many ways that faculty are doing this at Dawson. Each week I read with the kindergartners, and the teachers always choose books that help connect the students with the areas they are studying. As I read to them about a magic treehouse that travelled to ancient Japan, they signaled to me anytime they felt a personal connection with a character or situation. And this always leads to wonderful conversations about imagining what it would be like to be someone in the story. Literature is a fantastic way to help kids develop a sense of empathy.

 

Our sixth graders are just embarking on an Ellis Island simulation, and this event, a consistent highlight when eighth graders look back on their time in middle school, allows them to become someone else and to understand more deeply what immigrants to the United States went through at the turn of the century (and what they go through today). Earlier this year, when they did their Celebration of World Cultures, the theme was empathy, and they each researched a problem in their countries and brainstormed possible solutions.

 

Empathy is, in fact, a key component to the design thinking process. For those who haven’t heard of design thinking, it is a method of solving problems used by designers. It goes through various steps, and the first step is empathy. The argument is that you can’t solve a problem unless you can first understand how people are affected by it, and so you need to ask questions to get to that understanding. That understanding can allow you to define the problem more clearly, and this clarity allows for more creativity and innovation when coming up with possible solutions.

 

I read a fascinating article recently that said that new research shows that a strong sense of empathy can actually prevent burnout in jobs that work with people in high distress. The study looked at police officers who work with victims of sexual assault. In the study, police officers reported on their levels of burnout, compassion fatigue, and PTSD. They were also given a questionnaire that measured their empathy levels. The researchers discovered a correlation between empathy levels and burnout: police officers with higher levels of empathy actually experienced burnout at a lower level than those who had lower empathy levels. This is interesting because common sense might dictate that by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you are actually experiencing what they’ve experienced, and this might be upsetting or even traumatizing. On the other hand, though, by truly empathizing with the people in distress, perhaps the police officers found their work more meaningful, thus fending up compassion fatigue.

 

Either way, though, it’s a reminder of the importance of empathy. While it is not one of our core virtues, I feel it’s a necessary predecessor to compassion and thus is a key component in much of what our teachers work on each day.

 

If you’d like to read the article I mentioned, click here.

 

Thank you!

 

Take care,

Heather