Teaching Empathy: How To Create Compassionate Classrooms

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As educators and parents, we spend a lot of time focused on our children’s academics, extracurriculars, and test results. I suspect that “What did you learn at school today?” is a much more common question than “How did you feel at school today?”, let alone something like, “What did you do to brighten someone else’s day today?”. Sadly, much less time, effort and value are given to developing empathy and related skills such as self-awareness, respect, perspective taking, introspection, and active kindness.

I believe that empathy is the most important skill we can instill in our children. Empathy - a sense of shared humanity, and the ability to understand the needs and motivations of others - must play a central role in any school that aims to produce well-rounded, responsible and happy global citizens who will grow up to become tomorrow’s leaders.

That’s not to say that empathy should trump academics - the two are not mutually exclusive. Rather, there is enough emphasis on academics as is and empathy gets too little. If we do not teach our students the importance of empathy, then what kinds of future leaders will they become?

There is genuine cause for concern. With social media, we’ve seen the rise of filter bubbles or echo chambers, where people are drawn to only socialise with people like themselves and who share their views. The result is an empathy gap. In an age when confirmation bias pulls us into homogeneous bubbles, empathy may be the toughest quality to nurture.

The Harbour School (THS) was founded on the principles of kindness, compassion and humanity. With a strong belief in inclusion and diversity, the school has always placed enormous emphasis on social-emotional learning and the mental wellness of our students. At THS, our staff greet each student daily with kindness and warmth, they establish rapport and trust, and are positive role models for empathic, respectful behaviors. But is there more that we could do to unlock our students’ potential for empathy?

We want our students to be active listeners, develop a vocabulary for their feelings, listen to and understand others, increase their self-awareness and help them to regulate their emotions. It is a long list and no easy task. So two years ago, we decided to take it further. We implemented a curriculum and focused heavily on teaching students empathy starting from our youngest students in Prep.