START EMPATHY

Lusher School and Momentous Institute used their Innovation Fund to foster a four-school, two-city collaboration devoted to spreading empathy and goodwill among their student bodies and wider communities. The two schools, located in New Orleans and Dallas, worked with Homer Plessy Community School in New Orleans, and Cottonwood Creek School in Coppel, TX (another Changemaker School) to create the “HEART: Having Empathy Across Reflective Teams” project.  The four schools developed the projects following school visits where representatives from Momentous and Cottonwood spent two days in New Orleans, and Lusher and Homer Plessy sent their own representatives to Dallas.  During these visits, the representatives had the opportunity to tour each school, speak with staff members, share strengths (“Glows”) and areas for Growth (“Grows”), and begin planning for their “Changemaker” Days and the Love Drop Project.  After returning home, all four schools kept in touch via Skype, while the local schools were able to continue working together on Changemaker Day.

The two school pairings created unique lesson plans for Changemaker Day, but each ultimately centered on empathy and changemaking and featured collaborative problem-solving games focused on solving social issues.  Lusher and Plessy selected “Great Peacemakers” as their Changemaker Day theme with the aim of helping students understand the concepts of sanctuary and non-violence and of empowering them to connect their own positive character traits with those of Great Peacemakers.  In one activity, students viewed a PowerPoint presentation about Great Peacemakers, which included leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and then discussed what it means to be both “great” and a “peacemaker.”  The students then created portraits of a Great Peacemaker of their choice that featured not only a physical representation of their selected peacemaker but also quotations from and admirable traits of that person.  Students were invited to share their leftover supplies with one another and were each given time to present their portrait to the other students, thereby encouraging collaboration, sharing and communication.

The schools also created the Love Drop Project in order to engage with a community beyond their immediate school environments. For this project, students painted rocks with friendly, positive messages and placed them throughout their local community to be discovered.  Each person who found a rock was asked to take a picture, post it on the Love Drop Facebook page, and then pay it forward with an act of kindness.  The project spread good feeling throughout local and not-so-local communities, as the rocks quickly spread to other cities and made it as far afield as Hawaii and the Cannes Film Festival!  Louisiana State Senator JP Morell sponsored a Senate Resolution recognizing the project, and kindergarteners from Lusher received the resolution on the Senate floor.

The Innovation Fund grant offered schools who would not otherwise have the chance to interact the opportunity to create lasting friendships.  This contact has helped each school become stronger and more innovative as they learn about the strengths of their peers.  The grant also benefited a wider network of communities through the Love Drop Project, which spread messages of kindness and empathy far beyond the walls of the four schools involved.

The Opal School of the Portland Children’s Museum used their Innovation Fund to launch a network of educators interested in supporting young children’s voices in broader civic dialogue.  To accomplish this goal, they hosted a catalytic event attended by 130 teachers, administrators, advocates, and policy makers, including the state coordinator of early childhood education.  At this launch event, Mara Krechevsky and Ben Mardell of Project Zero, an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, discussed projects in Boston and Washington, D.C. that advance the rights of children as fully participatory community members.

After this event, Opal School and their collaborating partners at the Helen Gordon Child Development Center, a full-day lab school of the Graduate School of Education of Portland State University (an AshokaU campus) met to reflect on the experience and plan next steps.  They created a vision for their project, which will involve developing an app-based demonstration of children’s relationship with places. The project is entitled the “Hear Our Children/Here Are Children” Project. This demonstration will extend the public imagination by helping adults to view children as full community participants.  They also determined pilot members, forming a pilot group that involved not only Opal School and the Helen Gordon Child Development Center, but also Mentor Graphics Child Development Center, Teaching Preschool Partners, and Project Zero. 

Opal School and their collaborating partners are excited that they have established such a strong commitment among pilot group members to work together to implement the Hear Our Children/Here Are Children Project. Generating interest in sharing children’s ideas with the greater public among the larger group of 130 educators and advocates who attended the initial catalytic event was also an exciting and important aspect of the project.  The Portland-based pilot group is in a great position to share work on their project with a network of individuals and organizations doing similar work in other cities.

A study 20 years in the making was recently released that found a definite link between children’s social and emotional skills in kindergarten and their successes in early adulthood. 

“Children who were helpful and shared in kindergarten were more likely to have graduated college and have a full-time job at age 25. The children who had problems resolving conflicts, sharing, cooperating and listening as kindergartners were less likely to have finished high school and college, and were more likely to have substance abuse problems and run-ins with the law.”

This study gives further validation to the importance of teaching your children empathy and empathy-related skills at a young age. 

This summer, empathy has triumphed. In the United States, we have seen the legalization of gay marriage, the demise of the confederate flag, and the validation of the Affordable Care Act. The costs may have been great and the journey may have been long, but in the end the American people were able to come together and recognize the needs and challenges of other men and women in order to make this country a better place for everyone to live in. Regardless of varying political beliefs, I think we can all agree that this progressive and unifying summer has been one for the books. This summer, we have seen the true power of empathy and how it can lead to great change.

1. Refrain from comparing and labeling siblings

2. Praise cooperative behavior and explain what cooperation means

3. Remind siblings that they are on the same team

4. Play cooperative games as a family

5. Make playing together a privilege

Topics of conversation are brought up in a classroom setting that have not yet been common to discuss amongst young children. We live in an ever-changing world where current social issues of gender, sexuality, race, etc. are now in the forefront of conversation. Teachers must adapt to the new era, and use empathy in the classroom to promote positive, understanding, and productive discussions between their students. Here is one teacher’s story on how she has adapted in her nursery school classroom. 

We all remember the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School where twenty first-graders and six educators were shot and killed in 2012 by 20-year-old Adam Lanza who had a history of emotional problems. Mother of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis (one of the victims) said, “Since almost the beginning I had an intuitive awareness that had the shooter in our case had access to social and emotional learning this tragedy would not have happened.”

The legislation proposes federal funding to train teachers to have the proper tools to teach empathy in their classrooms - a huge step towards bettering the well-being of children across the country, and a significant positive conversation stemming from such a horrific tragedy. 

“98% of people…have the ability to empathise wired into their brains - an in-built capacity for stepping into the shoes of others and understanding their feelings and perspectives.The problem is that most don’t tap into their full empathic potential in everyday life.”

Check out this BBC article to discover more.

Check out this interview between Roman Krznaric and former Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis. Imagine the possibilities of the power of empathy if it can destroy the prejudices of a KKK member towards African Americans. Learn more from Roman’s blog: http://www.romankrznaric.com/outrospection/2015/06/23/3315

When you hear it, what is it that you immediately think of?  Notice.  Are your thoughts positive or are they negative?