Empathy in Teaching

The best thing about teaching is the selfless part. The need to get out of your identity and be in the shoes of the student you teach.

Empathy in teaching is the ability to see what your students are seeing. The ability to join them in their perspective and recognize their current situation.

With egoic academic part, these statements can run through your mind: You are the teacher. You know best. You know better than the student. You are superior. The students are inferior. They need to listen to you. You have to take the most part of teaching them and doing everything for their learning process.

The problem with this ego is that it increases the communication gap between you and the students. The hierarchical separation between the teachers and the students places the students in the receiving end role.

Then we complain: Why they don’t take initiative? Why they don’t start? Why they don’t take responsibility? The answer is us. If we continue to teach them one way with lots of authority from our part, then we are creating robotic humans to follow, to wait to be told what to do and to take permission and approval all the time.

So with empathy in teaching perspective, ask yourself: Who am I interacting with? What is this content I am developing for? How can I relate my teaching style and content to the needs, current situation and level of the students?