This video, shared via the Good blog is a must watch. Find six and a half minutes to watch this video, and ask yourself what changes would be necessary in your school to make it more like this one.
The work that this school does on teaching empathy, and understanding what it feels like to be another person, is an incredibly valuable life-skill. The abstract reasoning that one gains as one learns empathy has to have side-benefits for academic reasoning as well. If I know what it feels like to be you, and what you likely feel like, I may be able to better make predictions about other types of objects in the world as well.
I particularly like the five habits of mind the school has used for their conceptual framework:
- Evidence – How do you know?
- Conjecture – What if things were different?
- Connections – What does it remind you of?
- Relevance – Is it important? Does it matter?
- Viewpoint – What would someone else say? How would someone else feel?
