The Role of Empathy in Instruction: Guest post by Bill Storm

One of my favorite t-shirt saying is "I need minions." While I don't have minions, I do have some very smart and thoughtful Blue Skunk readers who leave great comments. Since I am at AASL this week and may not have a lot of time to get much original writing done, I'm sharing a couple guest posts.

Enjoy this one from Mr Storm... 

The Role of Empathy in Instruction 

Bill Storm
Instructional Technology Coordinator
Davis Joint Unified School District
Davis, CA

While reading your 7 Myths About Empathy post, I found myself looking for a description of not just what empathy is or isn’t, but also how it actually functions in the course of instruction. Then I wondered, “Why am I looking for that?”  As I read I remembered I had been provided with exactly that insight in the middle of my teaching career.

The path to understanding this many years ago was my biochemistry professor’s manner of delivering excruciatingly complex material; at least it was that for me. I was an adult learner, early forties, taking some career-necessary coursework at UC Davis. I was drowning, and apparently I wasn’t alone in feeling that way, and was seriously considering dropping the class. I remember the moment… at one point, the professor put down his dry erase pen after filling half the board with yet another enzyme reaction series. He turned toward the class, and with deep compassion in his eyes he proceeded to talk to us about knowing how difficult his was for us, how our brains needed time to unravel it on its own, and to not worry that we didn’t comprehend the complexity right at that moment. He then, as he had occasionally before, talked about the nearly miraculous nature of what it was we were trying to understand, that it was the essence of life itself, a complex process shared by virtually every living thing on the planet. He advised us to just take it in, relax, return to it often, and give our brains time to quietly sort it out.

That moment was a huge gift. Not only was he right about our brains and we how we come to understand complicated things, he used it as a teaching moment to share his love for the subject matter, and his compassion for us. He completely drew us into his discipline and communicated to us that both we and the content mattered, and the effect on us was quite amazing. I aced the damn class. My study partner (a second-career older adult) and I earned the two highest grades out of fifty or so in the class, but even our  desperate-looking whippersnapper classmates did quite well.

I’ve had other experiences like this, with inspiring professors and teachers, but this particular one informed my own practice as a teacher because of his precisely directed, caring advice. I came to understand that the empathy relationship was bi-directional in a classroom, and that the deeper that relationship became the more powerful and permanent the learning. I became a much better teacher, and had much more fun. Teaching this way was personally more challenging, more emotionally risky, but I look back on my teaching days as having been very successful thanks to that understanding.

For me, this is the heart of why the teacher cannot be removed from the learning of complex subject matter. Learning a “discipline” happens when the learning setting is informed by a discipleship of following and seeking rather than 19^th century discipline for punishment and order (The flogging will stop when morale improves.) Learning is often hard, at every age and level of development, and we can only be drawn to it as willing participants, not driven by compulsory anything.

Designing a new school - again!

Mankato voters on Tuesday approved the largest capital bond levy in the state — almost $69.5 million to pay for the construction of a new middle school, another middle school addition, a junior/high school renovation and the expansion of a high school cafeteria.

“When I talk to our community members, it’s clear to me that they want our schools to stay strong,” said Superintendent Sheri Allen. “And that’s the commitment they’ve made to us.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, November 6, 2013

Last week, our voters didn't just approve. They approved with a whopping 70% in favor. The bond passed in all 10 districts. I'm proud of the trust our community places in its public schools - and I am proud that the trust is well-deserved. 

Helping design our other middle school, Dakota Meadows, was one of my first tasks when joining the district 22 years ago. That school was innovative - and to me still feels that way. (See What You See and What You Don’t See: A Tour of Mankato’s Dakota Meadows Middle School, Minnesota Media, Winter 1993). But designing the new middle school will be even more challenging.

Based on our last elementary building that opened two years ago, the new middle school will be LEED certified (environmentally designed), security aware, and community friendly with spaces for non-school activities and events. We will also try to make it as technologically advanced as practical.

I'm thinking about what it means to design a school knowing that all students will probably have personal devices. That an increasing amount of time will be spent in differentiated groups. That more instruction will be dependent on online rather than print resources. That nobody really knows where tech will be when the school opens, let alone 10 or 20 years down the road.

Some of my initial thoughts are revolving around:

• Creating a scalable, pervasive wirelesss infrastuture, of course, and resources for charging personal devices during the day
• Designing a library that is open, accessible, welcoming, social, productive, and part of a larger learning commons of student support services
• Creating labs that are more "maker spaces" than rows of 1 to 1 keyboarding stations
• Creating classrooms that are student rather than teacher-at-the-front-of-the-room focused
• Purposefully designing flexible spaces

If this project goes like past building projects, my voice will just one of many. A team will visit other new schools to learn from them. And there will be a budget, of course.

For those of us who love questions, problem-solving, learning, and planning, building a new school is just about as much fun as it gets. Stay tuned and send me your best ideas.

You are more than your score

A letter to students from an unidentified elementary principal that went home with student state test scores:

We are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you-- the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do. They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school. They do not know that you have traveled to a really neat place or that you know how to tell a great story or that you really love spending time with special family members and friends. They do not know that you can be trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try, every day, to be your very best... the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart.  http://mrsrycus.weebly.com/3/post/2013/10/on-meaping.html

As I visited schools this week, I saw a number of elementary secretaries putting mailing labels on enevelopes for sending home state test scores. So Scott McLeod's Tweet pointing me to the letter above resonated. Test scores tell us such small amount about a person.

 

From personal experience, I know test scores can work against good test takers as well. When I was a little student growing up on the prairie, we took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. I always scored in the 90+ percentile. I was really good at psyching out the test makers and filling in little bubbles. My class performance was, ahem, somewhat lower. Which led to the comment "Does not work to potential" on every report card I can remember receiving. 

 

We are none of us our test scores - good or bad.

See also "Schools are more than the sum of their scores" 

Images from Miriam Cohen's First Grade Takes a Test (the latest edition has a different illustrator)