Teaching Empathy: Turning a Lesson Plan into a Life Skill

Worried about the shrinking presence of empathy in our schools? I know how you feel. With classrooms operating more like grade factories, it's hard to make the case for school-driven empathy. For an unlikely accomplice, look no farther than tomorrow's lesson plan. Cooperative Learning: An Empathy Lever In cooperative learning, students work together, think together and plan together using a variety of group structures designed along an instructional path. But wholesale adoption of cooperative learning does not automatically yield the kind of results that educators want and students need. The Jigsaw Classroom: Goals and Execution Created in 1971 by psychologist Elliot Aronson to defuse his volatile fifth grade classroom, the jigsaw method has a long track record of successfully reducing classroom conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes. In jigsaw classrooms, lesson content is divided into self-contained chunks and assigned piece by piece to different groups of learners.

Articles Of Faith: 10 qualities you'll find in a person of integrity AT THE TIME of the Seeds of Compassion event and the Dalai Lama's visit, I stirred the ire of some readers by wondering if indeed "compassion is all we need." I worried that compassion might devolve into being nice. I asked if all the emphasis on compassion might, if not tempered by other virtues -- courage, say -- ill-equip children for the challenges of life. Since then I've been thinking, in the unlikely event that some high-tech billionaire offers me big bucks to stage an event on a needed virtue, what would I choose? What is integrity? Doors provide an analogy. People aren't as simple as doors, and yet people who possess integrity have something solid inside. I can think of several reasons why integrity is at risk these days. A second thing putting integrity at risk is the conventional wisdom of an image-driven society that says, "It's all about perception." A third challenge to integrity is the frequent recourse to the victim mentality or its milder form, entitlement. 1. 2. 3. 4.