Vision of Empathy

Hurrah! My very first blog post! I figured I'd start this blog with my vision for the upcoming year. All corps members in Teach For America are required to draft their own vision of what they are striving toward in their classroom. As you'll read, my vision is heavily centered around the concept of empathy. Since my vision is a long document, I've only included my vision for social emotional and literacy development. If you don't feel like reading the whole spiel, though, then at least read my elevator pitch- the condensed version. And please, by all means, let me know what you think!

My Vision

Elevator Pitch: The ultimate truth that will exist in the heart of my classroom will be the enduring presence of empathy. This will be the driving force throughout all aspects of my teaching experience. It will exist in my own relationships with my families, Ms. D, and Ms. R. It will also be the overarching theme of my classroom between my students and in my own personal connections with each student.

Social Emotional Development: I hope that my kids leave my classroom with the ability to love and connect to others. I hope that they are able to make lasting connections to others over meaningful shared experiences. I am confident that if they can develop and internalize empathy during our year together, then they will be successful in their future endeavors as they relate to academics and, more generally, their young lives. I want so many things for my students, but I think this is the most important. The social skills my students will develop this year will permeate all other aspects of their lives, so I am dedicated to planting a deep seed of love and empathy in each. As a result, they will flourish into strong individuals with a sense of awareness of others and of themselves. They will be able to work cooperatively in groups, which will be extremely beneficial in both the short and long term.

Throughout the day to day, this will be evident as my students follow Rule #3- Caring Hearts. This means that students will be heard welcoming their friends in their play through sharing and inclusion. Students will also actively try and make sad or upset friends feel better. This might be through a hug, a picture, an invitation to join their play, or simply helping the student feel better by walking them to the Calm Corner. Specifically, I hope to hear a lot of, “you’re my friend,” “you can sit by me,” “I made this for you,” “do you need a hug?” and “you can play with me.”

Overtime, I hope that this internalization of empathy flourishes into deeper love for my students’ peers. I hope that they come to school bright and excited to play with all of their friends. I also hope they express concern and sadness when students are absent. I want my students to feel responsible for their actions as they relate to others, and be able to independently recognize when their own actions might negatively affect another person. When this occurs, I hope my students are able to suggest solutions to their social problems and feel compelled to right the situation. This might sound like a variation of, “I’m sorry, how about we do X so we both feel happy.” One of my major pet peeves of other teachers, and must be recognized as a potential pitfall of my own teaching as a result of this ultimate goal, is forcing students to apologize after making another person sad or hurt. Instead of forcing students to apologize, which might create shame within the classroom and cause the phrase, “I’m sorry” to carry no real meaning, I will model my sincere apologies to my students and co-teachers.

Literacy Development: A major aspect of understanding empathy is being able to communicate one’s feelings. Therefore, literacy will be the vehicle my students will use to form connections. I need to give my students the tools they need to communicate their feelings and emotions, and to understand the expressions of others (whether that be a classmate, a family member, a teacher, or a character in a story). I will focus my efforts on developing strong oral language, reading comprehension, and expressive writing because I am passionate about the influence these three components of literacy will have over my kids’ lives. Ultimately, I want my students to feel empowered by their thoughts and have multiple outlets at their disposal for how to express and communicate those thoughts. In addition, I want my students to learn how to be active listeners. This requires that they develop strong oral language skills in order to process others’ feelings and ideas in order to appropriately respond. This also means that my students need to develop their emotional literacy and develop the vocabulary necessary for understanding and expressing empathy.

Literacy in my classroom will be evident in multiple ways. Through oral language, students will develop their emotional literacy. For example, students will learn about more complex feelings, beyond happy, mad, sad, etc. Instead, students will learn how to identify feelings such as frustrated, exhausted, irritated, ecstatic, enthusiastic, frightened, and others. After learning what these emotions look like, students will use the language to identify them in others. This will help my students be able to better communicate their feelings and also be able to comprehend how others are feeling, too.

In addition to oral language, students will build their reading comprehension skills. This will also further their understanding and internalization of empathy. We will strive to do the 3-read model of read alouds in our classroom on a weekly basis. Through this method, students will be able to learn about the feelings, thoughts, and motivations of the main characters in our books, and they will begin to connect the stories’ characters to real-life people. By witnessing the emotions and issues that the story characters are forced to deal with in our class books, my students will be able to better relate to a real person with similar emotions and issues. I hope that as a result of our purposeful read alouds, my students are overheard saying things like, “don’t give up! Just keep trying, just like Willie had to keep trying to whistle!” and “they won’t let me play with them and now I feel just like the boy and his dad in Abiyoyo because they want me to get out.” (Obviously, these are pretty specific examples. In the broader sense, I hope that my students are able to verbally make the connections between character feelings and the real-life feelings from themselves and others.)