Empathy/Service Learning Matrix

Interdisciplinary Service Learning

I teach at an international school in Seoul, South Korea - about 60 km or so from the border for North Korea. In the 11 years I have lived here, North Korea has become "an issue" more times that I'm comfortable with, but FAR fewer than most of my American and Canadian friends would believe. International news coverage of what happens in North Korea is biased and inflammatory. It really is.  Sometimes I'll get a panicked email from someone back at home asking if we are OK and I will literally have no idea what they are talking about.  For the most part, day to day life in Seoul is unaffected by the political strife in North Korea. However, the situation is still relevant. It's a world issue. A human rights issue. And it's close to us.

Last year we had a speaker from Liberty in North Korea come to talk with our Middle School students about his organization.  He brought with him a North Korean friend, Jessie, who had escaped from North Korea several years ago and has been acclimating to life in South Korea ever since.  This is the service that LINK provides ... they help defectors start over. It's a harrowing journey, and we are only privy to a small part of it, but enough to know that these people need our support.  Here is Jessie's incredible story:




As my awesome team started to think about how we could get our students involved in LINK, we knew we needed a way to cultivate empathy in our students.  Even though the situation in North Korea is "local" enough for us, it's still sensationalized in the news. Our students already have too much misinformation about what's happening over there and they need real information to put it all into an appropriate and meaningful context.  "In the Shadow of the Sun" is a novel written by Anne Sibley O'Brien who actually attended Seoul Foreign School as a student. The book is a political escape thriller set in North Korea. We are hoping to read the book with our students to lay a foundation for inquiry with our students. We hope that reading it will open their minds to asking questions and finding answers.

Right now, our plan is to combine some literary analysis of this story with using rates, ratios and percentages to do some comparing of resources in North Korea with those same resources around the world including and especially here in South Korea. By building understanding and empathy for North Koreans, we are hoping to initiate some service learning opportunities related to LINK.  Right now, it looks like the primary means of supporting this organization is through funding however, we are hoping that the amazing folks at LINK will return to our school and help our students find ways to serve this community in a more direct manner.  I'm not sure what that will look like, but I'm excited to see how this interdisciplinary unit develops, especially related to service learning.

Service Learning

Last year I read a book called "The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl" by Stacy McAnulty. It's a charming story about a girl with an extraordinary mathematical gift and her trials and tribulations when she begins attending a public middle school for the first time in 7th grade. I highly recommend this book and spoke about it with my students several times as I was reading it.

Part of the story involves a service learning opportunity that Lucy, the story's protagonist, is involved in. Lucy's class finds out that they are expected to work in groups of 3 or 4 to identify a need in their community and find a solution for it as their service project. Oh man - did this sound AMAZING to me! One thing I have always found challenging about doing service learning in the classroom is trying to find something that all 88 students can participate in. It kind of defeats the purpose of service learning, because students are more or less forced into it. It just ends up feeling inauthentic. Most  students choose to participate half-heartedly in the service learning.  Some do an amazing job, and some don't do it at all. It's just not the ideal way for students to learn through service. The idea from this book seems so much more authentic, and relevant.  Especially when one of our goals for service learning is to help students become more aware of ways that they can serve their community.

Elizabeth Soloman has created a Service Ladder for IB schools that can be used for students to reflect on and self-assess their own journey in service learning.

As I see it, our job as educators is to move students along this ladder by providing mentorship and opportunities for service learning throughout the school year.

My amazing team is willing to give this new model a try and while we don't have all of the details fleshed out, it's looking like we are going to begin by opening it up for students to form their own groups of 3 or 4 and then together, identify their own commitment to the community. Students should be grouping with other like-minded students (kids who like animals group together, kids who like sports group together, etc) but more than likely, some of our students will group together based on existing friendships, and that's OK for now.

We are going to be looking mainly for projects that involve direct service, based on student action - reading to the elderly, tutoring younger students, cleaning up trash, or volunteering at the local soup kitchen -- projects where the student is giving of his or her time to interact directly with the needs of the community.

Each student group will choose a teacher to mentor them through their project. We will scaffold the guidelines for the project to include due dates and check-ins throughout the year to keep students moving along, and it's possible that we will be able to use our school's LMS and reporting system, Managebac, to share student progress with parents.

At the end of the year, we will be looking to have student groups share their experience in a public forum - either by facilitating a workshop for other students, or speaking publicly about it in a TED-style talk.

There is so much we still have to figure out in how to make this work, but I already look forward to working with my team in August to launch this model and get it off the ground with our students next year. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Empathy in the Classroom

empathy by Berkah Icon from the Noun Project

Teaching 6th grade is exciting in many different ways. The freshness of starting middle school is exhilarating and my students are eager to experience everything about it ... the good AND the bad.  They are enthusiastic about learning and they appreciate the responsibility and independence that Middle School requires of them. They are not jaded. However, 6th graders can be immature and inexperienced. Their abstract thinking skills are still developing (or just starting to develop!) and so they are still very literal about things. They don't listen and so repeating instructions takes up most of every class period. And they talk about poop. A lot.  But I've been teaching 6th grade for 12 years now and I can honestly say that there is nothing I would rather do. I love it. I love teaching 6th grade.  There is something so special about this year, about these hopeful beautiful children, that I don't want to leave.

Over the years I have noticed a growing pattern of disrespect and a general lack of kindness in the way that students interact with each other. It's disheartening and frankly, heartbreaking at times. And at the root of it is a lack of empathy. I think students don't always take the time to consider someone else's situation or viewpoint. They don't think about what another person is thinking or feeling or what they have been through, or not been through. They are not empathetic. And in the spirit of having a growth mindset about this, I will say ... they are not empathetic YET.

Elizabeth Soloman from www.ib-innovate.com has developed an Empathy Continuum.  The idea being that our goal as educators is to move students along this continuum, as "empathy is both the path and the destination" in an IB program.

This is something that can be addressed in schools. The presence of empathy has a direct impact on the culture of learning in a classroom. Students need opportunities to discuss and practice empathy. This can be something simple, like reflecting personally on a particular experience. Or if could be focused on understanding and respecting others in the classroom. These are ways I hope to cultivate empathy in my students next year.

Dr. Marilyn Price Mitchell has identified 6 Habits that can be used to develop empathy in our students. 

My reflections for each habit can be found by opening the speaker notes to the above embedded slides. I think trying to model these 6 habits could greatly increase the positive interactions between my students and set the tone of my classroom as an accepting, positive, empathetic community. My  goal is to create a community where students feel accepted, safe to take risks, and connected to others in a way that will nurture a desire to serve the surrounding community.