Teaching with Empathy: A Key Ingredient for Student Success
Sarah North, PhD | Teaching Innovation & Program Strategy Jan 22, 2024
Consider your “teaching presence” as an instructor – the way you develop your course, and how you guide the direction of the class activities and content. We make certain decisions as instructors in how we present ourselves, the material, and how we interact with students. Our empathy is a single piece of our teaching presence, and it’s an important one!
Demonstrating empathy to students enhances our teaching presence. It affects how we design and develop our courses, our communication and tone to students, the boundaries we set, and the focus we maintain on the learning process and students' learning success. Meyers et al (2019) noted that “Teacher empathy is not empathy experienced by people who happen to be teachers; it is an integral part of the role of teaching” (pg 161).
Demonstrating Empathy
It’s important to note that "teacher empathy" is not a simple skill set or technical trait. Our empathy exists on a continuum, within the degree to which we interact with our students and choose to react to unexpected situations. Additionally, it is a multi-faceted concept: Our cognitive empathy refers to how we understand our learners. As instructors, the better we can understand the personal and social situations of a learner, the more we can emphasize with them. Our affective empathy refers to our ability to feel what the student is feeling. If we try to put ourselves in the other's shoes, we can begin to feel what they feel.
A third concept, our behavioral empathy, stems from the previous two mentioned aspects of empathy (cognitive and affective). Our behavioral empathy exemplifies our cognitive and affective empathy. It’s what we do when demonstrating empathy. We may adjust our course design or policies, respond in a supportive manner to a student’s struggles, or we demonstrate caring through our tone and communication style and practices. But importantly, we strive to also prioritize learning for our students while still demonstrating empathy and setting appropriate boundaries.
Empathy and Student Success
Time and time again, educational literature has demonstrated that both teacher-student and student-student interactions are a crucial component to student success. What’s more, an empathetic approach from instructors creates higher quality teacher-student interactions and a positive class environment, which support student development and success. It’s important to note that the goal of empathy in teaching is not to simply feel and understand what a student is
going through, but to use our empathy to consider what a student needs to be successful and make instructional decisions in support of the student’s needs for success.
To explore teacher empathy further, join us for a two-week, self-paced online course starting on January 29. Join Dr. North and other faculty in identifying strategies for implementing empathy for student success and exploring complex scenarios together. Register: Teacher Empathy and Student Success
Resources
Aldrup, K., Carstensen, B., & Klusmann, U. (2022). Is empathy the key to effective teaching? A systematic review of its association with teacher-student interactions and student outcomes. Educational Psychology Review, 34(3), 1177-1216.
Meyers, S., Rowell, K., Wells, M., & Smith, B. C. (2019). Teacher empathy: A model of empathy for teaching for student success. College Teaching, 67(3), 160-168.