Motivation

1. Motivation

2. Empathy - A Way of Life

3. Message to Teachers Trainers

4. The Downward Spiral

According to World Health Organization, 2018, there is in the WHO European Region a high and increasing rate of mental and behavioral health problems in adolescents at population level. The latest Health Behavior in School-aged Children survey states that, 29% of 15-year-old girls and 13% of 15-year-old boys in European countries reported “feeling low” more than once a week; also, more than one in ten adolescents were regular weekly drinkers by the age of 15 (9% of girls and 16% of boys).

Half of all mental health problems in adulthood have their onset during or before adolescence.

Depression and anxiety disorders are among the top five causes of the overall disease burden (measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years).

Suicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents (10–19 years old) in low- and middle income countries and the second leading cause in high-income countries in the European Region.In 2015, there were over 4000 deaths from suicide among 10–19-year olds in the Region, principally among boys (see Fig. 1).

Young people who are disadvantaged – including minorities and migrants – are particularly affected.

Looking outside Europe, a 2016 survey by Pew Research Center found that nearly one-third of American adults (pretty much the same for all of us) never turn off their smartphones. But the

degree of empathy is six times weaker for online connections than it is for real-world interactions.

A study published in 2011 suggests that empathy is declining sharply. The results, based on a survey of nearly 14,000 students, show that the average level of ‘empathic concern,’ declined by

48 per cent between 1979 and 2009. There was a particularly steep decline between 2000 and

2009. This is part of the reason why a growing number of young people feel lonely, confused, frustrated and even angry. Lonely, confused, frustrated and angry students will not grow up to be happy, resilient, and robust.

Something has to change. Education in empathy can be an essential tool for teaching future generations the skills necessary for personal and societal advancement, based on compassionate  and empathetic understanding.

 THE BENEFITS OF EMPATHY

Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world. The fact that teaching empathy has been mandatory since 1993 in schools in Denmark is afactor that contributes to the happiness of the country.

5. The Folkeskola Act 1993

Helping students develop a strong sense of empathy is beneficial because it helps them to build a sense of security and stronger relationships with other students and teachers. It promotes social harmony and reduces the likelihood of bullying all of which positions them well for learning. Many frameworks, approaches and interventions for promoting and protecting the mental health of adolescents have been proposed, and their effectiveness was reviewed in a report commissioned by the WHO Regional Office for Europe. Over 300 research articles were found in a search of the literature on interventions in schools and communities and digital interventions, and especially there is strong evidence that high-quality preschool programmes to develop children’s social and emotional skills can have positive, enduring benefits for their development, including their emotional and social well-being, cognitive skills, readiness for school and academic achievement, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.

A substantial body of evidence further more indicates that effective implementation of interventions to teach social and emotional skills at school has a significant positive effect on those skills, on students’ attitudes to themselves, others and school, on the commitment of children from a diverse range of backgrounds to school and on their academic performance. Empathetic behavior also benefits students later in life. They are better at dealing with conflict and have more satisfying relationships. They have lower levels of stress and higher levels of overall happiness. Empathetic adults have greater success personally and professionally. In Denmark, for example, the health system is characterized by busy weekdays, making it difficult for doctors to have sufficient focus on showing empathy towards patients. International research shows that education in itself is not enough. Therefore, empathy is put on the school schedule, where “Man First” has become a compulsory part of education. This is to ensure that the future doctors can meet the patients with an understanding of their situation and thereby be able to better see the person behind the diagnosis.

6. Carry the Responsibility Together

All close relationships around the student are essential for empathic development. Robust international evidence shows that parenting interventions that incorporate social and emotional skills development (empathy) have significant positive outcomes. This important process of socialization, which parents take care of, continues when the student begins school. Here, however, it becomes a merger – or collaboration between parents and teachers- about a common task. Neither parents nor school staff can be separated when it comes to influencing students. Therefore, it is a task that must be solved jointly, with the resources that  each adult brings into the student’s life.

Empathic teachers contribute to students’ capacity and motivation to learn. Empathic teachers strengthen their students’ sense of belonging to their schools and their relationships with teachers and classmates. Various international documents have stressed the importance of such ‘soft’skills. According to the Council Recommendation by European Commission, 2018 on Key Competences for LifeLong Learning, ‘soft skills,’ like cognitive (critical thinking and responsible decisionmaking), personal (awareness, drive, self-management), and interpersonal skills (communication, negotiation, cooperation and teamwork, inclusion, empathy, and advocacy are essential for a good and healthy life.

A meta-analysis of over 18 empathy training programs found that empathy training is effective. The findings suggest that empathy training programs are significant overall, and indicated that 4 factors were statistically significantly associated with higher effect sizes:

1. Training health professionals and university students rather than other types of individuals.

2. Compensating trainees for their participation.

3. Using empathy measures that focus exclusively on assessing understanding the emotions of others, feeling those emotions, or commenting accurately on the emotions.

4. Using objective measures rather than self-report measures.

The findings indicate that (a) empathy training tends to be effective, and (b) experimental research is warranted on the impact of different types of trainees, training conditions, and types of  assessment. Looking only at the teacher’s role in this toolkit, five prerequisites are crucial for  students’ optimal empathic outcome. These are:

• Their feeling of self-accord and motivation 

• Their ability to build good relationships with students

• How they deal with challenging situations

• Their awareness of building a safe classroom atmosphere

• And having a strong support system around

Teachers must know what motivates them to have authority and inner anchoring to build self-accord and create healthy relationships. These preconditions are necessary for a practical, empathic approach to positively impact the relationship and the student’s learning. This is to ensure an excellent classroom atmosphere sothat empathy can take place, even in difficult and challenging situations. This can only be done with a good support system around both students and teachers.

7. Theoretical Foundations

People used to think that babies were born without empathy. But that is simply not true. We are all wired for empathy; we just have to learn how to connect the wires to make it work. Empathy sits in the brain’s limbic system (vises grafisk). This controls memory, emotions, and instinct. It is a complicated neurological system involving mirror neurons and the insula. What many don’t realize is that we are biologically predisposed to connect to others. This is made possible through many neuronal systems that are embedded in the right hemisphere of the brain, the mirror neurons being an important aspect of this. The self is not an individual entity, you see, but a relational construct. There is a new field in brain science, social neuroscience that have found the circuitry in two people’s brains activates while they interact. And the latest thinking about empathy from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. These newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, act as a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel “with” automatically. And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we are automatically prepared to help.

8. Theoretical Foundations 2

Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychology at UCLA, says,

“Empathy is not a luxury for human beings, it is a necessity. We survive not because we have claws and not because we have big fangs. We survive because we can communicate and collaborate.”

In other words, empathy facilitates our connec tion to others. It develops in infancy through the relationship with the attachment figure. A child first learns to tune in to his or her mother’s emotions and moods, and later on other peoples.

That is why the role of teachers istremendously  essential in the social development of empathy in students. In particular it plays an important role in the development of the teaching staff by encouraging future teachers to strengthen their own emotional skills. Thus support can be given to empathy development and to the emotional  regulation of their students. It is clear that teachers’ empathy contributes to their ability to meet students’ overall educational needs, and boost students’ confidence in the school climate.

A systematic review of 70 studies from Danish Clearinghouse lead by Svend Eric Nordenbo from 2008 regarding ”Which manifest teacher-competencies affect the academic performance of the students?” shows that tree competencies are crucial for teachers:

• Didactic abilities/competence – knowledge of one’s subject and subject-specific didactics. 

• Management-competence/classroom management–the ability to create clear structures, overview, clear rules, and a healthy climate.

• Relational competence.

He further formulates it in this way:

“If we want to create a good learning environment it´s important to teach teachers to create good relations: To show tolerance, respect, interest, empathy and compassion to each child and appeal to the children´s understanding of a conflict instead of bullying them.”

Danish psychologist and author Helle Jensen puts it this way:

“It takes a lot of empathy to meet students in a way that meets them with respect and equality, while taking responsibility for developing their capacity for professional as well as emotional and social learning. It requires a lot of personal integrity of the professional to be able to maintain the respectful presence in relation to themselves and to others, especially in conflict-filled, challenging and stressful situations.” (Jensen, 2014)

Students need, more than anything support to maintain or develop their empathy skills and to this they need teachers who are motivated and master self-accord according to Jesper Juul et.a., 2016.

“Self-accord means a person is at peace at the core of their being, which is the only place from where a person can relate deeply to other people and to a complex world undergoing extreme transformation, a world in which it is difficult to find role models.”

In the end, it is all about teaching student’s empathy, and the crucial factor for this is the teacher’s natural ability to meet the students empathetically. An empathic approach does nottake place for one hour a week, but at all times and in all subjects during a school day. It is about for the teacher to make a difference for the students, create meaningful relationships, and be credible role models, to show the way through their actions, as a way of being.

9. Intellectual Competence

10. Practical Ideas for Teachers and Trainers

How am I Doing Diagram