CENDICAS(Centro de Desarrollo Integraly Capacitación Social)has been training personnel in empathic counseling and outreach intervention strategies since 1986.
SUMMARY
This is a proposal to develop educational material on empathy to train teachers to build the necessary skills, themselves. It presupposes that in order to teach empathy in schools, teachers must first have developed insight and self-acceptance. The proposal includes writing a book, workbook, making videos and opening a course online. A web page will integrate it all with additional material for teaching. Sharing experiences will create a network to support educators incorporate empathy in all their lessons.
PROPOSAL
Develop on-line training for teachers to develop personal growth and empathy.
MISSION STATEMENT
Holistic approach for education specialists (teachers, psychologists, and administrators) to enhance EMPATHY through competence development of confidence, and conscious personal growth for quality education and multicultural acceptance.
OBJECTIVE
Empower teachers to develop empathy, so as to further enhance understanding and acceptance in schools, and the world.
TARGET POPULATION
Educators interested in incorporating empathy in their lesson plans..
STRATEGY
Personal development on-line for teachers interested in building skills for self-knowledge , self-acceptance and acceptance of others. It will enhance empathy with students and strengthen personal values. Through technological interaction (including chats, twitter, web page..) innovative approaches will be sharing and exchanging educational tools and experiences.
DEVELOPMENT
The on-line course on the theory and application of critical thinking to value development will offer teachers skills to empower not only themselves, but their students with the self-analytical process of acceptance and empathy. The project includes writing a book for support, with a practice workbook. A web page will have notes, readings, discussions and practical lesson-plans for support in designing and remodelling academic curricula to develop empathy in lesson plans.
Contents will include elements of Reasoning, Universal Intellectual Standards, and Intellectual Trait-development. Specific learning strategies for in-depth concept-attainment will include Socratic discussion, ethical reasoning and problem-based case studies.
As outcome of this course, educators will acquire greater self-knowledge and skills in tolerance, acceptance and inclusion of multicultural differences.
Other skills will include:
- Reflective insight and personal growth
- Critical thought processing
- Planning, designing and remodeling lessons to use critical thought and values to teach empathy.
- Designing and conducting ethical discussions and problem-based case studies related to empathy to include intellectual, academic, and social issues relevant to students’ lives.
- Participating in written research-based proposals related to personal empathy.

THEMES
- Insight and critical, independent thinking for reflective practitioners to address empathy through global issues and multicultural perspectives.
- Knowledgeable research-based instruction.
- Neuropsychological, socio-cultural, and physical factors that enable the empathy needed for learning and behavioral change.
- Behavioral development of empathy and values within school climate.
- Motivation and promotion of preventive resilience, collaboration, and stress management to ward off risk behavior.
- Construction of meaning with counseling, and critical thought.
- Empathic leadership for professional advocacy focused on global challenges.
- Value of diversity in humankind.
- Multicultural competencies.

Solution

This course takes teachers along these stages, reliving their own growing process to better identify with students and develop empathy. Inner search explores feelings at all levels, and their dynamics in constructive and destructive behavior. Stages include: 1) Respect 2) Acceptance 3) Identification 4) Comprehension 5) Understanding 6) Compassion 7) Caring 8) Sharing These stages are explored to include empathy-development in teachers' lesson plans. 2)

Example

This proposal suggests that empathy should not only follow horizontal or causal reactive processing, but should include transversal awareness of physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual experience. CONSCIOUSNESS will enhance students’ self-development, expanding their awareness of others, through empathy, spiraling into caring and sharing. A Model of Human Consciousness is introduced to stage empathy to the bio-psycho-social development of students. The development of academic curricula requires strategic planning from a holistic perspective to integrate all dimensions of consciousness, simultaneously.This outlines human thought, representing the complexity of its different levels, as the planes and angles of a cube. Their interrelationship describes de multivariate factors involved in empathy. To analyze facts and integrate them into one converging ‘understanding’, requires consciousness. This schematic description allows for clearer differentiation of the thought-process involved: On the one hand, there is linear THOUGHT where causality (cause / effect) defines an event , along a time-line (past-present-future), identifying its cause, in the past, and its effect in a ‘fore-seen’ future. On the other hand, there is FEELING the gives depth to the facts, through sensorial imprints that respond, either objectively, through automatic response to external stimuli, or subjectively, through an internalizing process that gives experience, a quality of profoundness. Thus, the determinate and indeterminate variables can be differentiated into: An objective level, affected by external factors (individual, group, family, community, institutional, national, international, mass). The subjective level, affected by internal factors (physical, emotional, rational, trans-personal/spiritual). Both planes are involved in the outcome of events. A holistic diagnosis of a situation requires analysis along the depth of the experience and the breadth of time. The graphic outline of this dynamic transfers the process of conscious thought, to the planes of a cube. EXPERIENCE The first level, as described, is a DEED as it occurs in linear time. Then analysis can include FEELING to give in-depth ‘quality’ to its effects (which may have an impact on the external world- objective reality; or internally- through subjective ‘apprehension’ of it. REFLECTIVE THOUGHT is possible when a parallel line is traced along the timeline of reality, to set a distance between the deed and the ‘perceiver’ and have a third stance from which to evaluate it. This parallel logic, develops a theoretical pre-view, from which to make reflective and critical analysis. DECISION-MAKING then, grounds the theoretical logic that projects possible scenarios along this parallel plane to reality, with a decision that will affect the course of events. MEANING The inferred meaning, personally assigned to an event, adds a dimension of SIGNIFICANCE to the experience. From the deed, its potential effects can also be drawn by tracing its IMPLICATIONS. The reconstruction of events and the meaning we give them, require a re-building process of abstraction. VALUES From the intuitive assignment given to meanings, PERSONAL STANCES, POSTURES AND OPINIONS are taken. These stand-points are personal , giving backbone to the scaffolding on which VALUES are built. The given value to a deed re-constructs reality in an abstraction. Personal opinions and stances taken require re-constructing deeds, as symbols and beliefs. UNDERSTANDING The foundation traced between DEEDS, their IMPLICATIONS and OPINION and the fixed GOALS we attach to them, lays the floor for under-standing. From this baseline comes COMMON SENSE, practical, solid decision-making and reliable premises from which to make conjectures. EMOTIONS Parallel to logical UNDERSTANDING is EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE. It hovers over reality, pivoting on SENSATIONS, STANCES, DECISIONS and TRANSCENDENCE. IDEALS Projected values into the future, transcend deeds and meanings as they reach GOALS and DREAMS. This level of abstraction gives volume to experience, closing in on it, for the containment of SELF. It opens an interior space for INTIMACY. This is where receiving and giving find upholding. These eight distinct levels of mental processing, allow to trace the steps necessary to achieve EMPATHY. These are modules to be given in the COURSE “EMPATHY FOR TEACHERS”

Marketplace

Teachers, counselors, social workers and people interested in personal development and human outreach for caring and sharing