Soft skills are intangible and difficult to measure but they impact an individual’s chances for success. They are not normally taught through traditional education. Soft skills include practices that seem to be in the background though we feel team building, analysis of body language or conflict resolution are important. Adaptability and resilience matter as well as empathy, optimism and integrity do. Critical thinking helps in finding new solutions. Proactivity makes us thinking and acting ahead, does it? We would like our students to develop the skills.
Emotional intelligence is as important to success as technical abilities.
That is the ability to:
That is the ability to:
- recognize your emotions,
- understand what they are telling you ,
- realize how your emotions affect people around you.
Being in touch with your feelings allows you to manage stress levels and communicate effectively with other people, two skills that enhance your life both personally and professionally.
Empathy - let's talk about it
LESSON 1
What is empathy? Why is it very different from sympathy?
Materials recommended by A.Mięsiak and A.Tobiacelli
What is empathy? Why is it very different from sympathy?
Materials recommended by A.Mięsiak and A.Tobiacelli
LESSON 2
The importance of empathy
The video recommended by A.Mięsiak
The importance of empathy
The video recommended by A.Mięsiak
LESSON 3
Has empathy any dark side? Does empathy make us too favourable to individuals? Does empathy equally likely motivate us to do what is right as to do what is wrong? Can empathy make us unjusty? Interesting topics for discussions with students.
Materials recommended by I.Szczeniowski
Has empathy any dark side? Does empathy make us too favourable to individuals? Does empathy equally likely motivate us to do what is right as to do what is wrong? Can empathy make us unjusty? Interesting topics for discussions with students.
Materials recommended by I.Szczeniowski
The Empathy Trap
by Peter Singer
Soon after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, he told a young girl, “We don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”
Obama expressed a widespread view, so the title of a new book, “Against Empathy,” by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, comes as a shock. How can anyone be against something that enables us to put ourselves in others’ shoes and feel what they feel?
To answer that question, we might ask another: For whom should we have empathy? As Donald Trump prepares to succeed Obama, analysts are suggesting that Hillary Clinton lost last month’s election because she lacked empathy with white Americans, particularly Rust Belt voters yearning for the days when the US was a manufacturing powerhouse. The problem is that empathy for American workers is in tension with empathy for workers in Mexico and China, who would be even worse off without jobs than their American counterparts are.
Empathy makes us kinder to people with whom we empathize. That’s good, but it also has a darker side. Trump, in his campaign speeches, made use of the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant to stoke support for his anti-immigrant policies. He did not, of course, offer any similarly vivid portrayals of undocumented immigrants who have saved the lives of strangers, although such cases have been reported.
Animals with big round eyes, like baby seals, arouse more empathy than chickens, on whom we inflict vastly more suffering. People can even be reluctant to “harm” robots that they know can feel nothing at all. On the other hand, fish -- cold, slimy, and unable to scream -- arouse little sympathy, although, as Jonathan Balcombe argues in “What a Fish Knows,” there is plenty of evidence that they feel pain just as birds and mammals do.
Likewise, empathy with a handful of children who are, or are believed to be, harmed by vaccines largely drives popular resistance to vaccinating children against dangerous diseases. As a result, millions of parents do not have their children vaccinated, and hundreds of children become ill, with many more affected, sometimes fatally, by the disease than would have suffered adverse effects from the vaccine.
Empathy can make us act unjustly. Subjects in an experiment listened to an interview with a terminally ill child. Some were told to try to be as objective as possible, while others were told to imagine what the child feels. All were then asked if they wanted to move the child up the waiting list for treatment, ahead of other children who had been assessed as having higher priority. Three-quarters of those told to imagine what the child feels made this request, compared to only one-third of those told to try to be objective.
One death is tragedy; a million is a statistic. If empathy makes us too favorable to individuals, large numbers numb the feelings we ought to have. The Oregon-based nonprofit Decision Research has recently established a website, ArithmeticofCompassion.org, aimed at enhancing our ability to communicate information about large-scale problems without giving rise to “numerical numbness.” In an age in which vivid personal stories go viral and influence public policy, it’s hard to think of anything more important than helping everyone to see the larger picture.
To be against empathy is not to be against compassion. In one of the most interesting sections of “Against Empathy,” Bloom describes how he learned about differences between empathy and compassion from Matthieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk sometimes described as “the happiest man on earth.”
When the neuroscientist Tania Singer (no relation to me) asked Ricard to engage in “compassion meditation” while his brain was being scanned, she was surprised to see no activity in the areas of his brain normally active when people empathize with the pain of others. Ricard could, on request, empathize with others’ pain, but he found it unpleasant and draining; by contrast, he described compassion meditation as “a warm positive state associated with a strong pro-social motivation.”
Singer has also trained non-meditators to engage in compassion meditation, by thinking kindly about a series of persons, starting with someone close to the meditator and then moving outward to strangers. Such training may lead to kinder behavior.
Compassion meditation is close to what is sometimes called “cognitive empathy,” because it involves our thought and understanding of others, rather than our feelings. This brings us to the final important message of Bloom’s book: the way in which psychological science proceeds has led it to downplay the role of reason in our lives.
When researchers show that some of our supposedly carefully considered choices and attitudes can be influenced by irrelevant factors like the color of the wall, the smell of the room, or the presence of a dispenser of hand sanitizer, their findings are published in psychology journals and may even make headlines in the popular media. Research showing that people make decisions based on relevant evidence is harder to publish, much less publicize. So psychology has an inbuilt bias against the view that we make decisions in sensible ways.
Bloom’s more positive view of the role of reason fits with what I take to be the correct understanding of ethics. Empathy and other emotions often motivate us to do what is right, but they are equally likely to motivate us to do what is wrong. In making ethical decisions, our ability to reason has a crucial role to play.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include “Animal Liberation,” “The Life You Can Save,” “The Most Good You Can Do” and most recently “Ethics in the Real World.” -- Ed.
ere to edit.
by Peter Singer
Soon after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, he told a young girl, “We don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”
Obama expressed a widespread view, so the title of a new book, “Against Empathy,” by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, comes as a shock. How can anyone be against something that enables us to put ourselves in others’ shoes and feel what they feel?
To answer that question, we might ask another: For whom should we have empathy? As Donald Trump prepares to succeed Obama, analysts are suggesting that Hillary Clinton lost last month’s election because she lacked empathy with white Americans, particularly Rust Belt voters yearning for the days when the US was a manufacturing powerhouse. The problem is that empathy for American workers is in tension with empathy for workers in Mexico and China, who would be even worse off without jobs than their American counterparts are.
Empathy makes us kinder to people with whom we empathize. That’s good, but it also has a darker side. Trump, in his campaign speeches, made use of the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant to stoke support for his anti-immigrant policies. He did not, of course, offer any similarly vivid portrayals of undocumented immigrants who have saved the lives of strangers, although such cases have been reported.
Animals with big round eyes, like baby seals, arouse more empathy than chickens, on whom we inflict vastly more suffering. People can even be reluctant to “harm” robots that they know can feel nothing at all. On the other hand, fish -- cold, slimy, and unable to scream -- arouse little sympathy, although, as Jonathan Balcombe argues in “What a Fish Knows,” there is plenty of evidence that they feel pain just as birds and mammals do.
Likewise, empathy with a handful of children who are, or are believed to be, harmed by vaccines largely drives popular resistance to vaccinating children against dangerous diseases. As a result, millions of parents do not have their children vaccinated, and hundreds of children become ill, with many more affected, sometimes fatally, by the disease than would have suffered adverse effects from the vaccine.
Empathy can make us act unjustly. Subjects in an experiment listened to an interview with a terminally ill child. Some were told to try to be as objective as possible, while others were told to imagine what the child feels. All were then asked if they wanted to move the child up the waiting list for treatment, ahead of other children who had been assessed as having higher priority. Three-quarters of those told to imagine what the child feels made this request, compared to only one-third of those told to try to be objective.
One death is tragedy; a million is a statistic. If empathy makes us too favorable to individuals, large numbers numb the feelings we ought to have. The Oregon-based nonprofit Decision Research has recently established a website, ArithmeticofCompassion.org, aimed at enhancing our ability to communicate information about large-scale problems without giving rise to “numerical numbness.” In an age in which vivid personal stories go viral and influence public policy, it’s hard to think of anything more important than helping everyone to see the larger picture.
To be against empathy is not to be against compassion. In one of the most interesting sections of “Against Empathy,” Bloom describes how he learned about differences between empathy and compassion from Matthieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk sometimes described as “the happiest man on earth.”
When the neuroscientist Tania Singer (no relation to me) asked Ricard to engage in “compassion meditation” while his brain was being scanned, she was surprised to see no activity in the areas of his brain normally active when people empathize with the pain of others. Ricard could, on request, empathize with others’ pain, but he found it unpleasant and draining; by contrast, he described compassion meditation as “a warm positive state associated with a strong pro-social motivation.”
Singer has also trained non-meditators to engage in compassion meditation, by thinking kindly about a series of persons, starting with someone close to the meditator and then moving outward to strangers. Such training may lead to kinder behavior.
Compassion meditation is close to what is sometimes called “cognitive empathy,” because it involves our thought and understanding of others, rather than our feelings. This brings us to the final important message of Bloom’s book: the way in which psychological science proceeds has led it to downplay the role of reason in our lives.
When researchers show that some of our supposedly carefully considered choices and attitudes can be influenced by irrelevant factors like the color of the wall, the smell of the room, or the presence of a dispenser of hand sanitizer, their findings are published in psychology journals and may even make headlines in the popular media. Research showing that people make decisions based on relevant evidence is harder to publish, much less publicize. So psychology has an inbuilt bias against the view that we make decisions in sensible ways.
Bloom’s more positive view of the role of reason fits with what I take to be the correct understanding of ethics. Empathy and other emotions often motivate us to do what is right, but they are equally likely to motivate us to do what is wrong. In making ethical decisions, our ability to reason has a crucial role to play.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include “Animal Liberation,” “The Life You Can Save,” “The Most Good You Can Do” and most recently “Ethics in the Real World.” -- Ed.
ere to edit.
EMPATHY in books
a short selection by K.Ziółkowska
a short selection by K.Ziółkowska
Bullying
LESSON
How to stop a bully - practise and win!
How to stop a bully - practise and win!
Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets. It includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. It can include sharing personal or private information about someone else causing embarrassment or humiliation.
WORKSHOP
Anti-cyberbullying campain
Anti-cyberbullying campain
After students had known a definition of cyberbullying and discussed that topic, they could plan an anti-cyberbullyimg campain. They could for instance:
A.Tobiacelli
- draw posters,
- make a research using their own survey questionnaire,
- write a script of a play/film based on information they had gathered.
A.Tobiacelli
'KLAUDIA = NEVER BULLY'
by Maja, Wiktoria, Ola, Natalia
by Maja, Wiktoria, Ola, Natalia
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'SMALL THINGS - BIG PROBLEMS'
by Oliwia, Ola, Agata, Amelia, Maciek
by Oliwia, Ola, Agata, Amelia, Maciek
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Communication Skills
DEBATING AS AN IMPORTANT EDUCATIONAL STRATEGY
ONLINE MEETINGS