Empathy in Education and the Role of Motivation in Student Learning

January 25, 2024

Michele Poulos

When you think of empathetic teachers, what comes to mind? What I often hear from other educators is that empathetic teachers are teachers who are understanding, flexible, kind, approachable, and caring.

Empathy is understanding student's personal and social situations, feeling care and concern for both positive and negative emotions, and demonstrating care and understanding through actions.

Empathy IS accurately identifying the feelings and thoughts of another person.	Empathy is NOT feeling or thinking as they do.
Empathy IS communicating an understanding of the internal experience of another person in a given situation.	Empathy is NOT expressing what you would do or feel in the same situation.

Now that we know what empathy is, why is it important, particularly in education? Empathy is correlated to students’ perceptions of their learning and their performance on objective tests. Empathy is a way to model effective communication. Empathy is the strongest predictor of positive student outcomes (i.e. academic performance and behavior). Empathy increases the likelihood of learning. Finally, it can avoid power struggles with frustrated students.

I like to think I am empathetic with my students, but the reality is for many educators, like myself, empathy scares us. Why is that? First, we might feel that by showing empathy we are lowering our standards. Secondly, we might feel that by showing empathy, we are accepting ‘unacceptable’ behavior. Finally, we might feel that we are not fully preparing our students for the future. Lowering standards, lack of relational understanding, and pity-based responses are NOT characteristics of empathy. They are, in fact, characteristics of sympathy. Empathetic teachers realize that empathy does not equal weakness. Empathetic teachers can separate their own experiences from others. They are careful in how they articulate students’ experiences. They create boundaries, and they prioritize student learning (Miller, 2022).

There are several things that educators can do to improve their own empathy.

Understand social contexts for students’ ‘undesirable behaviors’
Learn about students’ personal contexts
Use policies to support the understanding of students’ personal contexts

When we think of ‘undesirable student behaviors’ we tend to think of times when students miss deadlines, are chronically late, don’t follow assignment instructions, or seem unengaged. These ‘undesirable student behaviors’ are often the result of personal student contexts and not a reflection of the student themselves. These personal student contexts could be responsibilities outside the classroom, a fear of failure, or imposter syndrome. Most often these personal contexts are NOT lack of motivation, laziness, or rudeness.

What follows are five action items to help educators foster and demonstrate empathy in their classrooms.

Re-Submit Opportunities	Resubmissions allow students to refine their work as learning is a process.
Welcome Messages	Posting a warm welcome message sharing about yourself allows your students to see you as ‘human’, not just their teacher.
Get to Know Students (personally)	Make connections with your students, consider where they live, what sports teams they like, hobbies, children, etc.
Demonstrate Flexibility	Life happens to all of us, when possible, demonstrate flexibility.
Maintain High Standards with Clear Instructions	Consider how to maintain high standards expressed through clear, explicit instructions and expectations (what students want) while allowing for flexibly when necessary.

“Removing Obstacles in these Ways does not Lower Standards, but it does Increase the Chance Students will Successfully Complete their Courses” (Myers, 2019) and isn’t this what we want?

Sources

Myers, S. Rowell, K. Wells M. & Smith, B.C. (2019). Teacher Empathy: A Model of Empathy for Teaching for Student Success. College Teaching, 67 (3). https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2019.1579699.

Miller, K. (2022, September). Empathy in Higher Education: Not Just for Counselors Anymore. AAHEBulletin.com