Academic Empathy is the Answer

Vulnerability causes people to do some interesting things. In pre-teen years, it often manifests into cut throat judgment and meanness as a defense mechanism. If you look stupid, then I won’t. Couple that with a less than solid understanding of WHY anything is happening to you or around you and people experience some pretty traumatizing experiences that have ripple effects on their confidence and identity into adulthood. 

I would argue that most people walking the planet could use some sort of support in healing the inner school child that still walks among the halls of their memories. 

The ironic thing is that everyone has feelings, thoughts, and experiences that are more alike than different. And if the priority was to share, empathize, and understand these vulnerable learning moments over the actual content itself– we may drastically cut down on the damage that negative peer to peer exchanges inflict. How many brilliant and creative ideas vanished inside the black hole of someone’s inner life because they didn't want to look stupid or they felt like they didn't have a safe learning space to take a risk and share without ridicule? I read this meme somewhere: 

A guy in class got called on to answer a question and after a short pause he said, “hang on, I’m not dumb I’m just panicking.” I felt that. The girl next to me felt that. Everyone in class felt that. The world felt that. 

So if we all feel it, why does the power remain in the silence about it? We need to use an understanding of executive functioning and the brain to cultivate empathetic, dynamic, supportive learning spaces to explode big ideas and breed our most confident generation.

According to a study by Dr. Clancy Blair advocating for the increase in training and educating about a person’s executive functioning in early education years: 

Executive functions are thinking skills that assist with reasoning, planning, problem solving, and managing one’s life. The brain areas that underlie these skills are interconnected with and influenced by activity in many different brain areas, some of which are associated with emotion and stress. One consequence of the stress-specific connections is that executive functions, which help us to organize our thinking, tend to be disrupted when stimulation is too high and we are stressed out, or too low when we are bored and lethargic.

Treating the knowledge about executive functioning as an essential part of the curriculum would result in a couple of positive outcomes. One, each student would have a better understanding of themselves and how they retain, analyze, and struggle with learning new material. Pinpointing the road block in their executive functioning creates an opportunity to use specific strategies to progress, thus, decreasing the negative self talk that accompanies struggles. Better yet, knowing enough to predict a road block should be a learned skill. By broadening the reasons why someone needs more time, approaches learning differently, or gets stuck, the environment becomes more complex and less binary of stupid versus smart. And by putting the process of executive functioning out in the open, the language that follows the understanding breeds open communication, understanding, and ideally, empathy toward each other’s role in the learning. Everyone can exhibit strengths and approach their challenges with not just a growth mindset but a benefit mindset. 

According to benefit mindset theorist Ash Buchanan, it is “a purpose-driven mindset that is redefining success from being the best in the world, to being the best for the world.” Examining how our attitudes and actions affect others leads us to make conscious and conscientious decisions based on mutual advantage.

Imagine a classroom that approaches learning to benefit everyone in the room. One is connected to the other and essential to their success and ability to learn and solve problems.