President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” As educators, we know this, but we do not heed these words.
I work with a teacher licensing agency in Wisconsin. We are WI Department of Instruction-approved to prepare and endorse candidates for teacher licenses. Candidates are instructed and assessed in their understanding of and ability to teach content knowledge and to know and effectively use pedagogical skills. These two categories dominate teacher preparation.
Yet research and experience tell us that the single most essential quality children of all ages look for in their teachers is genuine care combined with trust of them as children and learners. Teacher empathy drives the “why” students engage in our curricular and pedagogical improvement strategies. We will not improve the data-based results until we attend to the human-based inputs.
A positive, empathetic care factor needs to become the third and co-equal skill set in teacher preparation. Until we do this, all other concerns for student academic achievement, student mental health and well-being, and their preparation as good citizens will continue to founder in our school systems. Children need to know their teacher cares about them individually before they begin to care about what that teacher is teaching.
What do we know?
Classroom environments, the way teachers and students behave, conform to teacher-student relationships. An observer sees it at once. The teaching/learning climate is a result of how children perceive their teacher’s relationship with them. There is no avoiding the nature and quality of interactions between teachers and students.
On the positive side, these are characteristics that occur in classrooms where children feel and know their teacher cares about and knows them as individuals, these things happen.
- Children learn best when they feel safe to make mistakes, ask questions, and take risks.
- Students work harder for teachers they believe they care about them.
- Strong relationships reduce behavioral issues because students want to maintain connection and respect with their teacher.
- When teachers communicate belief in a child’s potential, students persist longer and are more resilient.
- Positive teacher-relationships are powerful for students from marginalized or high-risk backgrounds.
On the negative side, reverse each statement in classrooms where children do not believe their teacher cares about them as individuals. Feelings of safety, willingness to take academic risks, effort levels, behaviors, and persistence on difficult assignments – they all go away.
Question our assumptions.
In our teacher preparation programs, we assume that people who want to be teachers innately care about children. Why would they want to be teachers if they did not? It is a mistaken assumption. We know people who, as students, loved literature and story writing, doing math problems, completing science experiments, turning wood on lathes, and competing in athletics who though being an English, math, science, shop, or PE teacher would extend that love into a profession. Causing children to learn a curriculum is completely different than loving a curriculum. Too many people who love a subject do not find enjoyment in the messiness of children’s lives and classroom dramas. They have no empathy for the child who is not like they were as a child.
Even teachers who consider themselves to be empathetic often rate themselves as being higher on the empathy scales than their students rate them. Empathy is not the demanding and careful work needed in lesson planning, even when the planning acknowledges differences in students. Empathy for students is in the personal interactions between a teacher and children – it is in the immediacy and intricacies of what is said and done. If children believe that an empathetic teacher
- listens attentively and respectfully,
- is consistent and fair,
- knows each student’s name, interests, and challenges,
- has and supports high expectations for each child’s learning, and
- responds to mistakes and problems with guidance not shame, then
help teachers teach them. If they do not believe these to be true, classrooms are relational battlegrounds.
What to do.
Treat empathy as co-equal to content knowledge and pedagogy. Candidates are not born with content or pedagogical knowledge, and they are not born with genetic-based empathy. Each of these co-equal essentials is learned and can be improved with learning.
Begin by dropping the mistaken assumption that all teacher candidates are empathetic toward children. Instead, teach them about empathy and empathetic behaviors. Teach them how to understand and use their knowledge of empathy to build professional relationships with children, parents, and colleagues. Teach them how to measure their own empathy over time and in different contexts. And teach them that empathy is not a dispassionate strategy but a constant disposition. Empathy lives in a growth mindset.
Create a teacher preparation curriculum based upon empathy as a muscle memory that can be learned and strengthened. Teach –
- cognitive empathy, an academic understanding of perceptions of others and how to respond to those perceptions. There is a full, academic curriculum of this content.
- and practice affective empathy, a non-academic, real-world exposure of how to translate academic empathy into reactions and relationship-building. There are clinical settings for practicing and refining affective skills. As a type of muscle memory, we can help teacher candidates rehearse empathetic behaviors and self-critique their behaviors for a clearer understanding of how others perceive their empathetic skills.
- teach empathetic regulation to avoid burning out, potential callousness, and over emoting. There are models for understanding and resolving stress.
Use self-reports, observational tools, and student surveys to measure effect and impact of what candidates learn and how they internalize their learning into professional behaviors and relationship building.
Teach teacher prep providers and school supervisors to use research-based assessments to guide candidate development of empathetic skills sets AND to give classroom teachers feedback on their classroom and school practices. Most classroom observation tools avoid clinical critique of empathetic behaviors.
Make the use of research-based assessments a part of school-wide professional development divorced from employment evaluation. The quality of a teacher’s empathy for and relationships with children is hidden in academic and discipline reports yet it affects those outcomes immensely.
The Big Duh!
Traditional teacher preparation programs historically have emphasized the “hard” components of teaching and shunned the “soft” components. In Wisconsin PI 34, these are the rules for teacher prep programs, we have hard guidelines and assessments for content knowledge and the applications of pedagogical knowledge. We document these. At the same time, prep programs “record” human relations and educator disposition surveys. The latter are not treated like the former. Candidate licensing applications pass or fail their prep programs based on their content preparation and demonstration of pedagogy; their relations and dispositions surveys are check-offs and this flies in the face of what Roosevelt taught us. I repeat – “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
If doing the same things repeatedly expecting different results is a sign of unintelligent behavior, then ignoring what we know about the co-equal skills sets of teacher empathy is equally unintelligent. Ramp up teacher knowledge and use of empathetic skill sets to see improvements in student learning and behaviors.