By: Dr. Thuy La
As is our tradition, the weeks before Christmas and the New Years holiday, our students spend time writing letters to the children who stay in children’s’ homes and the elderly who we will carol to in a nursing home. Both will likely spend their holidays without their families. During the past few years, our Indi-ED community has built the culture of the holiday that it’s time we all take to show actions of empathy toward others.
Empathy, as we all understand it, is the ability to understand others’ feelings and to share those feelings with them. To us, it means we learn to choose the right words of kindness, of joy, and of encouragement with the goal of lifting someone up.
Our students learn empathy through their act of kindness, from sharing accolades with one another every morning meeting, to peer-teaching in their academic subjects. Together, they work in small groups or work in pairs to problem solve with math and science, to read and discuss what their take-ways were, and what they learn from readings. In these small, daily activities, students demonstrate their empathy with their ability to understand one another’s learning styles, to understand their one another struggles, to help and to collaborate with one another so they all could progress to their potential.
Through demonstrating empathy to others, our kids show their strength and creativity. In order to know how to write a letter to someone they never met, someone going through tough times in life, like children in the Children’s home, where most kids have no parents’ care and don’t have a normal family life. It is challenging for our students to choose the right words to express their understanding and share of feeling toward other children and elders. Yet, they took their time to do research, to contemplate the word choices, to choose the colors and finally to create the many beautiful heartfelt cards or letters filled with positive thoughts and cheerful notes.
It takes the whole team of teachers, administrators, and parents to build them up every day so that they could learn what they could do to show empathy. It’s the essential social skill that at Indi-ED, we mindfully teach our students through different approaches. We give them the opportunities to be creative, we give them a safe and open space where they could share ideas freely, we facilitate their process of learning about empathy and let students lead the discussion and results of actions based on empathy.
Through this organic learning environment, students have time to reflect, to research, and to discuss ideas. We also give them space to think and to create. With construction paper, colored pencils, and inviting workstations on the rug area or by the Christmas trees. Students have the freedom to create their artwork in which they decorated, wrote and expressed their ideas of sharing, comforting, and encouraging others.
In this digital era where many teens and young children are immersed themselves in the self-indulgence culture -all about me- attention world, knowing how to show empathy to others through authentic genuine actions is what makes our students different. They learned how to not only talk about Empathy but also to know they must “walk the talk”. Doing good deeds to others, also as simple as writing a letter to another kids to cheer them up for the holiday reminds them of the key points of human being: to be compassionate, to feel for others and to bring them to a next level of growing, not just intellectually but as socially as a real human being. That is what the Holiday spirit is about!