(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



My thoughts about attending a session (with video of a past session) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-07-25

The Empathy Circle is a very simple concept for improving communication in small groups and can be adapted to large groups. There are four roles for the individuals to assume while conducting an Empathy Circle. There is a facilitator that is trained and initiates the circle by picking the time and the topic. The participants take turns being the speaker and listeners. The forth role is the silent listeners.

The Facilitator starts out by explaining the process. The key observance is reflection. The speaker gets 4 or 5 minutes to speak on the session topic or anything else that is on their mind. The speaker speaks a few sentences and then pauses. The listener then reflects back what they understood the speaker to say. The speaker then indicates they were understood and speaks again. When the time is up the listener becomes the speaker and picks a new listener.

As you can see from the poll taken last week 9% of the respondents said they would not like to use Zoom to attend an Empathy Circle. This is OK because the circles can also be done in person. In fact, Edwin Rutsch, the Founding Director of Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, that is coordinating the circles has a mobile tent and visits physical locations and conducts live in person circles. (More on the live Empathy Tent circles in a future article.)

A free and easy entry point to the Culture of Empathy, if you Zoom, is the Empathy Café. This is where I got started. These are held weekly and everyone is invited to visit and speak. The Empathy Café’s ongoing topic is “Building a Culture of Empathy.” But, as speaker you can speak about anything. <Link to Empathy Circles Schedule> Just view the calendar for a Café meeting time and join Zoom with the link provided at the indicated time.

At the Café I found that I like to bring an interesting story or metaphor to the group. And I also mentioned these articles I’m writing for Street Prophets. It is my small way of helping the empathy movement. It was through the Café that I learned about the group for bringing empathy into schools. There are often other groups formed with topics like, politics, religion, identity, and restorative justice. If you visit the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy’s YouTube channel you can view over 100 videos of Empathy Circles on many different topics.

What is interesting to me is the evolution of the circles. While the reflection and facilitator elements stay the same the balance between lecture on the topic and the time for speakers and listeners vary. The session I attended last Thursday had a very short introduction and links to supporting documents was provided in the text chat. The session in the video below held over a year ago a long introduction and spent 45 minutes reviewing supporting documents and also provided links.

The 45 minutes of the above video is an introduction to the process for new attendees and introductions of everyone. This was followed by a review of support for Empathy Circles in the California Core Curriculum.

… This is from the California department of education and i just want to focus what they talk about the importance of social emotional learning. So why am I giving you this. Not everybody lives in California but this is based on international research. And so if we have this in California there's probably something in the education code wherever you are that talks about something like this. And so this is basically institutional support for this sort of learning and what they say is social emotional learning reflects the critical role of positive relationships and emotional connections in the learning process and helps students develop a range of skills they need for school and life. This is being implemented in small ways … A snip from the transcript starting at 16:10 - Empathy Café: How might we create a culture of empathy in schools through empathic listening?

The session continues with the facilitator summarizing an informal assessment strategy.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/25/2112375/-Empathy-Circles-In-Schools-My-thoughts-about-attending-a-session-with-video-of-a-past-session

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/