DEAR STUDENTS,
DEAR TEACHERS,
This is your chance to improve your daily school life! In school, you find yourself in uncountable interactions with others. Shouldn’t they be as positive as possible? And what about your class room? An atmosphere of trust and safety makes you feel more comfortable. With empathy you can both improve your individual and your collective well-being. How do you do that? With beEmpathy! beEmpathy is a workshop about empathy and emotional awareness. In interactive and playful exercises you can explore different aspects of empathy. You will practice how to support yourself and others. Your class will grow together and build a community of care. beEmpathy encourages you to be confident, to have fun, to make mistakes, and to support each other. Listen, observe, feel - and be with each other! beEmpathy provides both a workshop structure and a pool of exercises. You decide how you want to use it! Make the tasks fit your needs and turn the provided material into your material. You all have the ability for empathy - it just needs to be activated!
EMPATHY IS THE HUMAN CONNECTION.
Empathy helps us to care for ourselves and others. It allows us to live and interact with each other based on mutual respect and understanding. It enables us to build cognitive and affective connections. Active listening, emotional awareness, perspective taking, and compassion define its core. Empathy is nothing one either has or hasn’t but a skill that can be improved through practise.
This is what beEmpathy is about! beEmpathy supports students and teachers in fostering empathy and emotional literacy. Becoming aware of one’s feelings, learning how to manage them, and interacting with each other with tolerance, supports an inclusive and safe learning environment that will eventually be carried beyond school walls. beEmpathy is an investment into sustainable social relations and in one’s individual and collective well-being.
Did you know empathy influences multiple aspects of our lives and has uncountable positive effects? Here is an overview of what empathy can evoke:
beEmpathy framework
beEmpathy is based on the beEmpathy framework. The framework explains what empathy is about and makes it adaptive. In four steps one can build a fundamental understanding of empathy and practise it step-by-step. Through conscious practice the empathy skill will be improved and the framework will eventually become an intuitive flow.
THE WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
It is recommended to conduct the workshop in five steps. Each step of the workshop is dedicated to one of the four steps of the framework, in consecutive order. The workshop steps begin with a morning circle that aims to establish emotional awareness. Afterwards different tasks are being conducted. All tasks are designed to be adjusted to the class’s needs. The exercises follow an interactive, participatory, and explorative approach that encourages students to relate to empathy with their own experiences and to discuss different perceptions. Each step ends with a reflection round. This supports the class to summarise their experiences and to close the day together. The fifth step is about reviewing and reflecting upon the previous steps and the produced outcomes. Students will display their material and create a small exhibition. Thereby, they will not only realise what they are already capable of but also how they can and want to practise empathy in the future.
Each task comes with specific material. They are all accompanied by copy templates that not only explain the exercise but also provide a medium to work with. All templates have regular DIN formats and are designed to be printed out easily.
IMPORTANT:
Three workshops plans are being provided. But even if the workshop is designed for five consecutive steps, the tasks can also be conducted individually. According to the school’s needs and circumstances, the steps can be spread out over several weeks and not all tasks have to be done in the recommended order. You can also find a proposal for a three-steps and a one-step workshop. First of all, beEmpathy is a pool of exercises from where teachers and students can choose elements that are integrable in their school days. Classes should engage with the material in open-ended ways and contribute to the beEmpathy network with their own ideas.
Do you want help or don’t want
to host the workshop yourself?
Do you want to order the physical toolbox?
The beEmpathy toolbox provides all copy templates that you can find
on the website plus extra material. The extra material includes:
different posters, card games, the See With Your Ears domino game, window&mirror picture cards, and stickers.