Can I teach students to lead with empathy?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

Hi! What do you appreciate from others when you’re having a hard time?

Can you think of a time when you were in a really vulnerable place and someone showed up for you? Empathized with you?

Do you have someone in your life who has space for you to feel big feelings? Someone who can sit with you and be with you in the hard places? Someone who doesn’t rush you through it, or dismiss you, or talk past you?

If you’ve experienced true empathy, you know the value of it. The power of someone seeing you as you truly are.

And we can all grow our skill of empathy. It’s not fixed. There’s room for us to deepen our compassion for ourselves and for each other as we grow our emotional intelligence.

I wish I would have gotten this earlier. As a kid, I could empathize with others to an extent. But I didn’t know how to empathize with myself. AND I didn’t know that it was fair for me to expect empathy from others. I didn’t know that healthy relationships have reciprocity and a balance of empathy. And that I could ask for this, “I’m not looking for solutions right now. I just need you to listen and try to understand what I’m going through right now.”

So let’s do this differently for the next generation. Let’s EQuip kids with these skills, so they can start better empathizing with themselves and their classmates and practicing these skills earlier.

Today, I want to showcase a sample lesson from our 12th grade EQuipped Classroom Curriculum: “Empathy as a Leader”

The EQuipped Classroom written curriculum has two guides, a student workbook for journaling and activities and a teacher guidebook with a one page guide to facilitating discussions.

One of my favorite aspects of this curriculum is that it offers enough guidance to support teachers and students without trying to overcontrol teachers. I would feel so condescended to as a teacher when I was expected to be a robot delivering verbatim content like you have to do with standardized testing. It felt to me like the less human and more robotic I was, the better. Which bummed me out.

The EQuipped Classroom curriculum is the opposite. It leaves space for your individuality as a teacher. It also leaves space for students’ humanity.

For this particular lesson, students have space to journal. Because this is a 12th grade lesson, students are thinking about their role as leaders at the school inherit in their position as seniors. Here is the student journal prompts:

I love this framing because often students grow their empathy and EQ when they realize they are leaders whether or not they signed up for that or not.

I didn’t know this as a 12th grade student. I thought I had to have formal positions in Honor Society and Student Council to be a “Leader.” I confused “Leader” with “Title.” I didn’t know that I was leading in how I treated others and how I treated myself. I wish I would have. I performed well academically and was in every student organization under the sun. But I didn’t know how to treat myself or other people very well. I was overfunctioning at the academic bits of school and failing to show up as a leader personally.

I’m learning to lead in my personal life for the first time now. In my 30’s. And while I’m grateful I made it here at all. I could have saved myself a lot of unnecessary suffering by learning these basic EQ skills earlier in life. I wonder how little High-Achieving-12th-grade Elizabeth could have benefitted from a lesson in empathy. Of even having the idea introduced to me that I was a leader already and that I could learn to be kinder.

I think about this lesson from the perspective of how it would have landed with me as a senior and high school. I also think about it from the perspective of a high school English teacher. Here is the teacher guide:

I like that it offers enough background to frame the discussion and journal activity but doesn’t over structure the lesson. I’m confident I could have facilitated a discussion using this resource with my high school students, especially the students in my advisory homeroom.