Much of my course work in ECI 508 focused on empathy and its importance in teacher leadership. Empathy plays a crucial role in not only teacher leadership, but also in the lives of the students that I teach. In order to get students to care about and become involved in local and global issues, they must embrace the idea of empathy. To an always self-consuming adolescent, this idea of putting one's self in someone else's shoes may be a completely mind-blowing (but hopefully life changing) idea! Below are some examples of the literature that I've read and the work I've completed that focused empathy. |
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 "Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives." -Oprah Winfrey (as cited by Pink, 2005)
Empathy is the key to truly engaging parents in their child's education. For my leadership project for ECI 508, I researched the positive effects parental involvement can have on a student, and how as educators, we can play a more active role in engaging parents in our classrooms. As a teacher, being empathetic to a family's life situation, background, and culture is the first step to successful parental engagement.
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 On the New Literacies Collaborative, I published a blog post on the online game, "Ayiti: The Cost of Life". This gaming experience is a perfect example of how to incorporate empathy into instruction. The whole purpose of the game is for the gamer to put themselves into the shoes of a Haitian family living in poverty. Every choice that they may be the difference between life and death. 
For "Advocacy Night" in our ECI 508, Teacher as Leader class Manning Pruden, Andrea Gambino, and myself brainstormed ways to reach out to the local refugee famililies in our area. Here is our Moodle post that explains our action steps: Plan to Advocate for Refugees |
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