"Get Inside" Empathy to Impact
What’s Going On in this Picture?
WHAT
Grade 6 WAB teachers work together inside Empathy to Impact in order to visualize and identify connections across disciplines, how to collaborate to amplify approaches to learning, and spark a purposeful sense of global context and informed, relevant action.
WHY
Empathy to Impact helps teachers and learners co-design meaningful interdisciplinary units and projects through physically engaging with systems thinking in order to enhance pre-existing approaches to design, service as action, inquiry, and project-based learning experiences. Ostensibly, working in concert through an Empathy to Impact snapshot, educators can promote meaningful student-centered learning for critically, creatively, and empathetically addressing:
What do I care about and why?
How can I become more deeply aware and credibly informed?
How can I apply disciplinary skills and thinking, technology, and language?
How can I take informed action and have a positive impact on an internal, local, or global community?
HOW
Organize a space that allows learning designers, ideally teachers and students together, to walk amongst the different elements of the Empathy to Impact system
Place transformative learning goals in the center to be constant remainders of the why of the learning and to identify opportunities for learners to demonstrate these goals during any part of the project or unit experience.
Don’t be locked into idea that Empathy to Impact is a cycle that begins with “Care”. Sometimes a unit or project might be a call to action and need back mapping from the “Impact” element. Other times, things like specific disciplinary skills (Able), a film (Aware), an interview opportunity (Aware), a wellness campaign (Care) might launch teachers and learners into a different launch point in the Empathy to Impact teaching and learning system.
As an interdisciplinary team or student learner, utilize your bank of metacognitive language, tools and resources, modern literacies, technology standards, enhanced action opportunities, and community partners to find pathways that best meet the needs of learners and community members. A recommended starting point for exploring and working with these tools and resources are found in the Inspire Citizens Master Teacher Endorsement and the Chapters International Empathy to Impact workshop series.
