I scoured YouTube and I found the Brené Brown video on empathy dubbed in Spanish. I found it with Spanish subtitles and I decided to do a mini lesson on empathy with my students and embed it into the chapter vocabulary. We had a discussion in class in Spanish about what students thought empathy was and if we as a society are very empathetic or not. Students emphatically claimed that we are not a very empathetic society, however they could not articulate what we could do to practice more empathy in our relationships.
I assigned a video diary (a video blog that students are assigned weekly) to articulate their thoughts in Spanish about what they thought were the obstacles for empathy.
We wrapped up by doing a comprehension worksheet as an exit ticket and a check for listening and comprehension.
At the end, I had every intention to do a unit evaluation for this activity, however I personally felt that it went horribly. Students did not seem to engage with the material and they seemed confused, bored, and not connected and I felt that maybe the subject was a little over their heads. I abandoned the lesson and moved on.
A month later, I realized that I had written this activity down as one of my year goals, and that I was going to do a unit evaluation on the lesson, and feeling dejected, I didn’t do my goal. I decided that I would show the video again to my students to see how much they remembered and if anything about empathy had sunk in and if anything we had discussed in class resonated and stuck with students a month later. I was completely shocked to see that students were able to recall the lessons and vocabulary that we had talked about a month later, without even reviewing the vocabulary. I showed the video one more time, and students were shocked to see that they were able to understand the video and pick up on more vocabulary that they recognized from the previous chapter. Not only that, but they were able to identify and practice how to be empathetic in their daily relationships.
I conducted a unit evaluation and the results were pretty positive. I’m happy I did this lesson (twice) and that I was able to incorporate SEL as an overarching theme in my classes. Here are some examples from the unit evaluation:
Karina,
Thank you for this story. The opportunity to revisit and retrieve once again is so important to learning, I think. It must have been heartening for you to witness this. In TMS, we restructured the classes so we have students 2 4 week sessions instead of 1 8 week session. I get the first returnees after Christmas and I am planning on a week of revisiting. I hope it goes 1/2 as well as yours.
I find that with language learning and most learning, repetition and revisiting is so important, good luck next semester!
I love this! So interesting how the students remembered after a month and then actually applied empathy (how do you say it in Spanish?) to their real lives – that is awesome!
wow this is such a powerful blog on sooooo many levels… you touch on everything here… it is funny the writing down of the goals kind of triggered you to revisit something in a way you probably would not have…
the idea of retrieval and revisiting something again is also huge… it takes time for us to process super important life altering concepts like empathy… letting it rest and sit is the educational equivalent of letting a great bottle of red wine breathe before you start drinking 🙂