First Webinar

I watched the first webinar and was struck at the simplicity of his answer in regards to the most important 21st century skill.  The key skill is learning.

This ties, again, to Erin Gruwell's comment on she was a great learner.

The answer that I had for what I thought was important in 20 years is empathy.  Seeing that I will be working with students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, empathy is an important thing to learn.

The question is, how do you teach empathy?  I think that teachers can do one thing, and one thing alone in regards to this.  They can only show respect to their students.  That is all we can do, show them respect and they will slowly figure out empathy and respect.

This, I now realize, is going against my previous post about direct instruction.

So are there things that cannot be taught using direct instruction?  Yes, but the sibling to direct instruction is indirect instruction, which I would see as the respect.  There is one more thing a teacher can do.  And that is show the student that you care about them.  You do this by asking them how there weekend was.  By asking how they are at that particular moment.  Showing that you care for them is a break-off of what I call respect.