Educators don’t often talk about compassion and love for children. This is because essentially we live in a world that mostly prizes only quantifiable consumerism and materialistic individual achievements. The education industry too reflects the same with its focus on accountability and measurement. Love and compassion enables teachers to see teaching as an art where we develop effective ways of connecting to students with different material and delivery.
Such is the inner-feeling really required of a teacher. Irrespective of everything else that is going on in his or her life, there is a pure chance to teach and help a student learn something and become better than before. More often than not, teaching requires a great deal of patience, compassion, and curiosity. It is important to be patient and non-judgemental of your students, it is important to be compassionate to them and think from their perspective, and it is important to continue to learn and be curious about your subject and its relation to the changing world.
Teachers should model compassion and acts of compassion on a daily basis, by complimenting students on their successes, inquiring about their day or their weekend activities and what they learnt from other aspects of life.
Compassion allows us to look at our students as individuals on different stages in different learning paths. Sometimes before starting a class, all that a child wants is a little acknowledgement of something that he or she has learnt about crabs in her recent beach holiday. These small things help the teacher a long way in successfully opening up the student to become an active listener. At the same time, parents too should have the same compassion towards teachers. Teachers make a large impact in our communities and on our children, and it is important for parents to seriously look at the profession from that perspective. We do sometimes come across parents who look down upon teaching as a profession and that is something we don’t tolerate because principles are principles. A teacher is a fundamental building block of the society and community around us, and it is important for everyone to understand that; The best resulting relationship in a society takes everyone to work on a mutually respectful and amicable relationship.
Four steps to become compassionate as a teacher
- Engage in small conversations around the child’s interests and outside classroom learning
- Always prioritize care for the child – sometimes a child might be hungry from school and is immediately taking your class. You can ask them to bring some food and can parallelly eat while doing the class for the first ten minutes.
- Display support and encouragement even when the child is not able to do things in the required way. Help them to build more patience and work in small steps.
- Care for animals, environments, elderly, and the larger society. Give them the little words of wisdom on while we are people designed to think selfishly for ourselves, in true sense, life is far more beautiful when you do things together for each other.
While we sometimes become too busy with life moving from one thought to another, I feel that a shift toward lessons encompassing love, compassion, and kindness is a priority. Such lessons must become a focal point in academic communities in order to promote and inspire significant change.
Yes, while we may be teaching kids coding, mathematics, or computer-science, we’re all human behind those big buck qualifications, professions, and busy lives. So, as a teacher it is important to hold on to these values with compassion towards children instilling principles of morality, kindness, and principle based thinking in them for their future.
Hope this is useful, thank you.
Learn more about our coding school and our principles of teaching at UnicMinds.
