“The 133 helped me this year helped me become less shy and actually come to school and helped me pass my classes and work up to get out. The 133 helped me to speak my opinion, ask questions. The 133 not just helped me with my attendance and grades but it helped me find close friends that are like a family.” (Kayla)
What more could we ask for from a book study about empathy, than to start with a student quote as a mission statement? A kid who felt left out and stranded on an island finds a family in school. UnSelfie is a book that can help us apply some systematic decisions to help more students share Kayla's experience!

An Overview of Our Work

Unselfie is a book that takes its readers on a journey into understanding the increasingly egocentric and narcissistic tendencies of the kids we teach. It offers concrete and age-appropriate strategies to teach empathy, and to use that empathy to help students succeed both alone, and as a group. What makes Unselfie unique is that while it applies heavily to education, there are concrete recommendations for parents, coaches, teachers, and anyone else who works with children. 
Each meeting we will discuss the ideas shared in UnSelfie in depth, using our own knowledge and experience working with students to ground the ideas from the book into our own practice. Each session will end with workshopped time to create several 10-15 minute mini-lessons that we’ll be able to use to teach empathy in our own classrooms next fall! These lessons will be published on one page online so at the end of the three weeks, we’ll have a wealth of empathy lessons, specifically written by Dunkirk teachers for Dunkirk students that we can take off the digital shelf any time we need to fill a few minutes

Part 1: Developing Empathy

Chapters 1-4

"But that 'look at me looking at you,' digital craze is spilling into the real world, altering our kids' offline attitudes, and creating the most entitled, competitive, self-centered, and individualistic breed on record." -Borba
Picture
My daughter, learning to match expressions with other people's feelings to build empathy! She's gotten really good.

Here is the Slides presentation that will drive our work this week! In order to build a cohesive team, this week we'll start by looking at some voices of people we know and respect to ground our work with Borba into our own practice.

Close Read! Dialectic Annotations:

Four our second activity, we'll use one of my very favorite close-read methods: dialectic annotations! Each group will be assigned a small portion of pages, and will group up to make some annotations on index cards to capture their learning. Then, we'll present the annotations to delve deeply into the methods of UnSelfie!
Here are the dialectic annotations we'll use to demonstrate our understanding during the close read portion of our lesson.

Part 2: Practicing Empathy

Chapters 5-7

"Next came a long-term study in Dunedin, New Zealand that followed 1,037 children for forty years. It found that ability to put the brakes on emotions is essential to success." -Borba

This week's work will focus mostly on lesson planning based on our reading and learning. The Slides above will structure our work, but I snapped an image of the reflection slide because that's really the lynchpin of how we'll come together as a team.

Empathy Lessons Created

Our team of incredible teachers worked hard to produce some lessons that any teacher can pull off the "shelf" and use whenever they find themselves with a few minutes to spare. All lessons are based on Borba's research and align to the NYS SEL learning standards shared to the right.

Role Playing Emotions

Authors: Kathryn Pilgrim, Jennifer Kingston, and Tina Novelli
Use this amazingly scalable Slides presentation to help students think about situations objectively and practice putting themselves in other people's shoes. By practicing with low emotional stakes, students can slowly learn to succeed when the stakes are higher!

Brainstorming and Categorizing Emotions

Authors: Mary Mistretta and Mary Allaire-Gifford
Do you find your students have trouble articulating how they feel? Does that make solving emotional problems difficult in your classroom? Try this controlled and incredibly productive brainstorming and categorizing lesson to help your students learn the language of empathy!

Reflective Listening

Authors: Brad Karpie and Caroline Handel
This lesson requires some control over your class before you begin, but it's a great way to help students practice reflective listening. They'll work on listening to their peers instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

Part 3: Living Empathy

Chapters 8-9

"An empathetic kid is one who recognizes 'who I am is more important than what I look or own, I care about others.'" -Borba

This week, we'll do a shallow dive into the final chapters of Unselfie before losing ourselves in the work of creating user-friendly mini lessons based on Borba's teaching.
Don't forget to check out ALL our empathy lessons in an easily-skimmed format by clicking the button to the right!

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