On Empathy and Blame

In designing your lessons, I cling to this idea, from the GAP protocol you’ll need to review before Friday:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The most important thing is always something about how you learn, and you learn what you put into practice. We need more “collateral learning” in our lives. Keep that in mind as you watch these next two videos and prepare to write a response.

Prompt #1: On Empathy

Prompt #2: On Blame

Your Response

Take the next 48 hours or so, in and out of class, to write a response to these videos. Use these three ideas to guide you:

• These videos obviously connect to the skills and traits of this course. What do they add to your understanding? To what extent can you use these as part of our learning?
• Last week, the entire building spent P1 looking at the idea of accountability, and the second video above especially connects to that lesson. How do these videos on empathy and blame tie into what you saw last week?
• Your personal reaction matters as much as the course and the building. To what extent do these videos resonate with you? What will you take away from them to put into practice?

Write something that weaves those three focuses together, if you can. Consider your response an essay in the true sense of the word, and attach a copy of that response to the post in Google Classroom.