Empathy

Our next session involved us buddying up with our '5 whys' partner, to create a role play that reflected our challenge. As I was in the process of completely reframing my challenge, we focussed on Ange's challenge for our role play. We also spent some time talking about my redefined challenge, and throwing ideas around about this.

Ange's challenge is related to maths and students not choosing maths as a subject, or having a low self esteem about their abilities when related to maths.

This is not just an issue facing students and teachers in maths, but in a range of subject areas and year levels. By role playing what it might be like for both student and teacher, it enables us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to try and understand what the issue might be like from their perspective.

This is both eye opening and real, as it allows you to then start thinking of solutions and what you might be able to do to help.

We then completed a visual poster of what our students might experience if they were faced with this issue. What would their needs be? What does it look like for them - actions/words?
I had already begun to think about my new challenge, so did this activity from the perspective of a student experiencing high anxiety, or low self esteem.