Abstract

MOTTA, Danielle da Cunha et al. A program to promote empathy in classroom. Rev. bras.ter. cogn. [online]. 2017, vol.13, n.2, pp. 122-130. ISSN 1808-5687.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1808-5687.20170017.

Violence among young people highlights the need to develop projects for the inhibition of violent behavior and the promotion of opposite behaviors such as empathy. The teacher constitutes an important element for the promotion of empathic behavior by modeling the expression of this ability. The project proposal presented in this article was to create a program for the development of empathic behavior in teachers. A quasi-experimental study was carried out, with before and after evaluations. Eight teachers from public and private educational institutions participated in all study procedures and completed the following instruments: Semi-structured interview script, Inventory of Empathy, Test of Empathy in Scenes and Free Evaluation of the training. The Empathy Training Program was composed of 11 sessions, lasting three hours. As a result, in the post-training evaluations, the participants had a higher average performance in all measures of empathy, with these differences being statistically significant. The benefits found in this study are consistent with the literature data that points to empathy as a skill with lasting learning effects. The effectiveness of the program, indicated by the results, shows that the proposed training can be useful as a resource in teacher training for a more empathic and less violent school.

Keywords : Empathy; Training; Teacher.

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