Project Based Learning
Learning Empathy from Animals
Communication Solutions
Driving Question: How does learning about others help us and strengthen our community?
Driving Question: What new tools can we create to improve how we communicate and understand messages at school when we feel strong emotion?
Communication happens when we send or share meanings (gestures, ideas, feelings, information). When we communicate, we make connections, we learn, and we grow. Developing effective verbal and nonverbal communication skills helps students:
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Build self-confidence and strengthen relationships
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Increase their ability to inform, persuade, and lead
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Excel in a diverse and challenging classroom, college and career environment
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Empathy is the ability to understand another person's perspective and to consider it before acting.
Developing and strengthening empathy helps students
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Foster tolerance and understanding
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Form healthy relationships throughout life
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Understand how their choices affect them and those around them
This project, tapped into both the interests and feelings of Core 2 students as they developed their academic and social skills and found individual comfort zone in their Thrive learning community during the first trimester of school.
Students imagined unique examples of animals that defy the laws of the nature, with different heads and bodies.
Identifying the special traits and abilities that these creative creatures could possess and relating to their feelings of being very different from the animals around them advanced students’ abilities to identify similar strengths and feelings in themselves and others learning with them. Explaining the positive value and worth of an animal that has “the head of an elephant and body of an eagle,” helped students “re-see” uniqueness as beneficial in all living things—including themselves and people who are different from them.
"Empathy Animals" Exhibition