STUDY OF MIIDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS’ EMPATHY IN A PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY

Abstract

Empathy is defined as a “feeling of closeness” which is “inversely proportional to the social distance between people” (Desev, 2010:154). It is manifested both as a skill and as an attitude to understand the feelings of others, take their position, respect the different point of view, and exhibit altruistic behavior arising from one's cognitive experience. In modern research, empathy is increasingly interpreted as a complete emotional-cognitive system with several interconnected plans: emotional, cognitive and behavioral. A number of studies emphasize the importance of empathy in the teacher's professional activity. Empathic teachers are able to identify the emotional needs of students and promote empathy in the classroom. They are sensitive to different learning styles and strategies, are able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student and apply personalized teaching methods. Empathic teachers are able not only to increase the academic achievement of their students, but also to change their attitude towards learning, increase their self-assessment and motivate them to achieve higher results. In the context of the teaching profession, empathy is disscused as a professional personal skill, which should be manifested primarily on a cognitive level – as a conscious act of support and understanding of the various states and bihevior of students in the educational process. Often in practice, however, mainly emotional manifestations of empathy on the part of the teacher, such as concern for the feelings and well-being of the student are observed, while manifestations of empathy, which include consideration of the student's condition, the ability to differentiate the student's attitude to learning, differentiating the approach to the individual student, are identified less often.
The proposed research is based on the assumption that teachers have a high level of empathy, understood as emotional sensitivity to students' problems, but fail to use empathy in teaching to achieve educational goals. In the research, empathy is considered as part of the professional skills and attitudes of teachers to apply person-centered approaches in the learning process and is named with the concept of "professional empathy". The study is performed with two scales, which are separately developed sets of statements. The first scale is BEES (Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale), developed by A. Mehbian and modified by N. Epstein (Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). The Scale is adapted for the purpose of the study in version with 25 statements. The second scale, PES (Professional Empathy Scale), is developed as an integrative scale for determining the professional empathy of the teacher in the educational activity. For the purpose of this study BEES and PES are unified. Both scales contains 25 closed-type statements – both direct and reversible. Statements are evaluated on a 4-degree Likert scale, where 4 is completely agree and 1 – completely disagree. The study covers 273 middle school teachers. The results are analysed in three stages: Evaluation of the Scales internal consistency; Descriptive Statistic and Correlation Analyses. The research results determinated important aspects of the conducted research such as correlations between types of empathy, correlations between different scale items, and correlations between demographic factors and different research variables. The average results achieved by the examined persons are also analysed.