Empathy: A Crucial Social Skill for Prospective Teachers at Secondary Level

Abstract Empathy plays a crucial role in effective teaching and fostering positive classroom environments. Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation. In other words, the ability of an individual to feel with others is empathy, which includes two dimensions of empathy, such as cognitive and affective empathy. Teachers need to possess the quality of empathy to comprehend the needs of their students and provide them with appropriate, high-quality instruction. The paper aims to analyse empathy among prospective teachers at the secondary level for the subgroups based on age, family background, locale of residence, marital status, and subject of study. The sample consisted of 174 prospective teachers at the secondary level selected from different teacher training institutions of Kerala. The descriptive survey method and the Basic Empathy Scale were used to collect the data. The results revealed that there is no significant difference in empathy among prospective teachers at the secondary level for the subgroups based on age, family background, locale of residence, and marital status, but there is a significant difference in empathy among prospective teachers at the secondary level with respect to subject of study.