01Vocabulary
A child can do something with a feeling they can name
A child who says "I am frustrated" instead of throwing the puzzle has kept themselves inside the lesson. Feelings work is learning work.
Empathy Global
The Empathy Curriculum
Social emotional learning for children aged around three to six. Built in a real school, refined daily for six years, and measured like it matters.
What children learn
Empathy grows in widening circles
First empathy for yourself, then empathy for the other, then empathy for society. A child who can name what is happening inside themselves can understand what is happening inside a friend, and grows into someone who understands people.
The Empathy Curriculum is licensed to schools. It is not free, it is not in the free curriculum library published by Empathy Global, and it is not available anywhere without a licence. If you have seen free curricula from Empathy Global, those are different programmes.
The three pillars
02Practice
Every lesson is a game, not a lecture
Children practice the skills inside structured play. The fun is the pedagogy. A lesson that is not fun is not working.
03Measurement
What gets measured gets done
Emotional vocabulary is countable. A teacher writes down the feeling words a child uses unprompted, across a normal week, on a five minute checklist.
How it runs
Scripted lessons
Every lesson scripted word for word. Teachers trained, coached, and certified personally by the founder.
Thirty minutes a week
A scheduled lesson, not a bolt on. It sits inside the school day like any other subject.
Measured outcomes
Emotional vocabulary tracked three times a term. Parent surveys at the start and the end.
Empathy grows outward, and nobody can skip the middle.
6
years of daily classroom refinement
4
level bands, around ages three to six
30
minutes a week, as a scheduled lesson
The thinking behind it
The thinking behind it
Six short pieces on why this program works the way it does.
How a partnership works
01
Pilot
The program runs in a small number of your centers for one school term.
02
Certification
Your teachers are trained and certified personally by the founder before the term begins.
03
License
A successful pilot leads to a license across your whole network.
Success criteria are numeric and fixed before the program begins, and partners co review the data.
Measured, not promised
A five minute per child checklist three times a term tracks emotional vocabulary and observed regulation. Parent surveys run at the start and the end.
Aligned to international frameworks for social emotional learning. Elements of the program are already used in over 200 schools worldwide.
About the founder
Eric Gonzalez-Payne
Eric Gonzalez-Payne has spent 20 years in education and holds an Ed.M. in Educational Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He built this curriculum at the school he founded in Bali in 2020, where it has been practiced and refined every day with children of exactly these ages.
He personally trains and certifies every teacher cohort that runs it.
I don't ask anyone to believe the program. I ask them to measure it with me.
Get in touch
Bring the Empathy Curriculum to your school
We partner with a small number of schools and preschool groups. If you would like to explore the program for your centers, we would love to hear from you.
If you are not a school but a person who wants to open one, that is a different conversation, and it happens at Empathy Global.