Malmö University, in cooperation with a primary school in Malmö, has developed and implemented a two-step method. The implementation work is part of a health promotion work "Understand Me, Then I'll Work" in a primary school in Malmö. The method includes CPS (Collaborative Proactive solutions), which is a structured model. The model is based on the facts that challenging behavior occurs when the expectations being placed on a kid exceed the kid’s capacity to respond adaptively, and that some kids are lacking the skills to handle certain demands and expectations. So the emphasis of the model isn’t about kids' challenging behavior, which is – whether it’s whining, pouting, sulking, withdrawing, crying, screaming, swearing, hitting, spitting, biting, or worse. Those are the manner in which they are expressing the fact that there are expectations they’re having difficulty meeting. The model does not focus on psychiatric diagnoses, which are simply categories of challenging behaviors. The core of the model is based in the understanding of the kids experience. One needs to understand the other.

Emphasis in CPS is one of the basic steps in CPS, which is about finding out as much as possible about a student's needs. Empathy training has therefore been a central part of the development work together with the teachers and school staff.

Well what is empathy then? and how can one develop the understanding of it in the context of social pedagogy work in school? We have trained school staff in phenomenological empathy in order to develop the empathetic ability in the treatment of students, parents and employees.In the theoretical discussion of empathy, one will find a “psychological mainstream” perspective that involves a "simulation" of the others experience. You “put yourself in the shoes of the other” as a way to achieve understanding of the other. I imagine what I had understood and felt in such a situation, what would your situation be like for me? The problem with this definition is that my understanding of the other is limited to my own, the listeners response to a hypothetically simulated situation. In other words, that I understand myself better in a hypothetical situation is not the same as understanding the other. 

The understanding of the other begins before the simulation, in a direct social perception (Zahavi 2011). This is a phenomenological critique of the mainstream perspective of empathy. From this criticism, a phenomenological psychological empathy training (FPE) has been developed for the care and care professions and for university students in these fields, especially in education related to human-occupational professions, such as social work education (Englander, 2014) and with this work also within the framework of social education in a primary school in Malmö.