There are six basic steps to developing empathy: listening, understanding, internalizing, projecting, planning, and intervening. The first two steps—listening and understanding—constitute awareness: Students must first pay attention to others and then take the time to learn what is being said and how (and for more mature students, perceiving what isn't being said). Understanding doesn't necessarily mean agreeing; it simply means having a cognitive grasp of another person's views.
Perhaps the most difficult step in helping students develop empathy is teaching them to internalize what they have learned. To place themselves in other people's shoes and actually experience their feelings—now that's empathy! Projecting is the next step, when students are able to imagine how they would react in the same situation. They can also work to imagine how the perceptions that they hold are perceived by others, and appreciate how easy or difficult that might be for the other person. Together, these opening steps lead students to appreciate how easy or difficult it might be to be someone else in a different context.
Once students have developed empathy, the next step is to create a context for collaborative effort. In step five, students are able to plan a response to a given situation informed by their empathy—perhaps starting with conversations toward common understanding and respect, or attempts to alter the situation, or both—and in step six, they execute their plan. Planning should always be inclusive and collaborative: successful change doesn't come from what we do to or for others, but rather from what we do together.
Strategies for Developing Empathy
To create contexts where students can practice these six basic steps, consider using some of these strategies and activities in your classroom.
For all teachers:
- Help students appreciate their own backgrounds and biases. Ask students to answer the question "Why am I the way I am?" by interviewing relatives, researching family histories, and creating self-presentations that feature music and photos and cover a range of information (e.g., geographic locations, ethnicity, family size, religion). The presentations can serve as a rich resource for teachers and students, as another way to understand some "others." (The data could be tallied and analyzed as a logical-mathematical activity, too.)
- Consciously teach about stereotypes and discrimination, the history and evolution of attitudes, and the reasons why people's degrees of empathy toward different people vary. From the Crusades and Westward Expansion to the subjugation of blacks, Jews, and women, there is no lack of fodder. Ask "What caused some groups or individuals to be so insensitive to the needs of others?" Remind students that the goal is not to empathize in all cases with everyone, but rather to act kindly whether or not you do.
- Have students examine historical examples of innocent people who were wrongly accused of crimes. Study the trial of Galileo, the Salem Witch Trials, or the Dreyfus Affair. The goal is to help students see the perspectives not only of the wrongly accused but also of the other characters involved. It may be easy to feel empathy for the protagonist, so it is important for students to see the interplay of perspectives so that they can speculate on which other character(s) might warrant their sympathy or empathy. (Arthur Miller's The Crucible, about the Salem Witch Trials, is a very powerful—and fairly short—resource.) Then ask your students to reflect on a time when they were wrongly accused of some misdeed. Have them generate adjectives and drawings or perhaps a song or dance to capture how they felt and how others in the situation felt, too.
- Create a system by which students can submit anonymous compliments for specific classmates. Then, quietly or publicly, pass along the praise. The goal here is to help students understand what others might appreciate, particularly how others might appreciate something that is not particularly meaningful to them.
For middle and high school teachers:
- Teach students about the differences in perspective between journalism and literature and between current and historical accounts. Use assigned fiction and nonfiction readings to help students see various perspectives and distinguish between empathy and sympathy. Books such as Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859/1999), Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) provide enough characters and complexity to generate good thought and discussion.
- Read portions of Paul Theroux's book Deep South (2015) with students to examine a slice of life with which they may not be familiar. The book follows Theroux as he visits with good people who are grappling with the effects of globalization and—even today—the long-term vestiges of slavery.
For elementary school teachers:
- Teach students the difference between sympathy and empathy. It may help to present empathy as the highest level on a three-step developmental sequence, with sympathy as step two and step one being care (i.e., the positive feelings we might have toward a pet).
- Use empathy as a tool to help students understand character creation and development in fiction. When we find our attention seized by a story—such as by Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) or Raquel J. Palacio's Wonder (2012)—it's because we reach beyond sympathy to empathize with the characters. Students should consider how the author causes us to feel empathy for some characters and not others.
- Ask students to speculate as to what other children might like to receive for their birthdays—discounting what they might want for themselves. Consider using this exercise to conclude a discussion of the different interests among students' family members. The goal here is for the children to learn to step out of their perspectives and work to see how others feel.
- If a student's pet dies, use the occasion to talk about feelings. Many students will naturally feel empathy in this situation with the student whose pet died.
For principals:
- Make it a priority to hire teachers who are empathetic toward all kinds of students—not just those who excel in school and are well-behaved. Teacher candidates should be able to explain how they might identify and care for students in a variety of situations. When interviewing, I often ask teachers to describe a time when they had to respond to a student who was having difficulties or to tell me how they might intervene in a hypothetical situation. My goal is less to learn more about the specific strategies they might use and more to determine how much of an effort they would make to know and understand their students.Similarly, Mark Catalana, director of human resources for the Mehlville (Missouri) School District, asks teacher applicants to describe an occasion when they learned about a student going through a difficult time, and then asks them whether that knowledge changed the way they treated the student. Sometimes Mark also asks applicants to tell them about any personal struggles they had as children. How did they handle them? Did it affect their schooling? Did anyone in the school help them get through their difficulties?
- Screen Brené Brown's two-minute documentary, <LINK URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw" LINKTARGET="_blank">Brené Brown on Empathy</LINK> (2013). I would first screen the video for faculty and then ask teachers to meet in groups and discuss how it resonated with them personally and how they might discuss it with students.
- Form a voluntary faculty book group to read books related to empathy. Ensuring total transparency of the selection process, choose books such as Daring Greatly (2012) and Rising Strong (2015), both by Brené Brown; Ghettoside (2015), by Jill Leovy; and High Price (2014), by Carl Hart. All of these are compelling works that enable us to see difficult situations from the perspectives of others.
