Building Empathy
Crafting empathy experiences for your students
I don’t remember specific lessons when I was in Elementary school.
I do remember how I felt.
I remember feeling like my interests, thoughts, concerns, ideas were not of interest to my teachers. I did what I was told. I was compliant. My learning environments had an ethos of “because I said so.” I don’t remember building strong relationships with my teachers and classmates because we were all too busy with our heads down following directions. We didn’t get to know each other. We left our personal lives at the door when we entered the classroom. Empathy was not a part of the curriculum.
Humans are biologically programmed to have empathy. Emotional contagion is a “form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly” (Emotional contagion, 2023).
However, just because our brains are wired to spread emotions, empathy is still a skill that must be learned and practiced. Students must be explicitly taught to empathize with their peers. For teachers, this includes being intentional about forming relationships with your students and centering empathy when designing a learning experience.
There are no shortcuts; you must take time to connect with your students. Effective teachers know their students. Instead of teaching what you think your students need, if you really know your students (and all of the identity intersections that make up your students), then you see their schooling experience through their eyes. Empathy takes time and energy to build, but it is time well spent. Knowing your students helps you gain insights into their educational needs.
Empathy is at the core of all of my learning experiences.
It is easy to forget that your students are actual humans beings with lives outside of your classroom. Public education forces teachers to obsess over data. Students become data points instead of living beings. The great news is that having a strong sense of empathy does not conflict with “big data.” Researchers have developed a “hybrid-insights” approach that “integrates quantitative research into human-centered design thinking. Hybrid insights allow us to embed stories in the data, bringing the data to life” (Kelley, 2013). Being an effective teacher does not mean that you have to separate your students from their data. Effective teachers center their students in the learning experience. Empathizing with your students is the best route to truly grasping the context and complexities of their lives so that you can educate the whole child, not just the data point. Every student has a story and those stories provide latent needs for their educational experiences.
Questions to consider
When you are building empathy, you can use interview questions to help students feel a sense of belonging in your classroom. This connection will help you design with your students in mind.
What does feeling a sense of belonging mean to you? Tell me more about that. What makes you think that?
Tell me about a time when you felt like you belonged in your classroom.
Tell me about a time when you felt that you did not belong in your classroom.
Is there anything you would want to improve about our classroom learning environment?
Empathy Resources
The Co-Designing Schools Toolkit helps build the capacity of school communities to set and pursue equity aspirations, so that every student is future-ready, no matter who they are, where they live, or how they learn.
Tools for Change come from The Teachers Guild x School Retool’s new Co-Designing Schools Toolkit. These resources are designed to lead you through a design journey that surfaces solutions for students furthest from opportunity in your school community. Work through each phase in order or choose a specific phase that best fits your team's needs. Phase 3: Get to know your students will help you learn about the lived experiences and needs of your students to better design learning experiences for your students.
Thanks for reading! Have a great week.
—Adrian
This is such a powerful reflection. Thank you for articulating this so clearly. It makes me rethink what meaningful education should feel like. https://slopeio.org