Listening with Empathy & Understanding
When I first introduced the term "empathy" to my classes, none of my scholars knew what it meant. Everyone who had heard the word thought that it was a synonym for "sympathy," so I developed a short lesson and activity to help scholars distinguish between the two. First, we watched the video below. Then, working in groups, we created three-column charts showing both sympathetic and empathetic reactions to common situations that arise in our lives. My scholars really applied themselves to this activity, and they quickly came to realize that putting themselves in other people's shoes—as the video puts it, "feeling with people"—and drawing connections to their own personal experiences when communicating with others are critical to empathizing. It is natural to feel sympathy in many situations, but I have challenged my scholars to identify ways that they can move beyond that and demonstrate empathy as much as possible within our community.
Video (above) and chart (right) for teaching about sympathy and empathy. I stopped the video at 1:55 during the lesson because the examples it uses are much more relevant to adults than they are to middle schoolers. However, it was still a very effective teaching tool.
The three-column chart that I used for this lesson has quickly become one of my favorite teaching tools. The one shown above is actually not the one I used in my original lesson. This one was written by my seventh grade girls during a period in which they were creating a lot of drama with one another. I invited them all to my room during lunch one day to draw a new version of the chart and work on relating to each other with more empathy, and the activity was a great success. Indeed, by the end, my students were getting along splendidly and clamoring for more challenging "empathy problems" (i.e., situations). This led to an excellent discussion about how I might be able to show empathy for a black student experiencing racism despite our differing races.
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Listening with empathy and understanding has become a hallmark of my students’ approach to learning. My classes spend about two-thirds of their lessons working together in small groups, so my students get a great deal of practice collaborating, respectfully disagreeing with peers, and giving and receiving feedback. Most of my scholars report that they prefer to work in groups, and it is easy to see why. I observe immense social intelligence as my students make sure that everyone knows what the task is and how he or she can help the group complete it. I watch scholars check their work with that of peers to ensure accuracy and precision in their answers. Some student leaders have even figured out strategies for replicating the answer keys that I provide so that everyone can check his or her answers more quickly. All of this leads to richer learning experiences for everyone involved.
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I support this culture of interdependent inquiry and teamwork by modeling empathy and understanding at all times. I always give students notes using a Socratic style of discourse that involves facilitating a lot of discussion and questioning. This approach leads to enthusiastic, vigorous conversations characterized by open-minded consideration of other viewpoints. My scholars express that consideration through "accountable talk stems" like "I want to build on what [name] said" and "I disagree with [name] because]...."Throughout the year, my students have even learned to anticipate the sorts of questions that I ask to foster discussion, and they are now experts at facilitating conversations with minimal assistance from me. All of my scholars know that they are responsible for listening respectfully to each other and considering other people’s approaches to a problem. Indeed, I frequently ask students to "feel with" a classmate by putting themselves in his or her shoes and explaining what he or she might be thinking based on his or her response to a question.
Eighth grade scholars debating whether emancipation benefitted black or white Americans more. This conversation was the warm-up for an interdisciplinary lesson that taught students about both the Reconstruction era and bivariate data tables. Although the natural rhythm of the accountable talk stems is somewhat lost because I have had to edit out scholar names, note that each comment begins with reference to a prior contribution to the conversation. We practice demonstrating empathy for each other's positions in this manner so much that my scholars all do it automatically by the end of the first semester.
Recently, I have begun incorporating more activities about listening with empathy and understanding into our community meetings. In February, I adapted an exercise that was originally designed to help autistic students build social skills for our entire middle school. Scholars sat in small groups and received printed cards with short personal narratives on them. They took turns reading the cards and offering their classmates advice for addressing their problems. The catch was that offering the advice was worth only one point. In order to earn more, scholars had to demonstrate empathy by connecting the problem to one in their own lives and using that to shape and inform their reaction. This helped them to draw a clear distinction between sympathetic and empathetic support. Whereas a sympathetic listener merely commiserates with a problem, an empathetic listener tries to put himself or herself in the other person's position while offering guidance. This activity proved to be a very powerful experience for many scholars; indeed, it is the empathy exercise mentioned in the quote below.
Example stories from the empathy activity. Despite the simple drawings, scholars were very eager to earn empathy points and shared a lot of real personal stories with each other to do so.
"A lot of people go through [situations in which they want to be shown empathy]. And the people who used to [treat people unkindly], they summed it down [after the empathy exercise in the community meeting]. That's an expression for 'they calmed down' in terms of how they were treating other people."
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7th Grade Scholar
Student graphic organizer about how listening with empathy and understanding looks, sounds, and feels in the classroom. This "Y-Chart" was made and presented as a group activity during one of our weekly community meetings.
My students have also learned a great deal from exposure to a tool that I call "empathy maps." The key to empathy maps is that scholars make them based on stories that other people tell them. If two scholars are having a conflict, for example, I might ask them to make empathy maps for each other. Each writes the other's name in the middle of the map and then listens to the other person to determine how he or she felt, what he or she thought, what he or she said, and what he or she did. They then seek to find common ground between the maps that they have made for each other.
One of my favorite aspects of empathy mapping is that it has the potential to bring together very different scholars. Especially when scholars complete maps with a partner outside of the context of an interpersonal disagreement, they often identify interesting shared experiences that bring them closer together. Furthermore, empathy maps can be extraordinarily helpful for scholars with special needs. It can sometimes be difficult for students with autism, emotional disturbances, and intellectual disabilities to relate to their classmates, and empathy maps give them a visual tool for doing so. Even when two scholars have extremely different mental abilities, they can learn a lot from creating empathy maps with one another.
Examples of empathy maps. Remember that the names blacked out in the middles of the maps are the names of the writers' partners. The scholars whose maps appear on pages 1 and 2 had gone to school together since kindergarten but had never realized until the empathy mapping exercise that they both associate cooking with feelings of loneliness and sadness. This point of connection brought them closer than they had been previously.The scholars whose maps appear on pages 1 and 3 both have very acute special needs (intellectual disability and autism, respectively), and empathy mapping proved to be a productive activity for both of them. Indeed, the scholar whose map appears on page 3 was more engaged in this activity than in any other that I have observed this year.
I also use apology letters to help students understand the consequences of their actions with increased empathy. Especially when a student says something that might hurt another member of our community, I tend to assign an apology letter rather than giving the student a more typical consequence like a silent lunch period or indoor recess. When I first arrived at my school, apology letters were not common practice and some students and parents were resistant to them. However, they are now utilized on a regular basis by many educators within our building. Scholars who write apology letters tend to internalize why they are being disciplined and have a better sense of how to make good choices in the future. Furthermore, apology letters periodically give teachers more context for understanding an incident. In fact, I encourage scholars who feel that they are being punished unjustly to advocate for themselves through their writing, and such letters frequently lead to very interesting and productive conversations about why a scholar made certain choices.
Student apology letters. To the left is a single letter from a student who called a classmate "gay" to belittle him. The scholar applied an empathetic mindset and connected his apology to his own experiences being teased and bullied. To the right is a PDF of several apology letters that were written by middle schoolers during a March "culture reset." Our students were getting restless and acting out in the weeks leading up to Spring Break, and the principal required an apology letter from every student as a ticket back to recess. I was very proud to see my "go-to" consequence being used with the entire middle school, and many of our scholars wrote deeply empathetic reflections about the choices they were making.