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Classroom Activities to Cultivate Empathy

Despite the many challenges students face to building empathy, the fact is that it is necessary for proper development. There are many different strategies to accomplish this — from interactions with students, to curriculum changes, to whole school events that can help cultivate empathy and create a community of students and staff who have genuine connections.

As a teacher, it can feel daunting to have to add social-emotional learning into an already packed curriculum. However, social-emotional learning, particularly building empathy, is actually extremely helpful in cultivating academic skills. We have developed several strategies that can be adapted so that they can be “folded” into the academic tasks that teachers might already use with their students. With a few mindful alterations, cultivating empathy can be easily built into most academic routines.

Present Different Perspectives

One of the most essential strategies for cultivating empathy and celebrating diversity is to include different perspectives throughout the curriculum. Too often, the curriculum only reflects the dominant culture in America, which tends to be white, heterosexual, and Christian. Even the structure of the school year is based on these values, with holidays off for Christian celebrations, but not other religions in most parts of the country. This does a disservice to our diverse youth population, which is only growing more diverse each year. Although as educators, we can’t change the district school calendar, there are ways to incorporate more diverse perspectives in our teaching that celebrate students from all backgrounds.

Including Diverse Characters

When assigning students to read fiction, it’s important to choose literature that includes characters from different backgrounds. Consider choosing stories that have characters that reflect not only the backgrounds of the students in your classroom, but also the backgrounds that aren’t represented. When reading these stories together, help facilitate discussions where students can relate to the characters and understand how their diverse backgrounds influence their choices, emotions, and behavior.

Another option for adding diversity to your reading is to create a more diverse classroom library and give students time for choice reading. Creating a diverse array of perspectives in your classroom library allows students to have windows into different ideas, cultures, and experiences that may not otherwise be available in their local community. Choosing to include perspectives from cultures that are not the dominant culture in your community also helps bring a more diverse view of the world to your students. This practice also helps cultivate empathy. Allowing time for choice reading gives students a chance to pursue interests that they might not have even realized they had. Part of cultivating empathy is understanding there are different perspectives and experiences in the world and having an open mind and curiosity toward these differing points of view.

Taking on a Different Perspective

Related to the above strategies is perspective-taking. In perspective-taking, students are asked to assume the perspective of another and answer questions from their point of view. When reading fiction, this can manifest as asking students to write a letter or journal entry from the perspective of one of the characters. Or you can take on a more scientific or historic perspective to present facts and information to the class. Challenging students to take on different perspectives is a great way to challenge their social-emotional skills to help develop empathy in the classroom.

Challenging Student Ideas

Another way to introduce diverse perspectives in the curriculum is to help students challenge their preconceived notions about a topic by presenting facts and figures that help address gaps in their knowledge. One strategy for challenging students’ preconceived notions is to use an anticipation guide with common misconceptions. An activity like this can be a great starter to a class. Consider creating a true or false worksheet where students can address common misconceptions. Then, the lesson can take students through each one to address their ideas and help present a different perspective. Students particularly love to guess if ideas are true or false and argue about who is right, so this activity usually leads to high engagement. You can also further gamify this activity and use an electronic quiz system, such as Kahoot! to increase student engagement.

Active Listening

Active listening is an active learning strategy where people give a speaker their full attention so that they are truly tuned in to what is being said. When active listening is successfully practiced, students not only listen to the speaker's words, but they also observe the speaker’s non-verbal cues like body language, as well as other verbal cues like tone and intonation. Active listening is a full sensory experience and a great way for students to build empathy and understanding of others. Even as adults, it can be easy to tune out while people talk. It is equally possible to daydream or jump ahead to brainstorm what we might want to say in return, which is why active listening is a prized skill, especially when it comes to future employment. Since active listening doesn’t come naturally, everyone needs some practice to excel at this skill.

Luckily, there are some techniques that teachers can employ during academic classroom discussions to facilitate this important skill. For example, reading comprehension is a skill covered at most grades and reading levels. To sneak in some empathy training, pair students with a partner to discuss a recently read passage and have them go through some active listening drills. Start by having one partner share their opinion about what they’ve read while the other partner actively listens. Because the focus is on the speaker — and only the speaker — this necessitates asking students to be fully present. This means that all electronic devices need to be stowed away and “correct” body language is displayed (i.e., body language that implies attention and listening, such as eye contact and head nodding throughout the explanation). After the first partner shares their opinion, the second partner then explains what they heard. The first partner is then tasked with either confirming the summary or re-visiting their opinion to clarify any misunderstandings. Students then reverse the process so that the first partner now has an opportunity to practice active listening.

Although this strategy works great with all kinds of academic content, it can also be done in more of a social context to build connections and cultivate empathy between students. For example, students might share a challenge they have overcome, a great memory from the summer, or a “first” they experienced (first bike ride, first time riding a rollercoaster, first driving experience, etc.). When using active listening to build connections, the listening partner retells the story from the first-person point of view. This helps not only build connections, but it also truly embodies empathy as students take on the perspective of their partner.

Collaboration

Group work and partner collaboration is a great way to build empathy skills into the academic school day. Working with a team inherently requires skills of empathy, kindness, and collaboration, and using this strategy with some specific constraints and guidance is an excellent way to help build these skills in students. Group work can be challenging for teachers, but not all students like it equally. In fact, there is a good chance that some students might push back, insisting that group work isn’t fair, and the work isn’t divided equally. Since students don’t necessarily have the communication or empathy skills to do amazing group work yet, certain structures and scaffolds, such as the following, must be added to help them be more successful.

1. Heterogenous groupings. No matter how you decide to group students, it should be intentional. Letting students choose their own groups often leads to groups that are unbalanced or have a proclivity for too much socializing. There are two main ways that teachers can group students, heterogeneously and homogeneously. In heterogeneous groupings, students of differing skills and ability levels are grouped together. This is excellent for building empathy, compassion, and collaboration. Students with differing skills and interests can contribute differently to the group work and ultimately help each other understand the value of diversity in a real-life setting. However, heterogeneous groups can sometimes be challenging, especially if students don’t know how to divide the work in such a way that plays to their strengths. In this case, roles can be a helpful tool to get around this issue so that a proper division of labor can be modeled.
2. Homogenous groupings. Another option is to group students homogenously, meaning students of similar skills and ability levels are grouped together. This type of grouping can be helpful if there are specific options for project deliverables that might be better suited to students who have similar interests or strengths. Another benefit to homogenous grouping is that teachers can target students who need specific supports, such as reading comprehension, while other groups can be more self-directed. The obvious downside to homogenous groups is that students might notice a trend in the pairings and feel slighted by their group assignment. This, unfortunately, has the potential to decrease students’ exposure to academic diversity and can lead to feelings of resentment.
3. Assigning roles.One of the ways to get around the challenges of grouping issues is to assign roles to students. When you are first using collaborative group work as a teaching and learning tool, it can help to assign roles to students within the group, as this models how to properly divide the labor. As students get more experienced, they can start to choose roles for themselves.

Building empathy doesn’t have to take time away from academics. With the strategies above, empathy can be incorporated into academic learning, which in turn helps students build their social-emotional skills while keeping on track with standards-based learning.

Are you curious? Want to take a deep dive on this topic?

To learn more about cultivating empathy in your classroom, visit the Professional Development Institute (PDI) website or our Social, Emotional, and Physical Wellness for Students and Teachers course.

For over 27 years, PDI has provided high-quality and affordable online professional development courses to K-12 teachers worldwide. Our online courses are designed to offer practical strategies that can be implemented in classrooms immediately. All our courses are instructor-led and conducted entirely online. Graduate-level university credit for every PDI online course for teachers is available through the University of California San Diego Division of Extended Studies. PDI offers an extensive catalog of online courses that cover the most critical topics in today's classrooms.