What is Empathy?

Like the idiom, “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” having empathy is the ability to understand what another person is going through. Yet empathy is also more than that. Having empathy means a person can feel what a situation has caused another to feel. It is a deeper understanding of that person’s experiences, challenges, and even their thought process.

What is Sympathy?

Easily put, sympathy is feeling sorrow for someone else. We often associate sympathy with the loss of a loved one or perhaps a terminal diagnosis. It can also mean feeling pity for the misfortune of another person; for instance, if a neighbor’s house has burned down, one might feel sympathy toward their loss.

What is the Difference?

The ending of these two words, “-pathy,” has its origins from the Greek word “pathos” which means to suffer. While these two emotions are similar, there are several differences. Sympathy is a judgmental response. The person feeling sympathy may not fully connect to or understand what the other person’s loss means to them. Empathy is a more profound connection toward the feeling of what someone else is going through as related to one’s own experiences.

Recently, teachers have developed their empathy as they work with students who have suffered losses and family-related stresses due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. A teacher may be sympathetic toward a student who has lost a loved one to the virus but will empathize by providing more time to work on computer-based assignments at school to the student whose parent has lost their job due to extensive quarantining.

Why are these Essential for Students to Have?

Through character-building activities, teachers often share the motto, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” To teach students to be both sympathetic and empathetic, this often comes through modeling. If students see the teacher respond sympathetically when someone in the room experiences a loss, then students may react in the same manner.

Teaching empathy often requires an educator to think out loud and walk students through why they respond in a caring way toward someone struggling with a new skill or stressor in their life. This modeling will encourage students to think about others before responding without thinking about how the other will feel as a result of their words or actions.

Activities that Promote Empathy and Sympathy

Teaching skills through social-emotional learning takes time and lots of practice on the student’s part. They are not skills that can be taught in isolation but rather should be practiced frequently. As a teacher observes the students interacting, different needs may arise for which the teacher can emphasize.

There are a variety of classroom activities that can be used to promote the development of empathy and sympathy skills.

Videos that Teach Emotional Skills

For younger students, there are lots of short videos appropriate for teaching empathy for others. Some speak directly to the topic, such as All About Empathy and What is Empathy, while others have characters demonstrating empathetic actions toward others. These allow the teacher to stop and discuss and provide modeling for students through trusted characters. There are even TED Talks and other coaching videos for students through high school ages.

Model Empathy and Sympathy

One of the best ways to teach an emotional reaction is to be a good role model. When students see a teacher ask another student how they are doing after returning from a family member’s funeral, they learn how to respond in similar situations appropriately. Likewise, when a teacher talks to students about how an event, such as an illness, made the teacher feel and asks if anyone else has ever felt the same way, the teacher develops a sense of understanding and connecting to others’ feelings.

Discussions about Emotions

For just a few minutes each day, a teacher can open a discussion about potential scenarios and the emotions each brings. These could be turn-and-talk activities in which partners discuss how they felt or might feel if they experienced a particular negative or positive event, such as: when a pet got lost, when they won the race, when they needed a hug but no one was around, when someone told them they had their shirt on backward at the end of the day, when their grandparent brought them an unexpected gift, etc. To extend this activity, have the children make a face that expresses that feeling.

Make it a Guessing Game

Teachers can also help students relate to others’ feelings by reading body language. For this activity, the teacher can display an image of someone making a specific face or showing body language that expresses an emotion. The teacher can then ask students to determine their feelings. To extend this, the students can develop ideas that might explain why this person feels this particular way. This allows students to read body language and connect their own experiences to the situation.

Listening Skills

Teaching children to be good listeners when explaining how they feel can be a challenging task. By nature, children want to interrupt and tell how they feel instead of listening and relating to that person. This skill can be taught, though.

A teacher can read a passage from a story and ask questions like:

• How is the character feeling?
• How can you tell the character is upset/excited/etc.?
• What made the character upset/excited/etc.?

Teachers can extend the activity by asking questions like:

• What would you do to help this character feel better if you were in the story?
• Have you felt this way, and if so, what made you feel this way?

Teaching children to sympathize and empathize with others will help build a culture of respect. Students must be able to see another’s perspective when going through stressful situations, although it is also essential that children understand they don’t have to solve someone else’s problem to be empathetic. By modeling and teaching these emotions, students will learn to give and receive appropriate responses to multiple situations in another’s life.

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Tech Resources for Teaching Empathy

One Globe Kids is a website as well as an app that lets kids travel virtually around the world. Users click on a friend to visit and then learn about them along the way. Each story accompanies activities that are designed to create feelings and relationships between the user and their “new friend” (though the stories are all pre-recorded and while they are interactive, there is no actual back and forth conversation in real time). Users can practice speaking other languages, see real photos of kids from different countries, and learn what their day-to-day lives are like. One Globe Kids helps students foster an appreciation for different cultures and costumes, build global knowledge, and develop culturally open attitudes. As an added bonus, there are free ELA Common Core lessons available to be used online and offline.

Who Am I: Race Awareness Game – Awarded as one of the top 100 products for parents, teachers, and kids, Who Am I: Race Awareness Game is a fun and educational two-player game. It teaches kids to think responsibly and openly about race and diversity through open dialogues about human physical and racial identification. How it works is that player 1 selects a target picture and player 2 asks ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions to try to figure out who player 1 is thinking of. The goal of Who Am I is to bring to life some of the fascinating anthropological, historical, and psychological insights about race. It sheds light on how race developed, how race is historically changing, and how race affects the everyday lives of people. Because children are learning about race from a very young age, it is critical that parents and teachers talk and educate about race. And Who Am I is a good place to start.

Step In—Step Out—Step Back is another great resource to foster empathy. Created by Harvard Graduate School of Education, Step In-Step Out-Step Back is a routine designed for nurturing a disposition to take social and cultural perspective responsibly. Students examine a person in a particular situation. They then try stepping into their shoes to imagine what they are experiencing. They step back out in order to identify what they need to learn to understand the person’s experience. Finally they step back into their shoes to observe their own reaction. Reflecting on what they notice during this activity, students learn what it involves to take on another’s point of view and see things from another lense.

Middle School Confidential – This graphic novel app may be just what you are looking for if you teach grades 5-8. It helps students learn to identify emotions, reflect on personal strengths or areas of weakness, learn to see different viewpoints, and put their own troubles into perspective. One idea for using this in the classroom is by placing students into groups where they can write alternative endings to the scenarios they explore on the app. Additionally, the end of the chapter quizzes are great opportunities to further discuss with your class the hardships of navigating through middle school.

Avokiddo Emotions – Preschool and Kindergarteners are sure to love this entertaining and educational app. Students learn to identify emotions by looking at facial expressions and reacting to stimuli. Users choose various props and change the backgrounds of their scenes. They then make predictions about how characters will respond to those changes. This app helps students grow empathy by looking at emotional cues and being aware of how others may be feeling in a given environment. To take this app a step further and bring it to life, have your students use classroom props and design their own backgrounds. Then, act out how others feel when they come into their different scenes.

Spent is a website aimed at grades 7-12. It has a text-based, choose-your-own adventure design. How it works is that players begin reading sentences that pop up on the screen saying that 14 Million Americans are unemployed….now imagine you’re one of them…you’re down to your last 1,000…can you make it through the next month? Users then decide on a job based on pay and desire. They then have to take into account childcare experiences, where you choose to live, transportation, etc. The goal is to survive a month within their budget. By learning about tough choices adults need to make, students build empathy for their parents and their community and begin thinking more broadly about life choices they will need to make.

Empathy is a way of connecting with other people that shows you understand they are experiencing something significant even if you don’t understand how that feels. It is an important concept to teach students so they can broaden their perspective about other people’s circumstances, behaviors, and hardships. By incorporating some of the above websites and apps, teachers can help their students start building empathy and, in return, better relate to their friends and members of their community.

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