The Lost Art of Empathy in Classrooms
Steps for moving from quick judgement to genuine connections
Do your students understand Empathy?
A comment in class becomes a joke at someone’s expense. A mistake turns into embarrassment that travels from class to class. Students listen just long enough to disagree or to react.
Outside school, many students are surrounded by quick takes and hot opinions. Thinking about the impact of their words is rarely the priority. The pattern is simple. Decide fast. Judge faster. Move on. Inside your classroom, that same pattern can quietly poison peer relationships, group work, and discussion.
In one of her most shared short videos on Empathy, Brené Brown explains and demonstrates what empathy looks and sounds like.
Empathy fuels connection. It is not about cheering people up or finding the silver lining in a problem. It is about sitting with someone long enough to understand. It is about hearing what they are saying. It is not to make it better or to solve the problem. It is to listen and connect.
Brown draws on nursing scholar Teresa Wiseman, who describes four qualities of empathy: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion in other people, and communicating that recognition.
Together, these four qualities give us a simple lens for helping students move from quick judgment to genuine connection in everyday classroom moments.
Brown also describes empathy as a skill set of compassion, an emotional capacity that grows as we practice three moves in real time: Stay curious. Listen fully. Believe what we are told. Believe, even when it does not match our own perception.
When we teach students to stay curious, to listen, and to believe, we give them a concrete way to live out those four qualities in their daily life with classmates.
👀 Perspective Taking
Seeing through someone else’s eyes
Perspective taking is the ability to see a situation from another person’s point of view, or at least to recognize that their perspective is real for them. As Brené Brown puts it, their perspective is their truth.
In classrooms, students are quick to judge, “I would never do that,” therefore, they must be wrong.
Teachers can slip into the same pattern. “Everyone should have their homework. It was so easy.”
Perspective taking invites a different question and allows for a different point of view.
Why might students not have their homework? Your perspective may change when you understand why the student is not doing homework.
If I were responsible for feeding and caring for my younger siblings every day, I might not have time to do my homework either.
You can build this into everyday lessons, simply by asking what a moment feels like from a character’s, a historical figure’s, or a struggling student’s point of view.
Once students have tried perspective taking in a few different contexts, you can invite them to deepen it through brief empathy interviews. In these conversations, students sit with a partner and simply ask what school feels like from that person’s point of view. (Multiple resources can be found in the BZ strategy link above. See video for more app info).
During these interviews, students practice three concrete moves that bring empathy to life. They stay curious instead of assuming they already know the answer. They listen for stories rather than short reactions. They believe what their partner shares about their experience.
To help students generate their own questions, consider using the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). The QFT is a simple classroom routine that teaches students how to ask more open, thoughtful, and empathetic questions. An overview and free resources are available here.
👩🏽⚖️ Staying Out of Judgment
Brown states that we cannot be empathetic and judgmental at the same time. Empathy requires suspending all judgment to fully understand another person’s perspective and feelings, even if we have not shared their exact experience. The second we start sizing someone up, we stop really listening to them.
In middle and high school, judgment is everywhere. What someone wears. How they talk. Who they sit with. How smart or dumb they are.
One comment, one test score, one outfit can become a fixed story.
She is so dramatic. He never cares. They are always rude.
A hard truth is that we often judge most harshly in the places we feel most vulnerable ourselves.
A student who is anxious about reading aloud may roll their eyes when someone else stumbles. A teacher who feels shaky with classroom management may label minor off-task moments as “defiance.”
The cost is connection. We cannot feel seen, heard, and valued while we also fear being judged by our peers, colleagues, or administrators.
Ultimately, staying out of judgment is an act of courage and vulnerability that is essential for fostering empathy, building genuine connections, and living a wholehearted life.
Check out From Judging to Understanding, a strategy that helps students move from automatic judgment to thoughtful inquiry by using Judgemental Statement Cards to reframe assumptions into insight and build a more reflective, connected classroom.
💗 Recognizing Emotion in Other People
To recognize emotion in someone else, you must be in touch with your own feelings. Empathy is not about having the exact same experience. It is about connecting to the feeling the other person is experiencing by tapping into a time you felt something similar.
Our role is not to judge how a student feels, but to recognize their perspective as their truth, even if it does not align with our own. If a child feels, “That is not fair,” that is their reality. We have all felt something was not fair, and empathy means responding from that perspective.
Recognizing emotion starts with paying attention to nonverbal cues like tone of voice and body language. The way a student walks into the room and drops their backpack. The eye contact and engagement you see with their peers.
We do not have to read nonverbal cues perfectly. We do have to care enough to wonder and ask questions. “Is everything okay, do you need to talk”
In class, you can model this in simple ways.
“You seem very frustrated, how can I help”
“I notice you put your head down during our class discussion. I wonder if you wanted to share”
As students build a richer vocabulary for emotions, they get better at recognizing more than mad or sad. They can name feeling embarrassed, left out, nervous, disappointed, relieved, or hopeful. The more precise their language, the easier it becomes to see what someone else might be feeling too.
Brown’s research identified eighty-seven distinct emotions. Most of us can name only a few in the moment, usually some version of happy, sad, or mad. When we help students expand their emotional vocabulary, we are not just adding more words. We are giving them the tools to notice more accurately what they feel and what others might be feeling. That accuracy makes empathy more possible.
Recognizing emotion does not mean we always get it right. It means we are willing to look again and to care about what is happening under the surface.
🗣️ Communicating That Recognition
The next step is letting someone know you see what they are going through. This is where many of us rush to fix things or dismiss them.
A student may feel disappointed and embarrassed with a D on the last test. However, responding to their emotions with statements such as, “At least you still passed. At least it was not as bad as it could have been” are not helpful or empathetic.
Comments like these are usually meant to help, but they send a quiet message. Your feeling is too big. I need to shrink it.
Empathy sounds different. It does not try to make it better. It tries to make it less lonely. That might sound like: “It sounds like the test was really hard,” or “I can see why you would feel that way.”
You can teach students to respond to one another in similar ways during pair shares, circles, or group work. Before they speak, invite them to try a connecting line first.
🌱 Empathy In The Classroom
Empathy in the classroom lives in small, everyday moments. Listen to a student’s story and let it stay theirs.
This is what Brown calls story stewardship, listening with care, reflecting back what you hear, and resisting the urge to fix or reframe.
When we rush to explain or improve a student’s experience, we slide into narrative takeover, and their perspective can feel dismissed.
This week, pause to notice a student’s emotion and ask one open question. Listen fully before you speak, and invite students to do the same.
That’s it for now,
Thanks for reading Shift Happens
Debbie and the BZ Team
Would love to hear your feedback and would appreciate your checking out the app