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Today's educational setting is often focused on teaching rigorous standards and preparing students for local and national assessments. Math, reading, history, and science are essential core subjects that are being introduced as early as pre-school. However, in order to be successful, students must develop the ability to get along with others, to work cooperatively, and to express one's thoughts and feelings productively. These skills can be taught through social-emotional training.

What is Social-Emotional Learning?

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) focuses on developing interpersonal skills necessary for building relationships in and outside of school. It begins with a focus on self-awareness and knowing one's own emotional cues. Once students understand their own emotions, they can learn to recognize others' feelings and develop empathy. In an attempt to enhance these skills, schools are realizing the need to embed social and emotional skills within the curriculum.

The Importance of Teaching Empathy and Kindness

While the vision and mission of schools may differ, the goal of educating students is to prepare them for life, including becoming productive citizens in the global workforce. For this reason, it is vital that students begin at an early age to develop the skills necessary for building relationships and resolving conflicts. This starts by teaching children to understand emotions, how they drive their actions, and ways the students can self-regulate to be more productive. Once students grasp their own feelings, they are able to apply that knowledge to others.

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of another person. Because it is human nature to be self-centered, students must be taught to empathize. According to Stephen Young, a research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership, there are three types of empathy.

Affective empathy: Allows people to experience similar emotions as others are experiencing. An example would be feeling sad when another person experiences a sad event in their life, such as loss of a loved one.

Behavioral empathy: Reacting with verbal and nonverbal behaviors that demonstrate an understanding for others' thoughts and feelings. An example would be spontaneously clapping when a classmate accomplished a difficult task.

Cognitive empathy: Enables people to understand others' thoughts and feelings. An example would be knowing that a friend feels pain when she drops a heavy book on her foot.

Once students begin to develop empathy, they can learn ways to express kindness to build relationships with peers and adults. Kindness is doing something to make someone happy or to help them and expecting nothing in return. Students will soon discover that kind acts and empathy will help them to work cooperatively and make responsible decisions which leads to productive problem solving.

How to Teach Kindness and Empathy through Social-Emotional Learning

It is probably easy to understand why schools are adding SEL to their curriculum, but the strategies for teaching students empathy and kindness can be more difficult. Because each stage of development comes with its own sense of personal awareness and connections, teachers will want to address SEL for each age group strategically.

Pre-school and Early Elementary School

At this age, students will need to focus on self-awareness. Before they are able to relate to others, students need to be able to identify their own emotions and understand what generates those feelings. Teachers will want to acknowledge acts of kindness specifically by stating, "That was kind of you to share your crayons." Likewise, teachers can label what caused the feeling by making statements such as, "I am sure you were frustrated when you lost your shoe, but didn't you feel happy when you found it in the cubby?"

As students begin to develop a language for their emotions, the teacher can emphasize empathy by acknowledging and modeling empathetic gestures. Thinking aloud, a teacher might model this by saying, "I am sure you will be happy if I share my cookie with you. I know we both like these." Soon, students will be using these strategies with their peers in an effort to develop friendships and strengthen relationships.

Upper Elementary and Middle School

As students grow in understanding their own emotions and triggers, social emotional learning standards can be taught through a classroom culture that focuses on kindness. When students see respect, empathy, and kindness modeled, they are more likely to respond in similar ways; but it is not enough to just model social and emotional skills, these must be strategically and continually taught. This can be done through collaboration, where students are coached and guided through working with others in small groups.

Activities that allow students to actively listen and respond to a peer can further develop SEL skills. It is also important that the social emotional learning activities allow students to discuss how their emotions affect others, both positively and negatively. Participation in feeling surveys may be an effective tool to prompt discussion on the impact of one's actions. Knowing how one person influences another's feelings is a very important leadership trait. Likewise, it will enhance students' abilities to communicate effectively.

High School

As students begin to mold their true personalities and look toward developing future goals, it is time SEL focuses on building healthy relationships and resolving conflicts successfully. One way this can be done is by studying book characters who make good and bad choices and discussing the results of those decisions.

Another way to teach social and emotional skills at this age is through peer interactions. As students become involved in clubs and extra-curricular activities, these are great opportunities for sponsors to further develop SEL. These more intimate group settings provide occasions for adults to teach strategies for self-regulation and managing behaviors as they affect others' ability to maintain composure.

Social-Emotional Learning prepares students to navigate through a stressful and fast-paced society.

By continually spiraling SEL for students throughout their educational years, teachers are able to help students see the correlation between better behaviors and success. Through these lessons, students will develop empathy and be able to express kindness through strategies that will allow them to flourish throughout school and in their future high-demand careers.

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Teaching Kindness & Empathy through Social-Emotional Learning - TeachHUB

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Today's educational setting is often focused on teaching rigorous standards and preparing students for local and national assessments. Math, reading, history, and science are essential core subjects that are being introduced as early as pre-school. However, in order to be successful, students must develop the ability to get along with others, to work cooperatively, and to express one's thoughts and feelings productively.

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LibGuides: BTC: Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Resources: Empathy

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This guide to Booth Library's and the Ballenger Teachers Center's Social Emotional Learning (SEL) resources is grounded in the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Core SEL Competencies.

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Resources to help foster empathy in every classroom, every day.

Building SEL (social and emotional learning) skills such as empathy requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but there are tools that can supplement the development of character in the classroom and at home. According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, empathy is "the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling."

While some tools focus specifically on empathy, the websites and apps that you use daily (in all subjects) can be used to promote perspective taking, too. You don't have to stop using the tools you love or toss out your lesson or curricular plans to start developing SEL. Below we have included some tips, tools, and actionable ideas for seamlessly integrating empathy and life skills-building into your content classroom.

Why empathy?

Classrooms are complex, collaborative, and diverse spaces. An enriching, engaging, and supportive classroom environment is one in which students reflect on themselves and their peers as learners and as people, full of similarities and differences. A group culture that encourages trust and friendship -- that practices empathy -- functions better as a whole and can better tackle tough concepts. Some schools are recognizing how impactful empathy can be, like the one in Pennsylvania where students shared their deepest, most painful secrets before 500 of their peers. The leaders of this school believe that events like this -- free of criticism or judgment -- create openness and understanding rather than discord and isolation. It's through this cultivation of empathic students that schools become communities.

Take action

Don't be afraid to tackle hard topics as a class -- get students thinking about their similarities and differences.

Set high expectations, and find opportunities to help students see how their feelings are connected to behavior.

Treat each student as an individual, and use a problem-solving approach when helping them overcome an obstacle.

Make sure the technology you use doesn't take the place of, but instead supplements, face-to-face interaction.

Using our Digital Citizenship Curriculum? Both our student interactives and lessons already foster key SEL skills.

Use some other excellent SEL resources, including CASEL, Character Lab, Edutopia, and Ashoka.

Think about the digital tools you're already using in the classroom. Can you find a creative way to use them to model empathy? Check out our suggestions below!

Directly target empathy

See our Top Games That Teach Empathy list for more empathy-focused tools.

Peekapak
Each Peekapak topic (including empathy) consists of an introductory storybook, eight activities to do in the classroom, and eight activities to send home for kids to do with their parents. Lessons for grades K-5 help kids explore SEL concepts from a variety of angles.

Florence
This incredibly relatable story about navigating adult love and life has some mature themes, but the controls in the game are mapped so well to emotions that kids learn how to traverse the nuances of fresh relationships in a compassionate way.

Build empathy in all subjects

For ELA classrooms

Pictello
Have students use this storytelling app to upload pictures, videos, and their voices to illustrate an emotional experience in their lives or to describe likes and dislikes. Through sharing, students will begin to see what it's like for their peers.

Facing History and Ourselves
Use Facing History's resources to discuss and reflect on students' experiences and beliefs about tough topics such as racism and prejudice. Students can also create and share bio-poems as part of a community unit.

For math classrooms

Pattern Shapes
Ask students about personal situations and have them use the app to construct a depiction of their feelings. Students can annotate the design, and after that a discussion can help students learn from each other while they study geometric shapes.

Spent
Illustrate the crippling financial quandaries of poverty. Have students discuss their play, using correct finance terms such as "minimum wage" and "inflation," and host an honest talk about how Spent oversimplifies the issue of choice.

For science classrooms

TinkerCAD
Use this 3D-design tool to address people's needs. Students can research societal problems (such as water quality or climate change). Once they build understanding and empathy, they can go through design processes to create a prototype solution.

WWF Free Rivers
This augmented-reality app immerses students in a river ecosystem. Students will gain perspective as they learn how rivers affect people and wildlife. Have students discuss the pros and cons of building dams for historical societies and for their own community.

For social studies classrooms

Teaching Tolerance
Videos and photo essays depict life experiences around the world. Use the Mix It Up activities to have students identify social boundaries at school, and then have them use primary-source documents to find similar boundaries in history.

Global Oneness Project
This site showcases global life stories. Let students view the videos on climate change or sustainability, and then have them go out and create their own videos capturing a cultural experience in school or their own community.

For all classrooms

Shadow Puppet EDU
Start a project where students search for images directly in the app (from art museums or NASA) to tell a story of the personal connection they have to the book they read, the organism they observed, or an event in history. Share as a class.

Skype
Skype is great for communicating with students from around the world. Hook up with another class and have students share their stories, solve an engineering solution together, or practice another language to gain perspective about other cultures.

Engage families

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We All Teach SEL: Empathy Activities and Tools for Students | Common Sense Education

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Building SEL (social and emotional learning) skills such as empathy requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but there are tools that can supplement the development of character in the classroom and at home.