How to understand what another person is feeling and experiencing — not just what they are saying. Empathy is the foundation of genuine human connection, good communication, effective leadership, and moral life. It can be developed and practised, and it is more complex and more important than it first appears.
Empathy at Early Years level is about helping children develop the foundational understanding that other people have inner lives — feelings, experiences, and perspectives that are real and important, and that may be different from their own. This is called theory of mind — the understanding that others have mental states that differ from your own — and it develops rapidly between the ages of three and five. Most young children are in the process of this development and benefit enormously from explicit teaching and modelling. The most important thing a teacher can do for empathy at this level is to name and validate emotions consistently and generously — both in the classroom and in response to conflict. When children fight over a toy, the empathy lesson is not the rule about sharing but the acknowledgement of what both children feel: you really wanted that toy and you feel angry that your friend took it. Your friend also really wanted it. Can you both feel how the other person feels? In many cultural contexts, emotional expression is gendered — boys are discouraged from expressing sadness or fear; girls from expressing anger. Teachers who name and validate the full range of emotions for all children — and who model this in their own responses — do some of the most important work in emotional education. No materials are needed for any activity below. Empathy is taught through relationship and response, not through worksheets.
Two figures where the helping person is clearly oriented towards the other — listening, being close, perhaps with a hand on the shoulder. The completion names a specific emotion and a specific empathic action: listening, sitting nearby, saying they understand.
Ask: what is the helper NOT doing? This often reveals as much as what they are doing — not giving advice, not telling the person how to feel, not looking at something else while the person talks.
A time when someone really understood how I was feeling was when I was very nervous about reciting something in front of the whole school. My older sister showed it by sitting with me the evening before and asking me to tell her what I was most worried about, and really listening to my answer without telling me I would be fine. It made me feel less alone with the fear, even though I was still nervous.
The showed it by is the most important part — it reveals what empathy looks like in practice. Celebrate specific and genuine memories. If children cannot think of a time, they can write about a time they understood someone else's feelings.
Empathy means feeling the same thing as the other person.
Empathy means understanding what another person feels — not necessarily feeling the same thing yourself. You can understand that someone is devastated by a loss without being devastated yourself. In fact, if you become overwhelmed by the other person's emotion, you may find it harder to be genuinely helpful. The goal is to understand, not to be identical. This distinction is important: it means empathy does not require you to have had the same experience — it requires curiosity, attention, and imagination.
To be empathic, you need to make the person feel better.
The goal of empathy is for the person to feel understood — which is different from feeling better. Sometimes people do not want to feel better yet. Sometimes they need to sit with a difficult feeling before they can move through it. Jumping to making someone feel better — by offering solutions, minimising the problem, or telling them how to feel differently — often makes them feel less understood, not more. The most empathic response is often the simplest: I can see this is really hard. I am here.
Some people are just naturally empathic and others are not.
Empathy is a skill that can be developed through practice, just like any other skill. Research shows that deliberate perspective-taking exercises, training in recognising emotional expressions, and explicit reflection on other people's experience all increase empathic ability. Cultural context matters — some environments develop empathy more than others — but no one is born incapable of empathy (except in specific neurological conditions) and almost everyone can become more empathic with the right experiences and practice.
Empathy at primary level introduces students to the important distinction between different types of empathic response and the genuine complexity of empathic understanding. The most important distinction to establish is between empathy (understanding another's experience from the inside), sympathy (feeling for someone from the outside — usually pity or concern without genuine understanding of their experience), and compassion (being moved by another's suffering and motivated to help, which can exist with or without full empathic understanding).
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person's thoughts, feelings, and perspective — to know what they are experiencing. Affective empathy is the tendency to feel what another person feels — to be emotionally moved by their emotional state. Both are components of empathy, and they can be dissociated: a skilled negotiator or therapist needs high cognitive empathy (to understand the other person's position accurately) and regulated affective empathy (to be emotionally present but not overwhelmed). A person who experiences high affective empathy but low cognitive empathy may be moved by others' suffering without understanding its cause.
The most important barriers to empathy include similarity bias (we find it easier to empathise with people similar to ourselves), the dehumanisation that occurs when we encounter out-groups, the cognitive overload of extended empathy work, and the defensive reactions we have to feelings that are uncomfortable. In classroom contexts, the most common barrier is the rush to solution — teachers and students who want to help often jump to advice and problem-solving before genuinely engaging with how the other person feels. The limits of empathy: it is important to teach students that empathy has real limits. Empathy based on our own experience can be misleading when the other person's experience is genuinely different from anything we have known. Empathy can be exhausting and produce compassion fatigue in people whose work requires sustained empathic engagement. And empathy is not a substitute for systemic change — feeling others' suffering does not necessarily produce the political action needed to address its causes.
I find it easiest to empathise with my younger siblings and with people who are clearly sad or frightened, because I have experienced similar feelings and I find it natural to respond to visible distress. I find it hardest to empathise with people who have done something I consider wrong or unfair — when someone has hurt someone I care about, I find it very difficult to hold any space for understanding their perspective, even when I know it would help resolve the conflict. My strongest empathic skill is probably active listening — people often tell me they feel heard after talking to me. The limit I most want to work on is my tendency to jump to advice when someone is distressed, rather than staying in the listening and understanding phase longer — I think I do this because their discomfort makes me uncomfortable and I want to fix it quickly.
Award marks for genuine honesty and specificity. The most valuable answers will show awareness of the connection between the student's own emotional patterns and their empathic tendencies — for example, that the drive to offer solutions is about managing one's own discomfort rather than meeting the other person's need.
The person was a classmate who had cheated in an important test and was later caught and punished. I found it very difficult to empathise with them because I had worked hard for my own result and felt that their cheating was unfair. What I felt was anger and satisfaction when they were punished. Looking back, I could have tried to understand what had made them feel desperate enough to cheat — pressure from family, fear of failure, perhaps a home situation that had made study impossible. A more empathic response would not have meant approving of the cheating, but it would have meant separating the action from the person and recognising that they were probably in more distress than I gave them credit for.
Award marks for genuine honesty about the difficulty rather than a retrospective claim to have been empathic when you were not. The most valuable answers will show that empathy does not require condoning actions — that you can understand how someone came to do something without agreeing that it was right. This distinction between empathy and approval is one of the most important and most misunderstood aspects of empathic understanding.
Empathising with someone means agreeing with them or approving of their behaviour.
Empathy is about understanding, not agreement or approval. You can fully understand how someone came to do something wrong — the pressures, fears, and experiences that led to their action — without approving of it or excusing it. In fact, genuinely empathising with someone often makes it possible to respond to their behaviour more effectively, because you understand the actual motivations rather than only the surface action. The confusion between understanding and approval is one of the most common misunderstandings about empathy.
To help someone effectively, you need to have had the same experience they have.
Shared experience helps build the raw material of empathy but is not required for empathic understanding. A doctor who has never had cancer can genuinely understand a patient's experience by listening carefully, asking good questions, and using imagination and knowledge to enter the patient's perspective. What matters is the quality of attention, curiosity, and imagination brought to understanding — not whether you have lived the same thing. In fact, over-relying on your own experience can produce misunderstanding: assuming that because you felt X in situation Y, the person you are trying to help also feels X.
Empathy is a feeling — you either feel it or you do not.
Empathy includes a cognitive component — the deliberate effort to understand another's perspective — that can be practised and strengthened regardless of how you feel in the moment. Research by Sara Hodges and others shows that explicitly instructing people to take another's perspective produces significant increases in empathic accuracy. You can choose to make the effort of empathy even when you do not naturally or immediately feel empathic towards a person — and that deliberate effort produces genuine understanding. Empathy is as much a decision as a feeling.
More empathy is always better.
Research by psychologist Paul Bloom and others suggests that empathy — particularly affective empathy — has real limitations as a moral guide. Empathy is naturally stronger towards people who are similar to us, who are physically present, and who are identifiable as individuals — meaning it produces moral responses that are biased towards the familiar and the near. Statistical suffering (thousands dying from a preventable disease) typically generates less empathy than the suffering of one identifiable individual. Bloom argues that compassion — caring about others' welfare without necessarily feeling their feelings — may be a more reliable guide to moral action than empathy. This is a genuine intellectual debate and one that secondary students are ready to engage with.
Secondary empathy teaching engages students with the genuine intellectual complexity of empathy — its neuroscience, its limits as a moral guide, its role in conflict and healing, and the conditions under which it can be cultivated. The neuroscience: research on mirror neurons — discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues — showed that specific brain cells fire both when an action is performed and when the same action is observed in another person. This finding has been connected to empathy, though the relationship is more complex than initial reports suggested. More broadly, social neuroscience has mapped a set of brain regions collectively called the social brain that are involved in understanding other minds, including the temporoparietal junction, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Research on empathic accuracy by William Ickes shows that people are significantly better at accurately understanding close friends and partners than strangers — but also that shared demographic characteristics produce only modest improvements in empathic accuracy.
Psychologist Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy (2016) argues that affective empathy — feeling what others feel — is a poor guide to moral action because it is innumerate (one identifiable person generates more empathy than statistical millions), parochial (we empathise more with in-group members), and potentially misleading (feeling someone's distress may produce reactive action rather than considered, effective action). He argues for what he calls rational compassion — caring about others' welfare, being motivated to help, without necessarily feeling their feelings. This is a genuine and important intellectual debate.
Research on contact theory — Gordon Allport's hypothesis that contact between groups reduces prejudice and increases empathy — shows that contact produces these effects only under specific conditions: equal status, common goals, institutional support, and genuine personal interaction. Simply placing conflicting groups in proximity without these conditions can increase rather than decrease hostility.
Empathy is a uniquely human capacity — animals do not have it.
Research in animal behaviour, particularly with great apes, elephants, and dolphins, has documented behaviours consistent with empathy — consoling distressed group members, sharing in others' emotional states, helping without apparent self-interest. Frans de Waal's research on primate empathy is particularly well-documented. This does not mean that non-human empathy is identical to human empathy — human theory of mind is significantly more complex. But the claim that empathy is uniquely human overstates the difference between humans and other social animals.
People who show little empathy are morally deficient or dangerous.
Low empathy arises from many different sources — including autism spectrum conditions, where reduced affective empathy often coexists with high cognitive empathy and strong ethical values; personality variations that are not pathological; cultural contexts in which empathic display is not the norm; and specific neurological conditions. The relationship between empathy and moral behaviour is not as simple as more empathy equals more moral. Research by Simon Baron-Cohen and others distinguishes between different types of empathy processing and shows that the relationship to moral action depends heavily on how empathy is regulated and directed.
Contact between different groups automatically increases empathy and reduces prejudice.
Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis showed that contact reduces prejudice only under specific conditions: equal status between groups, common goals, institutional support, and genuine personal interaction. Contact without these conditions — such as contact under conditions of competition, unequal power, or institutional indifference — can increase rather than reduce prejudice and hostility. This is an important caveat for diversity programmes, integration policies, and peace-building initiatives that assume exposure alone will produce understanding.
Women are naturally more empathic than men.
Research on gender and empathy is complex. Studies using self-report measures consistently find women reporting higher empathy than men. Studies using objective behavioural measures — empathic accuracy, physiological response to others' distress — find smaller differences. Research by Tania Singer and others suggests that men show reduced empathic neural response specifically towards out-group members who are perceived as having behaved unfairly — not a general empathy deficit. The gender differences that exist appear to reflect socialization and cultural expectations more than innate biological difference — and both men and women show significant empathic capacity when motivated to use it.
Key texts and resources: Paul Bloom's Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016, Ecco) is the most important intellectual challenge to empathy as a moral guide — readable and provocative. Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy (2009, Harmony) provides the evolutionary and primatological perspective, documenting empathy-related behaviour in non-human animals. Roman Krznaric's Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (2014, Rider) is the most accessible and practically oriented book on developing empathy, with specific attention to empathy across social and cultural difference. Brené Brown's work on empathy versus sympathy is available through her TED talks (the three-minute animation on empathy versus sympathy is freely available on YouTube and excellent for classroom use) and her books Daring Greatly (2012) and The Gifts of Imperfection (2010). For the neuroscience: Tania Singer's research group at the Max Planck Institute has published extensively on the neuroscience of empathy and compassion — many papers are freely available. For empathy and literature: David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano's research on fiction and theory of mind is freely available in academic journals; Raymond Mar's review articles on fiction and social cognition provide broader context. For restorative practice: Howard Zehr's Changing Lenses (1990) is the foundational text on restorative justice; for school contexts, Margaret Thorsborne and Peta Blood's Implementing Restorative Practices in Schools (2013) is directly applicable. For structural empathy and social justice: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress both implicitly theorise structural empathy as part of liberatory education practice.
Your feedback helps other teachers and helps us improve TeachAnyClass.