Eight Ways to Teach Empathy in Your School

Q: What's the difference between empathy and sympathy?

Sympathy generally means feeling concern or sorrow for another person, while empathy involves trying to understand that person's experience or perspective. Researchers often distinguish cognitive empathy, which involves recognizing or understanding another person's perspective, from emotional empathy, which involves sharing some of another person's emotional response. Classroom activities can build perspective-taking and emotion recognition in developmentally appropriate ways.

Q: What age can you start teaching empathy?

Empathy-related skills can be taught beginning in early childhood, with activities adapted to students' developmental levels and individual needs. Younger students may practice naming emotions and recognizing how others feel, while older students can engage in more complex perspective-taking, service learning, restorative conversations, and discussion of people or viewpoints not physically present. These are flexible examples rather than fixed developmental milestones.

Q: Which of these may be possible at the classroom level?

Some empathy-building activities may be possible within a single classroom, including kindness recognition, reading and discussion focused on global perspectives, appropriately approved service-learning activities, and reflective exercises such as an empty-chair discussion. However, school and district policies may govern curriculum content, fundraising, charitable collections, student privacy, classroom technology, online communication, and partnerships with outside organizations. Activities requiring new curriculum, funding, or staff training generally need additional school or district approval.

Q: How do you know whether it's working?

Use multiple measures because no single indicator captures the full effect of an empathy or school-climate initiative. Schools can examine data such as office referrals, playground incidents, and bullying reports alongside validated student surveys measuring attitudes, relationships, and perceived school climate. Changes in reporting data should be interpreted carefully, since an increase in reports can reflect either more incidents or greater willingness among students to report concerns.

By Jon Konen, Last Updated: August 31, 2026

An adult's hand and a child's hand holding a red felt heart between them outdoors

The practical answer to how to teach empathy is structural: build it into what students do every day instead of teaching it once. An SEL curriculum, a supervised playground, kindness recognition, service projects, and restorative discipline can help develop empathy and prosocial behavior by giving students regular chances to practice it.

Featured Programs:

Approach	Scope	What it takes to start
Socio-emotional learning program	School or district	Adopting a reviewed SEL curriculum, usually a district-level decision
Peaceful playground or play program	School	Marked games, taught rules, and adults trained to coach play
Multi-cultural education	State or district curriculum	Standards written into the required curriculum, as Montana does with IEFA
Kindness recognition program	One classroom or the whole school	A board, a way for students to submit, and a daily moment to read them out
Global learning	Classroom	Reading and discussion, plus connections to classrooms elsewhere
Service projects	Classroom or school	A proposal process and one project at a time
Restorative practices	School	Staff training, plus alignment with state law, district discipline policy, and any IEP, 504, or BIP requirements
Empty chair program	Classroom, assembly, or board meeting	One chair and the discipline to keep referring to it

PU#114 - Socio-Emotional Learning Programs

Programs that promote the well-being of students' mental health are becoming more and more popular in schools. Teaching students to understand themselves and their emotions supports their development in relationship building, handling anxiety and stress, and understanding others' emotions. Teaching empathy is a big part of these programs. CASEL.org (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) published a review over 10 years ago on SEL programs and has since reviewed many more. Here is a guide they created of the effective SEL programs currently in our schools: pg.casel.org.

PU#115 - Peaceful Playground or Play Programs

Teaching students how to play on the playground may seem like a waste of time, but teaching students how to play games, how to invite others to play, and how to use their words when they are frustrated can be powerful. Peaceful Playground promotes choice in several games they can play on the playground. There are specific rules for these games, and adults work with students on positive social interactions on the playground. Teaching empathy while learning and playing these games is vital to the implementation's success. Read more about it here: peacefulplaygrounds.com.

PU#116 - Multi-Cultural Education

Learning about other cultures brings us closer together, as well as teaching us that our differences are not so different. Not many states have actually placed multicultural education into their required teaching curriculum. In Montana, Indian Education for All (IEFA) is written into state law. Article X, Section 1(2) of the Montana Constitution recognizes the distinct and unique cultural heritage of American Indians and commits the state's educational goals to preserving it, and the Legislature codified that in 1999 as MCA 20-1-501. Under MCA 20-1-503, the Board of Public Education incorporates that heritage into the content standards schools have to implement for accreditation. The more we learn about each other, the more empathy we have! Montana's Office of Public Instruction has made this a priority. Read more about Montana's multicultural curriculum here: opi.mt.gov/Educators/Teaching-Learning/Indian-Education.

PU#117 - Kindness Recognition Program

We can teach students what kindness looks like and even sounds like, but starting a program that supports continual kindness recognition can change a school. Students look for kindness in the school as exhibited by other students and even staff members. Staff members can also recognize students. Recently, we created a Kindness Tree in our school (bulletin board with a bare tree). For each act of kindness (a leaf), we stapled them on our tree. We read these every morning on the announcements, and kids loved the recognition. Notice you can hardly see our tree or branches. This can be adapted and changed in an infinite number of ways.

PU#118 - Global Learning

Social media has opened doors to students around the world. These doors open us to different cultures, customs, and thinking. Fighting ignorance is not only a teacher's job, but it also should be ALL of our responsibility. The more we learn about each other's lives, the more we understand. When we understand, we increase our empathy. The December 2016/January 2017 edition of ASCD's Ed Leadership magazine had several great articles on the "Global Ready Student." My favorite article from this issue was "The Antidote to Extremism," by Anthony Jackson. Jackson talks about education being the "antidote to intolerance and conflict." Read the full article by clicking on the title.

PU#119 - Service Projects

Whether a service project helps your school, your community, your country, or another nation, we can show students how much we care by doing great deeds for others. It may be raising money, collecting shoes, starting a food drive, or sending letters to others. Service projects have a goal that supports students' understanding that there is more than just them in this world. Empathy can always be the ultimate goal of a service project. Here is the proposal form we use at our school. We chose one project a month to support and promote.

Treat this form as a starting point, not as approval. Fundraising, charitable collections, handling or transmitting money, and partnering with outside organizations are governed by school and district policy in most places, and student participation usually requires its own sign-off. Route any project through your district's approval procedures before students collect or send anything.

Student Service Project Proposals

Name(s) _____________________________________ Grade _______

Title of Project: ___________________________________________________________________

Describe the Project and Who It Supports:

Is there money involved? Is there an address to send money? Who is supporting you with this project from home? How will the organization or group get the money?

What information will go on your flyer? Will this go in Wednesday envelopes?

What is your timeline to start and finish this project?

All photocopying and poster paper is to be supplied by students. Do you have a parent supporting you with this project and the costs of any photocopying?

_____________ ______________ ______________________

Parent Signature Student Signature Sponsor Signature (Teacher?) and Date

***All work on the project is done during recess and non-academic time.

PU#120 - Restorative Practices

A school that puts more effort into fixing relationships than handing out punitive punishments illustrates that empathy can change a student. When a student hurts another student, with words or aggressive behaviors, we must spend more time with them understanding the situation. We find the motivation for the behavior, create a plan to fix the relationships, and decide how we'll handle ourselves the next time we encounter a similar situation in the future. If you want to go deeper on restorative practices, ask your district what training and curriculum resources it already has access to, since implementation is usually coordinated at that level anyway.

One caution before you start swapping practices in. Restorative work isn't simply a matter of administrators deciding to use fewer punitive consequences. Student discipline is governed by state law and district policy, and for students with disabilities it is further governed by that student's IEP, Section 504 plan, or behavior intervention plan. Incidents involving safety carry their own required responses. Build restorative practice to fit inside those obligations rather than as a substitute for them.

PU#121 - An Empty Chair Program

I first heard about the use of an empty chair from a colleague at a Principal's Conference in Butte, Montana years ago. Then I read about it more when Yiddish families celebrate the Seder Meal. The concept behind the idea is having one empty chair in our classrooms, our assemblies, our office, or even our school board meetings. Keep whatever you place on that chair fictional or generalized. A named student, or a description specific enough to identify one, raises real privacy and confidentiality problems, and that is true whether the student is absent, homebound, ill, homeless, or has a disability. A composite scenario carries the same weight without exposing anyone. As we make decisions or hold important events, we can refer to this empty chair in order to create empathy towards the missing student. For example, the empty chair at our school-wide assembly could stand for a student who couldn't attend because of illness or a long hospital stay. At a school board meeting, the empty chair could represent a student experiencing homelessness who is fighting for their education. This symbolism can shape the decisions we make.

(Adapted from the article, "The Empty Chair Program: A Peaceful Solution to Terrorism" written by a GrantNews Press staff writer with contributions from Yitzchok and Tehilla Friedman of the Navah Organization)

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between empathy and sympathy?

Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone from the outside. Empathy is understanding the situation from inside their perspective. Researchers often split it further into cognitive empathy, which is recognizing what another person is experiencing, and emotional empathy, which is feeling some of it yourself. Most of the programs on this page build the cognitive side first, because students can practice perspective-taking long before they can name what they're doing.

What age can you start teaching empathy?

You can start in preschool, and the activities adapt to where students actually are rather than to a fixed schedule. With the youngest students, it tends to look like naming emotions out loud and noticing them in other people. Perspective-taking work, service projects, and restorative conversations can be scaled up or down depending on the group in front of you. Older students can usually handle the more abstract version, including the empty chair and questions about people who aren't in the room. Development varies a lot from child to child, so treat these as examples to adjust rather than as milestones to expect.

Which of these may be possible at the classroom level?

Four of them may be possible at the classroom level, subject to school and district policy. Kindness recognition works in a single classroom with a board and a few minutes a day. Global learning is reading and discussion. Service projects need a proposal process. The empty chair needs one chair. None of that is automatically yours to start, though. Curriculum content, fundraising and charitable collections, student privacy, classroom technology and outside online connections, and partnerships with outside organizations are all commonly governed by school or district policy, so check before you launch. The other four require a curriculum decision, a budget, or staff training, which means starting a conversation with your principal rather than starting the program.

How do you know whether it's working?

Use more than one measure, because each one captures something different. Office referrals, playground incident counts, and bullying report counts are data most schools already collect, so you can compare them against the year before you started. Validated student surveys get at attitudes and perceived climate, which behavior counts can't see. Read report counts carefully in particular: a rise can mean more incidents, or it can mean students have become more willing to report, and the number alone won't tell you which.

Structure beats the standalone lesson - students get better at empathy by practicing it repeatedly in the settings they already move through, not by covering it once.
Four may be possible at the classroom level - kindness recognition, global learning, service projects, and the empty chair can often start in one room, subject to school and district policy on curriculum, fundraising, privacy, and technology.
Some states write it into law - Montana requires Indian Education for All content under the Montana Code Annotated, which makes multicultural learning a curriculum obligation rather than an add-on.
Restorative work sits inside a legal framework - finding the motivation behind a behavior and rebuilding the relationship takes real staff time, and what a school may substitute for a consequence is constrained by state law, district discipline policy, and individual IEP, 504, or behavior intervention plan requirements.
Use more than one measure - referrals, playground incidents, report counts, and validated student surveys each capture something different, and a change in report counts can reflect willingness to report rather than a change in incidents.

Running any of this past your own classroom means learning things teacher preparation rarely covers: how SEL curricula get evaluated, how restorative discipline is implemented without losing staff, how to make a case to a school board. The programs listed on this page include education leadership, school counseling, and curriculum tracks, many of them online and structured around a full teaching schedule. Requirements for school counseling and administrator credentials vary by state, including required degrees, supervised experience, assessments, and licensure, so verify that the program meets certification and licensure requirements in the state where you intend to work.

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