Teaching Self-Awareness & Empathy in Middle School
It is always my goal to support students as human beings first, and to set them up for a happy and positive future. I don’t believe academics can do it on their own.
The human brain is hard-wired to experience emotions before it can reason. That’s just the way we’re built. This is helpful for survival in physically threatening situations because you really do need to “BE AFRAID!!!” as your brain is telling you, and react far more quickly than a step-by-step plan can be crafted.
But in today’s everyday situations, this hard-wired bias towards emotion first can cause real trouble - especially when combined with our apparently innate negativity bias. As middle school teachers, we see it happen every day.
Interested in the studies? I’ve included links at the bottom of this post.
So, how do we help students to regulate their emotions and make positive choices when their humanness inherently means that they will feel their emotions before they have an opportunity to think?
We teach them self-awareness and empathy.
I’ve tried many approaches and targeted many skill-sets with my students over the years, and these two sets of skills have made the most significant impact in supporting students’ well-being, behavior and academics.
Before we jump into specific activities for the classroom, let’s make sure we understand the basics so what we’re teaching is actually helpful and healthy for our students.
Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness is knowing yourself thoroughly and honestly. Being aware of our own emotional tendencies and patterns helps us respond more effectively when we react emotionally, and goes a long way towards managing ourselves and our relationships.
When we are self-aware, we are more creative and confident, make better decisions, have healthier relationships, and communicate more effectively. We are more likely to be honest and we get more promotions at work. Self-aware leaders have happier employees and more profitable companies than leaders who lack this skill.
Knowing yourself might sound reasonably easy or likely, but it’s not as common as you might think. Researchers suggest that the majority of adults (62%) cannot identify their emotions as they feel them, and don’t meet criteria to be considered self-aware overall (85-90%).
For these statistics and additional information about self-awareness and emotional intelligence, check out this article from the Harvard Business Review as well as Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves.
Self-Awareness Instruction
Self-Awareness is just one skill set within the larger context of emotional intelligence, which also includes self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
When I first started teaching emotional intelligence skills to my students explicitly, I tried to cover everything. After a couple of years of this, I noticed a pattern: while strategies from the other three skill sets were at least somewhat helpful for students, the improvement in students’ regulation and behavior was far more noticeable when we focused on self-awareness and continued to come back to it repeatedly.
In my context at least, it seems that when students are aware of their negative behaviors, they generally replace them with more positive ones. Naturally, this makes getting along with others much easier. It also makes it easier for students to make smart choices related to their personal and academic goals.
In my experience, there are usually at least one or two students in a class of approximately 30 who appear to need more supports than self-awareness instruction. However, when I’ve paired self-awareness instruction with empathy instruction, the other students in the group have been far more patient and understanding when one or two of their classmates have continued to struggle (of course, when students struggle, follow your regular procedures to ensure they receive further supports).
Classroom Conversations and Activities
Students need direct instruction and opportunities to practice specific strategies to improve their self-awareness. In order for them to take a risk and look at their own tendencies with honesty, they need to see you do the same.
Even if you’re only comfortable sharing examples from your life at work, students will be much more willing to engage in this work if they see the same openness from you.
At a bare minimum, explicit conversations about the following topics can encourage students to begin noticing their own patterns. Reflection time (in private journals or with a clear caveat to only record what they’re comfortable sharing) is very helpful in allowing students to reflect on their own patterns and abilities.
As you might expect, there are many strategies for increasing your self-awareness. These are the ones that have worked best in my classroom:
Stop judging your emotions: when we judge them, we stop observing and responding constructively.
Notice your ripple effect: we affect everyone around us all the time, and we want this effect to be positive.
Demonstrate courage and curiosity: we can’t get better at things by avoiding them! We have to move towards the aspects of ourselves that make us uncomfortable if we want to grow.
Feel your emotions in your body: sometimes our physical responses can tell us how we’re feeling emotionally.
Know what upsets you: we all have things that upset or bother us, and benefit from planning for these situations.
Be mindful of good and bad moods so they don’t control your behavior: even a good mood can change your choices!
Ask friends and loved ones for feedback: when you feel comfortable, a trusted friend, family or community member can give you kind and honest feedback about your own patterns of behavior.
Don’t try to introduce these all at once!
I introduce these strategies one at a time, and provide students with opportunities to reflect in writing and conversation. It only takes a few minutes a few days in a row, and the payoff (happier, more cooperative students and much easier classroom management) is well worth it.
Direct teaching and reflection opportunities are helpful on their own, and you’ll see a difference in your students. To make the effect more permanent, keep coming back to the conversation throughout the year, in the context of your studies.
Every subject in school has its own opportunities for this, because all subjects include human stories in some way or another. When students see examples of human struggle in their studies, try asking them, “Is there a self-awareness strategy that may have helped this person? What choice do you think they might have made if they were aware of their emotions and their ripple effect?”
If you want to be more direct, you can ask your students to think about a time when they successfully used that strategy, or when they had the opportunity to do so. It’s important to encourage students to be forgiving of themselves. Most adults struggle with self-awareness, so it’s absolutely okay if students need more practice!
Empathy
Empathy IS:
Empathy is feeling with people. It builds connection because we don’t feel alone and we do feel supported.
In a classroom setting, empathy allows students to relate to one another more effectively, building community and trust between classmates. It allows students to be patient when others make mistakes, preventing small incidents from escalating. Academically, it increases creativity and helps students find importance in the topics they study.
Empathy IS NOT:
Empathy is not sympathy, which is feeling sorry for a person. Sympathy does not build connection.
Empathy is not enmeshment, which is when we feel the emotions of others so deeply that we lose our own emotions and sense of regulation in the process. Enmeshment cannot be supportive, because once we are lost in someone else’s emotion, we can no longer offer regulated support.
For a great resource on empathy in the classroom, check out Brene Brown’s handout for teachers.
Empathy Instruction
Empathy is actually a form of inference. To demonstrate empathy, we use information from a variety of sources to infer how someone else might feel.
So how do we teach it? The same way we teach any kind of inference!
We ask students to use the evidence they have been provided to make a reasonable conclusion, and then to check that conclusion to make sure it works with all of the evidence.
In Visual Arts, one of the easiest ways to begin this work is through a study of portraiture. Given a face with some level of expression, most students will feel comfortable theorizing about the subject’s emotions. Then they can be guided to consider choices of color, value, texture etc. to confirm or contradict their theories.
In Language Arts and Social Studies, narratives give plenty of opportunities for students to make inferences about people’s emotions, whether those people are real or fictional. In reading, directly teaching students to infer characters’ emotions builds their social-emotional skills AND their reading comprehension at the same time.
In Math or Science, statistics make excellent texts for teaching empathy because they communicate stories. Students can be asked to work with graphs or data sets about any real-world issue: poverty, any marginalized group within society, climate change, medicine, or even athletics. Once they understand the story the data tells, they can be asked to empathize to help them to understand why that data is significant and what it might mean for anyone involved.
As they practice inferring for empathy, students need reminders and guidance to identify evidence that supports their inferences. Their evidence can come from within the text and from similar situations outside of the text.
Try asking your students where they have seen or experienced something similar, and what emotions were present in that second, situation. Then they can see if those emotions might apply in the case study you’ve given them.
Your students should always go back and confirm that their inference is supported by the evidence, and it’s wise to remind them regularly that the only way to know how someone else is feeling for sure is to ask them. These situations are great case studies, but we do need to remember that without being able to ask someone, we can never be sure that our empathy inferences are correct.
More resources:
For more information about the stress response and the brain, check out this article from Harvard Health Publishing. To learn more about negativity bias, this peer-reviewed article by Amrisha Vaish, Tobias Grossman and Amanda Woodward provides strong evidence. For a summary in everyday language, here’s an article from Positive Psycholgy.
Like what you see here?
I post every other week, so stay tuned for more! In the meantime, please check out the free guides to teaching Art and integrating the Arts & SEL into core subjects! You can find them here.
