Teaching Empathy in Secondary School: What It Is and How It Develops

Empathy is one of the most talked-about goals in secondary education and one of the least precisely understood. It appears in school mission statements, SEL curricula, and teacher preparation programs, often without clarity about what it actually is, how it develops, or how it connects to academic learning.

That lack of precision matters because "teach empathy" is not an instructional goal. It's a category that contains several distinct capacities, each of which develops differently and connects differently to classroom practice. Understanding the distinctions produces better instruction than treating empathy as a single thing.

The Two Types of Empathy

Developmental psychology distinguishes between two types of empathy that develop differently and have different classroom implications:

Affective empathy: The automatic emotional resonance we experience when we encounter others' emotions — feeling sad when someone we see is sad, anxious when someone nearby is anxious. This is more reflexive and less teachable than cognitive empathy; it's partly dispositional and not primarily developed through instruction.

Cognitive empathy: The deliberate ability to understand what another person is thinking, feeling, or experiencing from their perspective — to imagine the world as it appears to them. This is the capacity that is genuinely teachable and that has the strongest connection to the outcomes education cares about: civil discourse, conflict resolution, understanding of literature and history, academic collaboration.

Most talk about "teaching empathy" is really talk about developing cognitive empathy — perspective-taking, the ability to inhabit another person's point of view sufficiently to understand how they see the world.

How Cognitive Empathy Develops

Research on perspective-taking development shows several conditions that support it:

Perspective-taking practice with complex characters: Characters in literature who are internally contradictory, whose actions are understandable given their experience but morally complicated, require readers to hold another person's viewpoint without immediately judging it. This is cognitively demanding work that develops the same capacity used in real-world perspective-taking.

The best question in literature for developing perspective-taking is not "what does this character do?" but "why does this character do what they do from their own point of view?" The second question requires inhabiting the character's world, not just observing their behavior.

Historical perspective-taking: Understanding why people in the past made the choices they did — what they knew, believed, and feared — requires cognitive empathy across cultural and temporal distance. The question "what were they trying to achieve, given what they knew and believed?" is harder and more educationally valuable than "were they right?"

Discussion across difference: Students who engage regularly in structured discussions with people whose experiences and perspectives differ from their own — and who are expected to understand those perspectives before responding to them — develop cognitive empathy in a way that homogeneous discussion groups don't.

Autobiography and memoir: Reading first-person accounts of experiences significantly different from one's own — poverty, immigration, discrimination, illness, war — provides the kind of close contact with another perspective that develops genuine understanding rather than surface knowledge.

What Doesn't Work

Exhortation: Telling students to be more empathetic doesn't develop empathy. Giving students experiences that require perspective-taking does.

Sympathy without understanding: Feeling sorry for someone is not the same as understanding their perspective. Instruction that aims for emotional response without cognitive engagement produces sympathy, not empathy.

Empathy as a unit: Empathy is not a topic that can be taught in three weeks and checked off. It's a capacity that develops gradually through sustained practice across multiple contexts and years.

Empathy and Academic Learning

The connection between empathy and academic achievement is less obvious than the connection to social outcomes, but it's real. Students with stronger perspective-taking capacity:

• Read literature more deeply (because they can inhabit characters' perspectives)
• Think historically more accurately (because they can contextualize rather than anachronize)
• Write more persuasively (because they can anticipate and address opposing perspectives)
• Collaborate more effectively (because they can understand others' contributions and concerns)

The student who can genuinely ask "how does this look from their perspective?" is a better reader, writer, historian, and scientist than the student who can't.

Practical Approaches

Explicit perspective-taking prompts: After reading a text, "explain this character's actions from their own point of view" rather than "evaluate this character's actions." After a historical event, "explain this decision from the decision-maker's perspective" before evaluating it.

Role reversal in discussion: Students argue a position they don't hold — not as a debate exercise but as a genuine attempt to understand the strongest version of a view they disagree with.

First-person historical writing: Students write from the perspective of a historical actor using what they know about that person's context, beliefs, and knowledge. The constraint of accuracy forces genuine perspective-taking rather than caricature.

LessonDraft can help you design perspective-taking activities, empathy-building discussion protocols, and literature-based SEL instruction for any grade level.

Cognitive empathy is among the most important capacities secondary education can develop — and it's developed through academic work, not alongside it. The literature class that develops genuine perspective-taking is simultaneously teaching reading and developing character.