For quite some time now I have had this post brewing on one of my writing ideas lists. Percolating away. It seemed important because I have witnessed first (and second) hand the power of children connecting deeply with a topic and empathising for someone at the heart of it.
That level of investment creates tension with simply being an active participant. And when I pull on my learning designer hat the apparent distinction remains significant, yet intriguing.
They are both phrases I have come across in my working life in education, however at very different times. This is a post to unpack the distinction and see what influence that understanding might have on instructional and learning design.
Stay On Target
Engagement and more precisely student engagement was something I grew into the profession of teaching with. I recall it being something that proved an indicator of my practice, a yardstick of my emerging craft. Keeping students “on task” was the order of the day as I learned the ropes. Fellow student teachers would compare notes about how to do this, keeping students engaged for longer and longer periods of time seemed to be the goal as our practical experience extended.
The observations from college tutors visiting me in schools, or from my school mentor, would speak of how engaged the children were, “All the children were on task…” that sort of thing — or the opposite of course. I think I have gone through a few stages in appreciating the influences on student engagement over the years of my teaching, stretching all the way back to during my four years of training in university.
First of all I thought it was just about managing behaviour, there is an overlap here with students being engaged. This is unsurprising in some ways as most people’s early experience of teaching can be dominated by a focus on classroom or behaviour management. I thought it was just about managing the impulses and choices of every student, all at the same time, all thirty of them. Engagement was about them.
I soon began to consider the importance of task or learning design as I got better at it. During my placements I would spend hours planning lessons and sequences of learning, testing ideas and seeing the influence on students of different ages and developmental stages. The emphasis seemed to shift back to me — maybe it was me, maybe I held the keys to getting student engagement right in the classroom?
As my placements extended and the responsibilities increased, I had longer periods of time with students. I was teaching a whole range of subjects with the same group of children, not simply taking the reins for one or two lessons. I was opening the door to them in the morning and chatting with their parents at the end of the day. I was dusting them off when they had fallen and trying to make them laugh with my bad jokes.
I was truly finding my own identity as a teacher. It was during these times when things started to make more sense and I realised it was not just simply about the students’ whims nor my own learning design skills. Engaging learners was, is, based on the quality of relationships you form together.
What does an engaged learner look like, what are the indicators?
[Students] show sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone. They select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration in the implementation of learning tasks; they show generally positive emotions during ongoing action, including enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity, and interest.
This was taken from one of my lesson observations at university. No, not really, just joking. It is a pretty broad definition from Skinner, E.A., & Belmont, M.J. (1993) of an engaged learner and encompasses some of the emotional signals too. But engagement is not enough as some people say.
I was pleased to recently discover a similar post by Mike Crowley titled Beyond Engagement: Making School Personal. Mike shares a range of interesting ideas and it is definitely worth a read.
He refers to this from Alfie Kohn:
For Kohn the imperative is personal learning, “that entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.”
As you see it underlines my reference to the importance and potency of relationships in terms of influencing engagement but also learning co-design. Mike goes on to share a new course at his school about making a difference in the world, saying:
When we care deeply about something in a personal way we are more likely to act upon that thing.
What surprised me about Mike’s piece was the lack of reference to empathy. Not mentioned once. Technically I suppose he says everything but the word itself, but it is such an integral element of impacting the world around us. Not on some sort of detached “get behind the cause” sort of way, but on a human level. If I was to rephrase Mike’s words quoted above:
When we care deeply about other people, we are more likely to act with purpose, sustain those actions and develop ideas that matter.
Your Shoes, My Steps
As I have shared before, establishing complete empathy for another human being is perhaps perpetually out of our reach. I might walk in your shoes, they may help me learn about your perspective but I can never truly, completely understand it. Walking in someone else’s shoes is as elusive as someone walking in our own.
I think developing empathy for others comes in small aggregated pieces, rarely do we have exactly the same experience to draw from, the complexity of our bias (and life) prohibits this in many ways. It is more a mosaic of experience we build that helps us connect with others, find common ground and shared values.
Empathy is distinguished by two separate flavours. First up we have Affective Empathy or what many people refer to as emotional empathy. This is about our ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to someone else’s state of mind. For example we are sad when someone else expresses their frustration about something. Or perhaps we respond happily when others share a successful achievement.
The second distinct component of empathy is what is commonly known as Cognitive Empathy. This is the capacity to understand another’s perspective or mental state. When we can identify that perspective ourselves, recognise it and perhaps validate it through our own experiences we are exhibiting a level of cognitive empathy.
The physiological evidence of these two distinct components empathy is also clear.
A meta-analysis of recent fMRI studies of empathy confirmed that different brain areas are activated during affective–perceptual empathy and cognitive–evaluative empathy. Also, a study with patients with different types of brain damage confirmed the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy. [Wikipedia]
Another great articulation of what empathy is, and especially the difference with sympathy, comes from Dr Brené Brown. (Beautifully animated too.)
We have to connect with an emotional truth of our own to feel with someone. As Brown says we have to look within ourselves, to draw upon our own experiences and emotions to connect with others. As I have said it is an aggregate of our personal truths. In order for us to appreciate someone else’s perspective (cognitive empathy) and offer an appropriate emotional response (affective empathy) we have to connect deeply to our own emotions and perspectives.
For me there is also an exchange on some sort of deeper level I think. When you are exposing yourself in a similar way there is a degree of emotional vulnerability. This takes energy and you have to be open to that happening.
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~Walt Whitman
I first came across the concept of empathy when I was studying A Level Psychology. The Developmental Psych component of the course allowed us to go into some local schools and work alongside some primary age students. It was actually during these times that I first began to understand that teaching was something I was set to pursue as a career.
More recently my understanding of empathy has extended to its relevance to ethnographic and human centred problem solving and design. I try and help people move closer to an understanding of stakeholders so they can solve the right problems, on issues that matter and that address unmet needs.
This has been mainly within the context of school and education. All too often we start with the problem and quickly move to our ideas. The centricity of empathy has helped slow things down, and keep people, other human beings, at the heart of these creative efforts.
An example of a tool would be interviewing with a sharper focus on empathy. Take a look at the quote and resource below from the Stanford d.school.
You want to understand a person’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, so that you can determine how to innovate for him or her. By understanding the choices that person makes and the behaviours that person engages in, you can identify their needs, and design to meet those needs.
Or even this example of creating Personas from the DIY Toolkit by Nesta. I would highly recommend finding some additional time to explore the toolkit in more detail, some real gems in there.
Personas help ensure that your work stays focused on people, rather than an abstract description of the group they are said to represent.
Another area of my understanding that has matured over the years has been how we design learning that is rich in the opportunity for developing empathy. This has come in various guises as I have sat alongside teachers and in some respect comes back to narrative and storytelling.
When a deeper connection with people at the heart of curriculum topics is designed into sequences of learning, it fosters a deeper level of engagement. Maybe this is what Mike Crowley was saying when he was thinking about “beyond engagement”.
I recall a group of Prep students in a school in Sydney who didn’t just learn about Sustainability but felt something. As a result, they sustained the level of investment they had in that idea for far longer. They wanted things to change, they wanted behaviours to change and they wanted the world to know about their ideas to achieve that.
This was mainly due to emphasising empathy during that period of learning. Positive participation (engagement) is one thing, but sustained commitment to change (as a result of empathy) is another. This meant the Prep students continued discussing the issues and the ideas long after the topic had passed.
A Signature Made in Aggregate
The distinction between Empathy and Engagement helps us to better design learning. I now appreciate more fully how engagement can happen as a result of empathy fueled activities. But importantly I think,
Engagement as a result of greater empathy has its own signature.
It is a more significant level of engagement, something that needs observation over time rather than just in a short frame. Engagement can also be short lived and isolated, it is often a means to an end. Whereas empathy is connected into many things over a longer period of time. Increased levels of empathy is also something we should identify as an end, an important outcome of our time with students.
Much of the connection and difference warrants further exploration and I suppose there is an inherent weakness in anecdotal evidence. However these are some of my observations if empathy is emphasised when planning sequences of learning:
We are more inclined to act and try to change stuff. When learners are closely connected to the plight of a group of people, or starkly perceive the needs of another and are in a position to do something, they want to act.
We can’t help but connect the learning experiences to real things.Whether intentional or not, the pure dynamic of empathy is very human and so is very real. The emotional response we have for others, especially, is a concrete thing. Seems strange to describe emotions with the word concrete, but it is certainly less abstract. How does this make you feel? Should be a standard question regarding learning design.
We sustain a level of investment in learning and doing. Noticeably the timeline for thinking, learning and doing seems to extend when there is an emphasis on empathy in the design. Children want to see things through, to make those changes and continue to stay connected. There is a shared appreciation of a perspective and this is sustained — often leading to further learning.
Ultimately this returns to the quality of relationships in the learning space. It is in the intentional design of opportunities for a group of learners to connect, explore and discover another person’s story that underpins empathy rich tasks. That design relies on an ever-improving knowledge of the learner. Know what is in the heart of your learners, and you can create the best possible conditions for them to connect with others.
Photo by Pedro Kümmel