Empathy is an essential component for co-designing equitable learning environments. Human beings naturally feel a sense of empathy toward others with whom they identify or have a common experience. Additional care and awareness are required to cultivate a sense of empathy with those who may appear different or come from different backgrounds. Activities that invite listening to and considering perspectives other than one’s own, building communication skills, and offering content that authentically represents a diversity of lived experiences can help expand learners’ empathy for one another.

Empathy has the potential to build and sustain a caring learning community. This attention to others’ experiences and perspectives strengthens the communal bonds within a learning environment, creating a space in which learners feel safe taking risks and collaborative learning can take place.

Sometimes, trust is broken when care is not extended toward others. This may not be intentional, as sometimes we are not aware of how our actions impact others. While it can be challenging for some to confront these situations, restorative practices are a powerful vehicle for repair. Rather than punishing learners for mistakes, restorative practices allow for learners to consider the impact of their actions and design an appropriate response to repair trust in the community. Empathy is a key component to restorative practices, as learners practice identifying with the perspective of others, understand the difference between intent and impact, and seek to make the learning community whole.

• Use a strategy such as circle practice (a protocol where learners share about their emotions and experiences by passing a talking stick and responding one by one) or an emotions check-in to encourage learners to learn from one another’s perspectives.
• Facilitate learners sharing coping strategies or coping needs to encourage learners to take care of one another.
• Institute protocols such as a “buddy bench” or an accountability partner to encourage communal responsibility for the learning community.
• Co-create and facilitate classroom agreements. Specifically ask learners to add to the agreements the things they need to feel safe in the classroom.
• Create kind and equitable tools, processes, and protocols for learners to hold one another accountable to community agreements in classrooms, workplace settings, and other learning environments.
• Use a protocol such as circle practice to make communal decisions about how to restore the community after an agreement has been broken. These protocols can span primary through adult learner settings.