Using Empathy Interviews to Lower Barriers Between Student Cliques

“Yeah, we all just hate each other.” When a freshman made this offhand comment during a student council meeting, the lingering tension that we, as teachers, had been feeling in the classroom could no longer be hidden. Students were stuck in their cliques. The standard community-building from the beginning of the year—the lunchtime mixers, the get-to-know-you games, and even inter-advisory dodgeball,—had not brought the students into a cohesive group. That student’s remark was the catalyst for teachers to realize that this year, we needed something different.

Our school has a STEM focus, and over the past few years, we’ve been working on integrating design thinking into project-based learning. In design thinking you start with a need and then seek to understand your customer. Empathy interviews, a design thinking technique, help build understanding of consumer needs, and we thought empathy interviews might help students get to know new people, better understand each other, and break down barriers. The initial process was bumpy, but both teachers and students came out stronger in the end. Here’s what we learned and how you can use the empathy interview technique to heal fractured communities in your school.

implementing empathy interviews

We ran our empathy interviews during advisory periods. Students picked a comfortable spot in the school, and teachers circulated to check in and offer encouragement when conversations stalled. We made time in the schedule to have students check in with their same partners monthly to give relationships time to develop.

Just as many products that seem like a good idea turn out to be less than stellar, our first round of interviews was rather disappointing. “I can see what they were trying to do,” one student told us, “but I really never see her in the hallway.” The structured questions felt artificial, and students weren’t buying in.

Practicing our design thinking principle of iterative redesign, we asked for student feedback and made three crucial changes. Here’s what we’ve found works well—with the input of our students.

Pair students strategically. Match a volleyball player with an orchestra kid, a theater student with someone from robotics. You know your students, but your students don’t all know each other. Think about how you can connect students from different niches so each can understand the other’s experience and perspective.

Model it first. Show students what effective sharing and reflective listening looks like. Non-examples can be especially powerful. Take this as an opportunity for teachers to go out of their comfort zones to ham it up a bit. Act out scenarios where empathy interviews work, and times when they might not. Make it clear that this is a judgment-free zone and that what the students share with each other stays confidential.

Let students write their own questions. The students know what they actually want to talk about better than we do. Providing a few sentence stems or scaffolds and then letting students generate the question list before opening the discussion proved to nurture conversations that lasted for the whole period and beyond.

We used the CASEL framework to create prompts that could promote social and emotional learning. We gave them examples like these:

• What makes you feel supported in school?
• Can you describe a time when you felt misunderstood?
• How has going to this school impacted your life?

The key is asking questions that invite real reflection, not yes-or-no answers. The questions are meant to scaffold discussion and drive deeper thinking, so make sure students have plenty of depth to explore.

Focusing on ongoing experiences, not onetime events, also helped. Prompts like “How does school impact your life?” sparked better conversations than “How do you feel about exams?”

Add activities to ease the awkwardness. We added the option of selecting simple crafts, coloring materials, or outdoor games to work on collaboratively. Having something to do with their hands made conversation flow more naturally, especially between those students who were naturally more reticent.

Prepare students for after interviews. After each interview, students initially wrote reflections and summarized what they had learned from their partners, but they told us this felt too “school-ish,” and it was more natural and effective to give students a moment to identify a follow-up action item that they could hold each other accountable for.

What Success Looks Like

After our refinements, things shifted, and we noticed social barriers started breaking down. Students who’d been skeptical came around. “I got to know someone I wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise,” one student leader said. “It’s a good way for people to branch out, since there are so many little communities like sports and arts, and they don’t really mix a lot.”

Another student had a breakthrough: “I never really thought about how much pressure my classmates are under. I just assumed they had it all together. I feel more comfortable now knowing that I’m not the only one struggling with a mountain of homework.” Moments like these signaled to our teacher team that the process, despite the rough patches, was accomplishing our design goal.

The beautiful thing about empathy interviews is that the process of crafting the activity with your students builds community just as much as the interviews themselves. When teachers and students worked together to make school better, everyone benefited. School culture is built on mutual understanding, and students crave the feeling of belonging. Empathy interviews are one more tool to get you from cliques to community.