Teaching Empathy through Active Listening Skills

This summer, YouthToday published a 25-year study on empathy in adolescents. The study tracked the way empathy can develop in kids through family relationships, and then get practiced with friends at school and elsewhere. The authors note the importance of empathy in everything from creating successful relationships to managing conflict and even reducing violent crime.

At work, empathy matters too—and everybody's noticing. In a study of 1,000 employees, most said they thought empathy between leaders and employees contributed to more efficiency (88% of those surveyed), job satisfaction (87%), and revenue (83%).

But empathy as a teaching and learning outcome is fairly new. With the growing awareness of teaching Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), we're seeing more talk about how empathy skills can help students not only at school—but in life and careers. Fortunately, one easy way to build empathy into lesson plans is by connecting it with Active Listening—a skill already valued and taught in the language, communication, professional skills, or leadership classroom.

In this post, I'll share why active listening can help create a path to empathy-building, and then I'll share how—including activities you can use with English language learners, or adapt to the professional communication setting. (You can also watch me share these thoughts on video.)

Why Active Listening Can Help Us Build Empathy

I remember a professional in one of my workshops once telling me: "I know I want to be more empathetic, but I just don't know how." He was right in thinking this skill could be learned; multiple studies (many referenced in this article from the U.S. National Institutes of Health) have proven it.

When I teach Active Listening—whether it's to children or adults at school, or professionals in the workplace—I like to begin by sharing the Chinese symbol for "listen." To me, it invokes a broader meaning and understanding than the English word "listen"—and it opens the path for teaching empathy along with listening skills.

Image found on areskoltd.wordpress.com

I'm no expert in the Mandarin language, and I would love to hear from people with more expertise, in the comments. But, I'll explain a little of what I understand about the parts of the character above:

• ear - We use the ear to hear/listen.

• king - Suggests the concept of respect, and attending to the one talking

• maximum - Suggests maximum focus

• eye - We use the eyes to take in information from body language, facial expressions.

• one - Suggests the concept of "one" singular focus — focusing on the listener

• heart - We need to listen with the heart to truly understand and empathize with the speaker.

When I showed this character to a group of creative, experienced educators I'm working with at the Autonomous University of Guerrero in Mexico, I asked them what they thought was a good definition of Active Listening—one that included the different parts of a person captured in the symbol above. They created beautiful definitions that included concepts beyond hearing, like:

• We can use multiple senses to listen.

• We can connect with the speaker and their experience by listening with hearts.

• We can combine our mind, body, and heart focus to truly learn from the speaker.

• We can try to understand others' perspectives through listening with our whole self.

Skills like listening to understand provide benefits not only for the speaker, the listener, and their relationship—but to organizations and businesses as well. By listening not just to hear words, but to empathize, we practice understanding one's perspectives and working harmoniously.

How to Teach Empathy with Active Listening Practice

Whether we're trying to pay attention in a meeting or learn a new language, listening can be a challenge. In today's world of constant information and communication, it can be tough to really focus onto someone's message and "hear" what they're saying—to really give our full attention and be fully present with what's being shared.

Practicing Active Listening through asking questions can help. I like to arrange steps and activities in a scaffolding order—starting with simpler, fact-based questions and then moving to more complex questions; and starting with teacher-led questions and moving to student-led questions.

For example, in an English language classroom, we might use Active Listening to not only practice vocabulary, but to start working on inference and on empathizing with various perspectives.

By thinking about questions like "Who is wearing purple?", students can practice vocabulary—in this case, colors. But by asking questions like "Who might be arguing?" students begin to analyze, infer, and think criticallly. They also start jumping into someone else's perspective—a practice that helps us build empathy and connect to others.

And that's exactly what Active Listening is, right? Really "hearing" someone—but with more than our ears. To truly listen and connect, we need to empathize, by using our minds, hearts, eyes, and attention, as well as our ears.

In a business setting, I might use images or scenes from a corporate environment, or a professional conference, and ask questions about what people in the picture are experiencing. We can adapt this exercise to any level of learner, by choosing images that help us teach concepts we're studying with that particular group.

Connecting Active Listening with Emotions and Inference

We can also study facial expressions to practice listening and inferring about another person's experience. While we can help students practice English, for example by asking questions like "Who is wearing glasses?", we can also help all learners practice empathy with questions like, "Who might be feeling frustrated?"

Examining facial expressions brings focus to the inner experiences of others.

Similarly, we can actively and intentionally teach the concept of perspective through similar inquiry-based listening activities. With the image below, I might take on the role of a medical professional to ask some questions—and then the role of patient to ask more.

Typically, I'll share a comment from one person's point of view, and then ask students to say (or type, if we're online) the corresponding letter. We can look at a variety of "competing" perspectives with similar exercises: teacher and student, lawyer and judge, hotel employee and customer, restaurant server and patron.

Exercises like these help learners connect speaking and listening with the inner experience of ourselves and others. Learning to look at multiple perspectives has value not just academically, but in our lives, communities, and families.

As educators and facilitators, we already teach listening skills to support communication and collaboration. By framing Active Listening as a bridge to empathy, we help learners develop emotional intelligence that extends far beyond the classroom. The more we integrate empathy-building into everyday lessons, the more we prepare students and professionals to lead, work, and live with awareness and respect.

Thank you for reading! This video covers the same content, if you'd like to hear the explanations aloud!