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The Secret to Teaching Empathy? Leaning On Experiences, Not Explanations.
- Ed Kirwan
- May 9
- 3 min read
When we receive feedback from teachers about our Empathy Week events, it’s an opportunity for us to reflect and refine. Some teachers have shared that they’d love to see even more emphasis on empathy being explained during our live sessions, particularly a clearer focus on what empathy means and how it can be understood.
It’s a helpful reminder for us, and highlights our intentional approach to not always implicitly explain empathy at every opportunity, but create opportunities for it to be experienced in real time. For example, our annual festival Empathy Week, is not an awareness week but an experience week. A chance for everyone to explore the lives, perspectives, emotions, viewpoints and experiences of others… and crucially get to share their own too.
Put simply, we don’t just want to talk about empathy, we want to create it.
Too often, when we define empathy explicitly or tell people what it should look like, we risk flattening the experience, reducing empathy to a concept rather than a lived experience. Imagine, telling someone what chocolate tastes like versus them trying it… the first one sucks right?
Our approach is more subtle, and it might not be what people expect. We have a "Trojan horse" approach. We don’t bombard students with definitions or over-explain what empathy is. Instead, we create spaces where empathy can grow naturally by exposing them to diverse stories, perspectives, and experiences. In this way, empathy becomes something they feel and experience, not just something they learn about in theory.
Take our event with Amnesty International, for instance. Instead of starting with an explicit lecture on empathy, we invited an education officer, the amazing Sita, from Amnesty to speak about the importance of human rights. Lipa Nessa also hosted the show, a young female Muslim footballer, who shared her journey of wearing a hijab while pursuing her passion for football. Students watched a film about her life and had the opportunity to ask questions to Lipa directly.
If that wasn’t amazing enough, students then heard from three incredible human rights poets. One shared their experiences growing up as an LGBTQ+ individual, another spoke about the experience of growing up in India, then coming to the UK to study, and the third poet reflected on the challenges and thrills of life in London. These voices, from all walks of life, shared their truths with the students. The session ended with students creating their own poetry, which they then shared with the group.
THIS is empathy in action (often without students realising it).
In the span of just 90 minutes, students were immersed in a rich tapestry of human experience. They were exposed to perspectives and life stories they might never have encountered otherwise. And this, is where the empathy building starts!
Empathy is about giving students the space to hear different stories and reflect on their own lives. It’s about seeing and hearing people they wouldn’t normally get to meet. This approach doesn’t need to constantly hammer home a definition. Instead, it gives students the chance to build empathy organically, through lived experience.
I understand that schools face many challenges. I remember from my teaching days; time is tight, resources are limited, and teachers are stretched thin. But I firmly believe that the opportunity to hear diverse narratives and engage with a wide range of perspectives is invaluable. It’s about providing the conditions where empathy can thrive naturally, not just telling students how to act.
At the end of the day, empathy isn’t something you can simply tell students to have. It’s something that takes root when they are given the opportunity to see the world from multiple perspectives. When they walk away from an event during Empathy Week, they may have encountered five, ten, or even more people whose lives are radically different from their own, and through that exposure, they’ll have developed a deeper sense of empathy.
Empathy isn’t about simply knowing what it is—it’s about creating experiences where it can be felt and lived. That’s what we do, and that’s what we’ll continue to do, because we know that true empathy isn’t just learned—it’s experienced.
If you or your school are interested in taking part in Empathy Week 2026, our registrations are now open! Visit our Empathy Week website to nab your school's spot for Empathy Week 2026!
