[AUDIO LOGO] SPEAKER: So in design thinking and continuous improvement, when design thinkers or improvers look at the steps of their process, they’ll typically see right at the top of that list the word empathy. And I think it’s good to think about empathy, not as a step in the process, but as a skill set or even a perspective to learn to adopt.

When working in design thinking or improvement science, our success depends both on how well we can see our larger systems and also how well we can connect with and understand individual’s perspectives, including how they have problems and how they experience potential solutions.

There are three techniques for building empathy, and they each have their own relative strengths. Empathy interviews create the opportunity to hear the perspectives of the people you are working with. Immersions allow designers access to the experiences of their users. And participant observations aim to allow one to experience elements of both of those strengths.

Empathy interviews are focused conversations, in which one person ask questions, to try to uncover important or surprising facts about another person’s experience. If we want to know how students are experiencing teaching and learning in our schools, we can always just stop and ask.

A participant observation is a way to build empathy by, in effect, taking on the role of a cultural anthropologist. So one does an activity along with the people that they’re working for, and experiences both the immersive elements of trying to do something with someone, and also has a little bit of power to step back and ask questions and take notes about what’s actually happening.

So if you’re working on a project to help students have better access to financial aid for college, we could sit next to a student as they’re filling out the forms and do this together. And we can try talking through the process. And this would give both the in-depth feeling of what it’s like for that student. But it also gives the opportunity to observe how they interact with maybe the website, and ask questions about how they are making decisions in terms of navigating the process.

So this is something that great teachers already do, which is that they work in time during class when they’re not at the front of the room, and they take a step into the class and they say, well, let me just do some of this together with you. And so that creates an opportunity, when a teacher can be immersed in the world of a student and simultaneously have the power to pause and ask questions and make observations about how students are experiencing their learning.

Immersions put us in the shoes of our users and allow us to try to have our own experiences that might be similar to theirs. So in the world of project-based learning, there’s a maxim that has a lot of power as an immersion, which is to do the project yourself first.

So as a teacher, if you’re asking your students to build a rocket or make a documentary video, before the students actually try that curriculum, doing the project yourself first and immersing yourself in their experience will uncover some really surprising insights about the big arc of the learning, as well as lots of small things about specific questions or challenges that come up along the way, or tools or software that you might need to use as part of the process. And it might be something as small as, what is the right kind of glue to use for this project?

One example of an immersion comes from a time when our schools were trying to improve students access to financial aid in the college application process. And a school director actually sat down with their laptop and tried to apply for college and tried to complete the financial aid applications themselves. What they learned through the process is what it’s really like for a student to do that and how they are navigating the websites and how they’re gathering information and trying to actually complete all of the steps.

The way that we make the most of empathy as a skill set and not just as a step in a process is to bring these different techniques to life, and to thoughtfully integrate them at different points throughout our processes. So we ask ourselves, when or how might it be helpful to pause and interview somebody else about their experience? And we can ask ourselves the same questions about when and how it would be helpful to immerse ourselves in another person’s experience? And when or how it might help to just sit next to someone and to work with them and talk together.

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