A 3 Step Process to Foster Resilience & Empathy (6 minute read)

How does a disagreement that young people inevitably have with their friends relate to losing a basketball game or other sports match? Can they notice a connection from those two situations to a difficult assignment in one of their classes?

Is it too much of a stretch to connect all of those personal experiences to characters in their favorite TV series or literature? How does all of this relate to the lyrics in their favorite songs? Or living things in nature?

A common thread across these situations could be ‘resilience’ in the face of ‘setbacks.’ Imagine if more of our middle school students could independently draw out the lessons of each circumstance and apply those lessons to new situations.

For instance, a disagreement with friends could demonstrate that strong emotions are temporary. Unpleasant feelings will eventually fade. That idea could be comforting after a sports match loss.

And after both making up with their friends and winning a match, they could learn that struggles can make positive moments feel even better. And that the best things in life are worth putting in effort.

Those lessons can be applied to a challenging school assignment. They could then notice these principles in others such as characters in film and other stories. Imagine a young person making this connection while watching squirrels prepare for winter!

The best thing we can do for our students is teach them to become pattern seekers, especially in the area of self-management.

The rapid pace of change in our world today means that our young people will have to continue to learn and adapt long after they’ve left our schools (McGowen, n.d.). They need to be able to see patterns across different situations. They can’t give up easily. And they need to be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

We can use an empowering three step process to teach our young people how to become pattern seekers.

Step 1: Acquire understanding of transferable concepts.

Concepts are organizing ideas with distinct attributes that are shared across multiple examples. Put simply, they are words we use to organize and categorize our world. They are like mental file folders. They help our brains organize examples into meaningful groups based on shared attributes.

The beauty of concepts, as shown in the example of resilience and setbacks above, is that they point students and teachers alike to look past the superficial features of a situation and into the deeper structural features.

Step 2: Connect concepts in relationships.

Concepts alone, though, do not suffice to transfer our learning to new situations. The real driver of transfer is the ability to see the patterns of interaction among concepts. For instance, a resilient person must do more than just recognize a setback or a difficulty in a situation. They need to use their understanding of how setbacks make success taste sweeter in order to persevere and not give up. The mental “file folders” — concepts like setbacks and perseverance — need to be organized in relation to one another to create a conceptual framework in the expert’s mind (Donovan & Bransford, 2005).

Every field, hobby, or complex skill can be viewed through the lens of fundamental elements, called concepts, and the predictable ways those elements interact. Concepts and their connections are a critical link between prior learning and new situations.

See Figure 1 for the three simple steps to think about social-emotional learning.

Figure 1: The Learning Transfer Model-Stern, et. al, 2021

The most straightforward way to help students construct webs of meaning is to ask questions that prompt student attention to conceptual relationships. We can plug concepts into the following conceptual question stems to achieve that:

  • How are and _ connected?
  • What is the relationship between _ and _? 
  • How does impact/affect/influence ? 
  • What effect do and have on ? 
  • How do and interact? 
  • What is the role/purpose of  in ? 

We can use a cycle with two main components as a broad way to think about instructional design:

  • Teachers pose abstract questions about how concepts relate in order to call attention to the deeper structures of a situation.
  • Students explore a specific context – e.g. a personal difficult moment, witnessing a difficult moment that others experience, hearing about an injustice in the community, etc. – in which the concepts play a major role.

After students have a chance to explore a specific context and answer the conceptual question, the cycle should continue, allowing students to apply their understanding to increasingly dissimilar contexts. See Figure 2 for a visual of this cycle.

Figure 2: The Learning Transfer Cycle –Stern, Ferraro, & Mohnkern, 2017

Step 3:  Transfer learning to new situations.  

Consider the example in Figure 3 for social-emotional learning. Students are exploring the concepts of empathy and conflict. To begin, of course, teachers help students understand each concept on its own. They give students a quick definition of each concept and have students categorize a series of scenarios and images as representing either empathy or a lack of empathy. Students brainstorm as many types of conflict as they can and create a non-linguistic representation of what conflict means to them. These activities help direct students’ mental effort to the shared characteristics of empathy in new situations, which is essential for learning (McTighe & Willis, 2019).

Once students understand the meaning of each concept, the teacher poses a simple question about the relationship between them: How are empathy and conflict related? Then, students work through the learning transfer cycle to deepen their understanding of the concepts and understand how the concepts relate to each other.

How are empathy and conflict related?

Abstract conceptual questionContext for investigation
How can a lack of empathy lead to conflict?Students read a short story about a younger brother who always feels left out by his older siblings. Then they discuss the role a lack of empathy played in this sibling conflict.
How can conflict make it difficult to empathize with someone else?Students brainstorm instances in which they have had a conflict with someone else and write a journal entry about how the conflict made them feel. Then they discuss how the feelings associated with conflict – anger, frustration, resentment, sadness – can make it difficult to put yourself in another person’s shoes to practice empathy.
How can empathy help resolve a conflict?Students watch a video in which a girl overcomes a feeling of anger during a fight with her best friend by imagining things from her friend’s point of view.
How are empathy and conflict related?Students reflect on their learning through the previous three contexts and respond to the overall question of how empathy and conflict are related.

Notice that with each new book, video, or exercise, students are not only looking beyond the unfamiliar, superficial features to recognize the familiar, organizing concepts, they are using the unique features of the situation to explore the deeper patterns involved in the relationship between empathy and conflict in order to build a complex web of connections between the two ideas in their minds. This aids in both memory retention and in transfer of learning, as strong patterns in relationships allow predictions when confronting a new situation (McTighe & Willis, 2019).

The beauty of this cycle is that each new context also helps students strengthen their understanding of each concept individually. After investigating the relationship between empathy and conflict in these various iterations, students will have many examples of each concept in their respective mental file folders and can draw upon those examples when investigating the relationship between, say, conflict and peace, or empathy and resilience, down the road. And, just as important, each new context provides fertile ground to practice learning transfer.  

When we transfer, we must revisit our existing understanding and interrogate what we believe to be true. This means that we have to practice intellectual humility and admit when our prior understanding was partial or erroneous. Imagine a world where everyone practiced intellectual humility! This simple three-step process is a powerful force in our quest for more resilient and equitable schools and communities.

For further learning on this model, see Julie’s website and online courses. 

www.edtochangetheworld.com 

www.conceptualtransfer.com 

References: 

Donovan, S., & Bransford, J. (2005). How students learn. National Academies Press. 

McGowan, H. (n.d.). Sample frameworks. Heather E McGowan. Retrieved November 29, 2022, from https://heathermcgowan.com/sample-frameworks 

McTighe, J., & Willis, J. (2019). Upgrade your teaching: Understanding by design meets neuroscience. ASCD. 

Stern, J. H., Ferraro, K. F., Duncan, K., Aleo, T.,  (2021). Learning that transfers: Designing curriculum for a changing world. Corwin. 

Stern, J. H., Ferraro, K. F., Mohnkern, J. (2017). Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding: Designing lessons & assessments for deeper learning. Corwin. 

Julie Stern has two decades experience facilitating adult learning, and feels lucky to partner with educators to take their practice to the next level. She is passionate about synthesizing the best of education research into practical tools that support educators in breaking free of the industrial model of schooling and moving toward teaching and learning that promotes sustainability, equity, and well-being. She is a four-time, best-selling author of Learning that Transfers, Visible Learning for Social Studies, The On-Your-Feet-Guide to Learning Transfer and Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding, Elementary and Secondary. She is a certified trainer in Visible Learning Plus and Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction. She is a James Madison Constitutional Fellow and taught social studies for many years before serving as Director of Curriculum Innovation for a network of schools. Julie moves internationally every few years with her husband, a US diplomat, and her two children.