Our cohort wanted to increase the perspective-taking opportunities within our classrooms.
Perspective-taking means stepping into other peoples’ shoes to attempt to understand their feelings and experiences. It is a helpful exercise for developing empathy and analyzing issues and situations from all sides.
Using Harvard’s Project Zero Thinking Protocols, we each selected multiple activities to modify to meet our classroom/content needs and try with students. These protocols were easily adapted to our content areas of English Language Arts and Social Studies and could be used in many other content areas as well.
Through careful implementation of these activities, we hoped students would gain valuable skills in empathy and considering the viewpoints of others, which can be used in real-world issues and conflicts as well.
Harvard Thinking Routines:
Circle of Viewpoints
This routine helps students see and explore multiple perspectives. It helps them understand that different people can have different kinds of connections to the same thing, and that these different connections influence what people see and think.
See-Think-Me-We
Choose an artwork or image. This routine works well with a wide variety of works, so feel free to be experimental or adventurous in your choice. If you typically use classrooms norms for respectful discussion, you may want to refer to them before you begin: The routine invites learners to make personal connections, so it’s especially important to establish an atmosphere of trust and care
Who am I? Explore, Connect, Belong
It is not unusual for people, systems, objects or ideas to be judged or given labels without others really knowing much about them. This routine encourages students to reserve judgment, take time to find out more about what they see and/or hear, and explore more deeply and broadly other people, and develop greater understanding of similarities and differences.
Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate
This routine activates prior knowledge and helps to generate ideas about a topic. It also facilitates making connections among ideas. Concept maps help to uncover students’ mental models of a topic in a non-linear way
The 3 Whys
This routine nurtures a disposition to discern the significance of a situation, topic, or issue, keeping in mind global, local, and personal connections.
Color-Symbol-Image
This routine asks students to identify and distill the essence of ideas from reading, watching, or listening in non-verbal ways by using a color, symbol, or image to represent the ideas.
Feelings and Option/Taking a Stand
Feelings and Options scaffolds perspective taking, empathic problem-solving, ethics spotting, and communication skills for social dilemmas of digital life.
Projecting Across Distance
This routine encourages learners to take a broader, multi-perspectival view of a topic, event, or issue. While there are other thinking routines that also encourage learners to take diverse perspectives, this routine differentiates itself by inviting learners to specifically compare and contrast perspectives with firstly another community in their country, followed by countries that are geographically different from their own country. In doing so, learners come to understand that:
• Not everyone in the same country or even in the same city, holds the same views, and even if they hold broadly similar views, it’s the shades of differences that may be of greatest interest.
• People in countries that seem to be like theirs may not always think the same way, and that in fact it could be the case that people who are most geographically distant that may share similar views as them.
• It is important to gather a diversity of perspectives on a topic, event, or issue if one is to try to understand it as fully as possible, or to try to walk in someone else’s shoes for a day.