Building Bridges Through Stories: How Empathy Education Can Start with Reading and Writing

February 16, 2026

While empathy is often viewed as an inherent trait, research shows it is a skill that can be cultivated, strengthened, and taught. Empathy involves understanding, feeling, and responding to another’s emotions by actively listening, perspective-taking, and identifying emotions in others. One of the most powerful ways to develop this capacity is through the seemingly simple acts of reading and writing using strategies.

Developing Empathy While Reading

Think about the last time you got genuinely lost in a book. You weren't just following plot points—you were insidesomeone else's experience. That's exactly what happens with our students when they connect with a character. Those characters start doing real work: keeping kids hooked, yes, but also connecting students to experiences that may or may not align to their own. There's even evidence that students who emotionally connect with characters comprehend stories better. Which makes sense, right? When you care about what happens, you pay closer attention to why it's happening.

The real magic is when support students to go beyond passive reading into active emotional engagement. Instead of just noting what a character did, we ask them to sit with the why. Why did she say that hurtful thing? What pushed him to that choice? Try these two strategies to deepen how students understand characters while quietly building their capacity for empathy.

Strategy 6.5*—Think About How the Character Is Feeling:  Ask students to think about a time they felt something similar to what the character is feeling, then find words for that feeling. You'd be amazed how quickly this builds an emotional vocabulary that sticks.

Strategy 6.12*—Empathize to Understand Motivations: Sometimes imagining ourselves to be in the character’s position helps us to make an inference. Ask students to notice what's happening to the character—how others are treating them, what's going right or wrong—and think about why they might be reacting the way they are. Then extend it: “What would you do in that situation?”

Writing Takes Empathy Even Further

When kids write their own stories, they're juggling three perspectives at once: their own as the author, their character's, and their future reader's. That's a serious mental workout—and a serious empathy workout.

One thing I love about writing-as-empathy-practice is how it changes the way students think about people, not just characters. Once a child has had to imagine why a character snapped at their best friend or stayed quiet when they should have spoken up, they start applying that same curiosity to real people. This deliberate act of imaginative identification, asking "How would I feel? What would I think? How would I react?” challenges students to bridge differences and find common humanity.

With instruction and practice, students of all ages can improve their ability to understand the perspectives of others, including perspectives shaped by cultures and communities different from their own.

Here are two strategies that do double duty: strengthening students' writing craft and helping them to add meaningful details that bring their story to life, while also deepening their capacity for empathy.

Strategy 6.21**—Write the “Inside Story”: Include feelings and thoughts in the moment. Have students zoom in on how a character is reacting to events. Not just what they did, but what was going on inside their mind and heart. What were they thinking and feeling right as it happened?

Strategy 6.31**—Use Empathy to Figure Out What to Add: Ask students to truly inhabit their character—real or fictional, similar to them or completely different—and write from that place. How would I feel? What would I think? What would I say? The details that come out of this exercise are almost always richer than anything they'd produce otherwise.

Why This Matters Beyond Your Classroom

Students who develop empathy through literacy can become better friends, more thoughtful citizens, and more effective communicators. When they practice seeing through the eyes of characters who don't look like them, who've faced things they haven't, who make choices they wouldn't, they're building a flexibility of mind that serves them both in school and in life.

In teaching empathy through reading and writing, we're doing more than building literacy skills; we're giving students the tools to actually see each other. And that feels worth the effort.

*strategies from The Reading Strategies Book 2.0

**strategies from The Writing Strategies Book