Lesson 2 - Perspective Taking

Welcome back to Week Two of the Coping Power Classroom video series!

This week, your students are learning all about perspective taking. This includes understanding how different people might view the same situation, event, or problem very differently. Your students are learning about the importance of exploring where misunderstandings between people might come from, or why one person might react differently than another person in a given situation.

Your students learned last week about how their feelings, thoughts, and actions impact them, and the intensity of their different emotions. This week, they’re focusing on understanding how other people might have unique thoughts and feelings that impact their behaviors and perspectives as well.

If we don’t think of different possibilities for the behaviors of others, we might wrongly assume they are trying to be mean or cause problems in our lives, when they might just have a different perspective on the situation than we do. In fact, they might not even realize that whatever they’re doing is upsetting to us!

Your students are practicing thinking through what another person’s perspective and goals might be in various situations, like passing a friend in the hallway who doesn’t say “hello,” or sharing a snack with someone when they didn’t want to share. The goal is not for students to always agree with the other person in a situation, and they don’t have to change their opinions to match the opinions of someone else, but it’s helpful to understand where the other person is coming from to better work through a tricky situation or misunderstanding.

Ideally, your students will begin to stop and think before reacting to upsetting or challenging situations, or to someone else’s behavior. They should be asking themselves questions like, “why did this happen?” which will help them to consider the intentions and goals of others before jumping to conclusions. For example, they might recognize that while a friend or classmate hurt their feelings, it was a misunderstanding or an accident. In later lessons, we’ll help your students learn to communicate hurt feelings and misunderstandings effectively.

For this week though, we encourage you to dig deeper with your students into the concept of perspective taking. Ask them about any experience in which they applied perspective-taking, and how it helped them resolve the situation.

This is also a great concept to tie into classroom lessons and activities. If your class is reading a book containing a conflict between two characters, or learning about a conflict in history, point out the importance of perspective taking, and how perspective taking could impact the outcome of the conflict, real or fictional. Ask students to think about the perspectives of both individuals in the conflict, and how practicing this skill might help them come to a resolution.

These conversations are also applicable in the specials classrooms. For example, in P.E., students might stop to discuss controversial calls during a game and try to understand the perspectives of both players. In music, they might discuss how sound is different based on where in the room you are standing, or how the sound of your own voice is different to you than it is to others. In art, students might discuss how different people interpret the same piece of art, how two people might feel differently about different colors or patterns, or what type of art is the most meaningful to them.

There are hundreds of opportunities to discuss perspective taking in the lives of your students, so please don’t feel limited to just these examples. Good luck, and we’ll see you next week!