Students use empathy to understand how identifying stakeholders shifts the way a problem is defined and how stronger solutions are developed. Through a bridge-design launch, peer critique, journal reflection, and creation of their own empathy maps, they practice listening, perspective-taking, collaboration, and decision-making in authentic project contexts. This week builds the habits and tools students will use in later exhibition projects while connecting artistic empathy, group behavior, and environmental problem-solving to real audiences and real needs.

Students will identify stakeholders, ask empathetic questions, and use empathy maps to better define a real-world problem before proposing solutions. They will analyze how perspective-taking shapes decisions in art, environmental design, and collaborative problem solving, aligning their thinking to community and ecological impacts. Students will communicate their ideas clearly, give and apply peer feedback, and revise their empathy maps for their grade-level project focus. Through journaling, discussion, and exhibition, they will reflect on how empathy strengthens self-awareness, teamwork, and the quality of final design choices.

Students will create a class empathy map around the bridge scenario, individual journal reflections, and draft stakeholder question lists as they practice defining problems through empathy. By the end of the week, freshmen will produce an empathy map that guides the theme and audience needs for a board game, sophomores will produce a collaborative empathy map that identifies research needs, shared decisions, and cross-biome coordination for their planet project, and juniors will produce an empathy map that clarifies audience age range, interests, and topic for their book. Students will also prepare a brief share-out or display version of their empathy map for class exhibition and peer critique, then revise it based on feedback.

Open with a fast-paced “Who is affected?” bridge design challenge: in table groups, students study a scenario in which a new bridge is being built near a community and generate as many stakeholders as possible, along with each person’s likely questions, needs, and concerns. Groups transfer their ideas into a large empathy map, then combine their thinking in a whole-class whiteboard map to notice whose perspectives were easy to see and whose were overlooked. Close with a short discussion around the question, “How can empathy change the way we define a problem and create a solution?” and have students write a quick journal reflection about how the activity shifted their thinking.

End the week with a gallery walk in which students post their empathy maps and give a 2-minute explanation of how empathy changed the way they understood their project problem and possible solution. Freshmen can share board game audience and theme choices, sophomores can present how their biome group’s decisions connect to the shared planet, and juniors can explain how audience age and topic shaped their book concept. Classmates leave warm and cool feedback on sticky notes, then students revise their maps and add a short reflection pulled from their journals. If possible, invite another class, teachers, or administrators to visit so students practice communicating their thinking to an authentic audience.