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EdSurge
Can Virtual Simulations Teach a Human Skill Like Empathy?
By Stephen Noonoo
Aug 5, 2019
Can you learn empathy through interacting with a computer—even though,
by definition, the skill requires understanding and sympathizing with
real people?
When Kathleen Marek first heard about virtual simulations designed to
help teachers be more responsive and even empathetic to students in
distress, she was skeptical. “I thought it was interesting that it was
computer-based,” says Marek, who works as the mental health program
coordinator for Santa Clara Unified School District in California, “but
it was sort of ironic.”
Yet when she spoke with teachers, she found many of them were receptive to the idea.
“This one math teacher said, ‘I think about interpersonal interactions
with students that I’ve had and I wonder how much of what I said led to
whatever happened’”—especially if it was bad, Marek recalls.
The teacher’s biggest fear was fumbling a sensitive conversation and
accidentally making things worse, so she wanted the chance to practice
empathic conversations in a safe, controlled space. “I thought, of
course, that’s genius,” Marek says.
Earlier this year, the Santa Clara district held a one-day training for
hundreds of teachers and support staff using simulation software from a
company called Kognito, which specializes in creating one-on-one
virtual conversations around health-related topics, such as bullying,
suicide prevention and substance abuse.
The company’s simulations make use of virtual students and role playing
techniques. It’s just one approach to creating challenging scenarios
for educators that test not only their decision making abilities, but
their capacity for building trust and relationships with others. The
big question, of course, is how—and also, is it effective?
A New Perspective
Empathy is not a singular concept, explains Glenn Albright, Kognito’s
co-founder and director of research. It’s divided into two parts with
different meanings. Emotional empathy is the definition we often think
of. It’s the natural ability to share how another person is feeling—to
get happy when a friend shares her recent engagement, or to feel sad
when others are crying.
Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, takes more conscious effort. It’s
putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, or understanding why a friend
or student is feeling sad, even if you’re not feeling it yourself.
“Both [emotional] empathy and cognitive empathy increase your ability to communicate a relationship,” Albright says.
When virtual simulations attempt to build more empathy, they do it by
presenting scenarios that are often emotionally fraught, stressful or
challenging—and maybe a little dramatic. The goal is to provoke an
emotional response in participants and give them a taste of what that
situation can feel like from someone else’s perspective.
Over the decades, simulations were designed to train humans to perform
specific procedures or tasks that were too expensive, dangerous or
impractical to do on a regular basis, such as performing complicated
surgery or piloting planes. Today, simulations are trying to cover
fuzzier, “soft” skills that do not always have clear-cut answers or
steps—such as education and empathy.
“I’m not going to say it’s always successful,” says Andrea Stevenson
Won, an assistant professor at Cornell University and director of the
Virtual Embodiment Lab, which researches these topics. But she adds
that they have shown promise in areas beyond specific rote tasks—like
compassion. In one study, participants who identified themselves as
naturally self-critical used a virtual reality simulation to comfort a
child avatar who was upset. Later, they became the child avatar
themselves, and heard their own comforting words played back from a
different perspective, an experience that taught them to be more
compassionate to themselves.
“You want to think about what VR can do that you can’t do in other
media,” Stevenson Won says. Because it’s a controlled environment, “you
can repeat actions over and over, you can look at your own actions and
reflect on them, and you can look at other people’s actions from
another perspective.”
Providing that first person perspective is central to Ed Leadership
Sims, which creates professional development simulations for school
leaders. These programs are not as high-tech; they run on a computer
browser and feature video clips of actors who perform scenarios that an
administrator may encounter—such as a recalcitrant teacher, a budget
shortfall and a challenging PTA, or a student who comes out as
transgender. Users often work in small groups and choose from a list of
pre-populated text responses, which shapes how the scenario’s next
event unfolds.
“This isn’t designed to give them a crystal ball, ‘If you do this, this
will happen,’” says CEO Ken Spero. “The goal here is critical
thinking.” A secondary goal is to provoke debate and discussion. By
taking on the role of a principal or other administrator, the hope is
that participants reflect on their past bosses—and even themselves—when
tough decisions get made, as a way to build cognitive empathy.
To add complexity, certain details are intentionally left out, allowing
group members to make different assumptions. And obvious answers are
often absent, forcing the group to do the best they can. Naturally,
conflicts arise and participants often report feeling stressed, says
Spero. It may be unpleasant in the moment, but it’s a deliberate
attempt to trigger emotions and make the experience more
memorable—based on research that suggests that emotional events are
more likely to move into one’s long-term memory.
“The simulations do a good job at putting them in the hot seat and
making them own the scenario from the get-go,” says Tyler Grundmeyer,
an associate professor of educational leadership at Drake University in
Iowa, who uses the simulations with the aspiring administrators in his
courses. “I don’t know that you’re going to get the realism or the
empathy without really making it personal for them.”
Take the recalcitrant teacher scenario, one of Grundmeyer’s favorites.
A well-regarded teacher comes to the principal—who the participant or
group is role playing—complaining of a disruptive, bullying coworker,
who blames students and other teachers and won’t take constructive
feedback. At a faculty meeting, things get heated. Do you interrupt the
meeting? Talk to either of the teachers alone? Do you follow up quickly
or let things play out? As participants discover, if you don’t thread
the carefullest needle, the well-regarded teacher who filed the
complaint leaves the school.
“Students come back frustrated,” says Grundmeyer, who typically
conducts a class discussion after groups complete the simulation. “They
say, ‘We were going to talk to her but we didn’t yet.’ They’re frazzled
when she leaves, because she was one of the best teachers left. That’s
real.”
When students go through a simulation, Grundmeyer notices them weighing
how their decisions impact others and whether their actions will help
them succeed. But he also watches as they learn to navigate groups:
both the virtual ones in the scenario and the real-life partners they
need buy-in from to make decisions. “It’s bigger than empathy,” he
says. “It’s about them shaping their leadership platform and philosophy
when they get that opportunity.”
Developing Emotional Intelligence
Kognito’s use of animated virtual agents instead of actors is
different, but the general idea is similar. Scenarios still involve
choosing dialogue options from a list—some nurturing, others more
blunt—and receiving feedback.
In addition to building trust and empathy, the company also aims to
teach so-called “gatekeeper skills,” or the ability to identify
distress, talk meaningfully about concerns and motivate students to
speak with a counselor, says Kognito’s Albright.
“This virtual human—let’s say a student—is programmed with memory,
personality, emotion, and it will react like a real student in
psychological distress,” Albright explains. Virtual students will
remember if you’ve said something judgemental earlier in the
conversation, and appreciate attempts to build trust and empathize.
After interactions, a virtual coach dispenses feedback on choices and
occasionally thought bubbles appear, providing a window into what
students are thinking.
To teach these context-specific skills, such as building trust with
students, a simulation like Kognito relies on techniques like
motivational interviewing, an intervention which is used to help
prepare another person to make a change in their life—in this case,
sitting down with a mental health counselor for the first time. “It’s a
very respectful way of speaking with people,” explains Albright.
Teachers might select open-ended questions from a list of choices to
get students to share, and then reflect back what the student said to
show they’re listening. “We begin to feel comfortable, and that’s
exactly what happens in these simulations,” he says.
In one simulation, a middle school student named Charlie shows early
signs of distress in English class. Once an avid talker, she’s become
withdrawn and stopped participating. Over the course of the
conversation, you learn that she may be experiencing trauma. By the end
of it, you can create some accommodations to help her in class and
refer her to the school counselor.
These types of conversations can be very effective, says Marek, the
mental health program coordinator. “It was hugely impactful because
teachers were realizing, ‘I’m making assumptions that my class is the
most important thing to this child and clearly they have other things
happening,’” she says. “I think [teachers] want to have empathy, but I
think they don’t know how to necessarily reach those kids.”
Kognito’s simulations attempt to put both emotional and cognitive
empathy at play. When virtual students like Charlie share difficult
parts of their lives, you might feel a pang of sadness without even
thinking about it. Reading her thought bubbles might provide insights
into why she’s responding the way she is. “We’re aiming at increasing
both empathies,” Albright says. “If you and I start to understand what
people are really thinking as opposed to what they’re saying, we
develop more of an emotional intelligence in terms of communicating
with that individual effectively.”
That’s the ideal, anyway. Whether or not independent research bears
this out is still up for debate. Studies on medical students conducting
simulated patient visits have shown some success, particularly in
developing cognitive empathy. But research with pre-service teachers
last decade using a less robust simulation didn’t do much to get
participants to identify with the virtual characters.
In fact, there may be a limit to what simulations are capable of when
it comes to these types of skills. It’s a robust area for research, but
not enough has been conducted to tell.
“Mostly there is evidence these techniques can help with the more
tactical, cognitive aspects of social interaction,” says Jonathan
Gratch, the director for virtual humans research at the University of
Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. “I don’t know
that there’s good evidence it helps with the socio-emotional part of
it.” That is, if a person is afraid of, say, speaking in public—or in
the case of Marek’s teacher, speaking candidly with a
student—simulations can teach tactics to help regulate those emotions
in the moment, though research is less clear on whether they can teach
empathy skills in general.
Simulations are also an imperfect substitute for in-person interaction,
says Gratch, because when we’re talking with another person, our
behavior can change. The confidence you feel in a controlled scenario
might not carry over to a real life situation. “Many people want to be
too accommodating,” he notes. “They may not feel that kind of emotional
pressure to be accomodating to a virtual character, but they might when
they are sitting down with a person. Their defenses crumble.”
However, he adds, it certainly can’t hurt to practice.
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