Last Updated on 09/25/2025 by Ruth Okoye
In today’s interconnected world, developing perspective-taking skills in high school students is not just a pedagogical goal; it’s essential for fostering critical thinking, empathy, and digital citizenship. These skills are integral to shaping today’s high school graduates, and educators play a significant role in turning this abstract goal into concrete instructional practices that encourage students to think critically and share their thoughts. Let’s examine some foundational frameworks for perspective-taking that can ground instruction and explore how specific edtech tools can amplify these lessons by helping students visualize viewpoints, embody new perspectives, and engage in structured debate.
Foundational Frameworks for Perspective-Taking
Harvard’s Project Zero Thinking Routines
As part of Project Zero’s focus on visible thinking, researchers have developed a practical Thinking Routines Toolbox that offers patterns of action that can easily be integrated into the classroom to enhance learning. The aim is to structure students’ learning through a series of questions or prompts that can be used repeatedly with different topics so that the strategy becomes routine. Perspective-taking is an entire category in the toolbox, offering 24 different thinking routines, including:
- Circle of Viewpoints – This routine asks students to identify different perspectives on a topic or dilemma and think critically, asking questions from those viewpoints.
- Step Inside – This routine asks students to inhabit a perspective and speak from that point of view.
- Tug-of-War – This routine asks students to identify the tugs (reasons) pulling each side towards opposing ends of a rope (core issue).
- Peel the Fruit– This routine asks students to go beyond the surface level of an issue and find deeper meaning by thinking about facets of the issue as the skin (surface), pulp (substance), and core (central idea) of a fruit.
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Competencies
Perspective-taking is at the heart of the Social Awareness competency in CASEL’s framework for social-emotional learning, as understanding the perspectives of others is key to developing empathy. Elements of social awareness that relate to perspective-taking include:
- recognizing strengths in others;
- showing concern for others’ feelings;
- identifying social and ethical norms; and
- appreciating diversity.
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culturally responsive teaching is a pedagogical framework that acknowledges and values students’ unique and diverse cultural perspectives. This theory emphasizes that perspective-taking extends beyond academics and highlights key matters of equity and inclusion. Specific targets relevant to perspective-taking captured in the seminal work of Gloria Ladson-Billings include:
- Developing cultural competence by asking students to move beyond their own cultural lens and gain fluency and appreciation for other cultures.
- Activating prior knowledge by recognizing “funds of knowledge” (the rich information, skills, and experiences a student brings from their family and community), which offers classmates a different lens through which to see the world.
- Fostering sociopolitical consciousness by helping students understand the impact of power, privilege, and oppression in the world.
Digital Citizenship
Standard 2 in the ISTE Standards for Students focuses on the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of living, learning, and working in an interconnected digital world, and acting in ways that are safe, legal, and ethical. A deep understanding of what is safe, legal, and ethical necessitates the ability to take the perspective of different parties, in instances such as:
- Copyright – Taking on the perspective of the content creator, understanding the effort and value behind creative work and respecting the rights of the person who made it.
- Data privacy – Understanding the perspective of companies collecting data as it relates to security and privacy at a societal level.
Common Sense Education’s digital citizenship curriculum includes a “Relationships and Communication” module that emphasizes the role of empathy in perspective-taking. Discussions of cyberbullying and hate speech provide students with critical practice in understanding the experiences of others.
Integrating Edtech to Amplify Perspective-Taking
Below you’ll find several types of edtech-infused activities you can use to help your students develop perspective-taking skills.
Brainstorming and Visualizing Viewpoints
- When implementing the Circle of Viewpoints thinking routine, consider using a Padlet Sandbox board or Figjam to create a digital whiteboard space where students post sticky notes for each viewpoint they are assigned. For example, having students take on different stakeholder roles as they consider a hot topic allows the entire class to see the full spectrum of viewpoints simultaneously, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the topic.
- When implementing the Tug of War thinking routine, consider using MindMeister (reviewed here) to create a mind map with the dilemma at its center and two main branches extending on either side. Then, students can add smaller branches for each tug (reason) that supports each side of the conflict.
Embodying a Perspective
- When implementing the Step Inside thinking routine, consider having students use a screen recording tool like Screencastify (reviewed here) or ScreenPal (reviewed here) to record a response as a historical figure, character, or even an object.
- Consider using Canva for Education (reviewed here) or Adobe Express for Education (reviewed here) to have students create a social media profile or a day-in-the-life-type post from an assigned perspective, developing both their digital literacy skills and perspective-taking abilities.
- Consider using Book Creator (reviewed here) as a platform for students to showcase writing from a particular perspective. Each chapter can represent a different point of view.
Discussion and Debate
- Consider using Kialo Edu (reviewed here) as a structured discussion platform where students can post pros and cons to represent different viewpoints on the same thesis statement. Students can also extend threads by responding to others’ claims, showing deeper connections.
- Try using Parlay (reviewed here) as a roundtable virtual discussion option that ensures that all voices are part of the conversation. Students can respond to prompts, reference materials, and discussion questions provided by the teacher asynchronously in writing.
- Use Gravity (reviewed here) to create a community where students can create and post video responses to discussion prompts. Video responses provide a unique opportunity for students to adopt an empathetic perspective.
By grounding instruction in established frameworks that focus on perspective-taking and amplifying lessons with edtech tools, teachers can create dynamic and memorable learning experiences that foster students’ capacity for empathy, deepen their appreciation for diversity, and enhance their digital citizenship skills. These types of lessons are essential for helping students not only understand the content, but also the world they live in.
Help this resource grow! Share the tools and strategies you use to foster perspective-taking in the comments below.