Social Emotional Learning Topic: Perspective-Taking

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Perspective-Taking with Dr. Clements

Jenny Woo: Hello everyone. I'm Jenny and you're listening to 52 Essential Conversations. Today, we have Lindsay Clements joining us to talk about Perspective-taking.

Jenny Woo: Lindsay is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology at Boston College. She researches how parent-child and peer-to-peer dialogue can impact early learning and executive function. She also has experience working with schools to build and implement learning support programs for struggling students and those with disabilities.

Jenny Woo: Welcome Lindsay. 

Lindsay Clements: Thanks for having me.

Jenny Woo: Tell us, what exactly is perspective-taking and why is it important?

Lindsay Clements: Perspective-taking is really what it sounds like. It's the ability to take another person's perspective into consideration. As researchers, we often think of that in a couple of different ways. One way that we can think about it is more from a visual perspective and understanding that if someone else is standing at a different place in a room or a classroom, that they're experiencing that classroom a little bit differently than we are. So, we can stop to think about what that experience is like for them--what they see and what they feel in that particular position. Another way that we can think about it is more from an empathetic or interpersonal perspective. And that's getting to know a person, understanding that they have different beliefs, likes and dislikes, than us. And understanding that because of that, they experience different situations, different people, even TV shows a little bit differently than we do and stopping to think what that is like for them. These both ways that we think about perspective-taking are important because both contribute to executive functioning and there are two ways that really happen. One is through what we call inhibition. In order to take another person's perspective, we really have to inhibit our own to take a few moments and put ourselves in another person's shoes and think about what this is like for them. The second way that supports executive function is through what we call cognitive flexibility. And that really means that we're switching in our brain between different perspectives. I'm situated in my own perspective. I take a moment to try to understand someone else's so I'm flexibly switching to their perspective and then I switch back to my own. By taking other people's perspective, whether it's from an emotional standpoint or just in thinking about what the space that they're in is like for them, we're supporting our own executive function and we're supporting kids and developing their executive functions.

Jenny Woo: This sounds like a really critical skill and I can already think of examples of when I wish my children could have a little bit more of those. For example, as parents, we've had a long day at work or just running errands coming back and there are times where I wish my children could take that perspective of mine and realize that I've had a hard day, I need a break right. Or, if my twins could understand each other and have fewer fights. Tell me, what can we do at home to encourage and build perspective-taking skills?

Lindsay Clements: One way that we can do it from kind of an activity fun thing to do perspective is to prompt children to do that. We could do that on the go. If we're driving in the car, we could ask our children "what do you think this park looks like for me versus you because I'm in the front seat and you're in the backseat?" Or, if we're at home and somebody is watching a TV show. Whether it's a children's cartoon or a show that you might like to watch, you can still comment on the different characters' emotional states and maybe prompt during the commercial break your child to role play and think about if you were this person in the show and this other thing happened to you, how do you think you would feel? You can also do that with something like a book character or even a character in a commercial.

Jenny Woo: That's great. And I know that role modeling is also very important. What can we as parents do ourselves to role model this type of perspective-taking for our children?

Lindsay Clements: One thing that's important to remember is that perspective-taking along with all executive functions are developmental skills so kids get better at it as they get older. You might want to think about how you can make role modeling more age-appropriate. For younger children, you might take the time to tell them a story in more detail about not only what happened to you in that particular story but how you felt and how someone else felt during it. Kids are beginning to understand that in any given situation there's a lot of different perspectives happening that are all interacting and cooperating. To build a different situation, for older kids you can do the same thing, but your questions might be a little bit more complex. There's a better understanding of more diverse emotions beyond just happy, sad, angry as children get older. You might ask more probing questions like "do you think they felt both happy and sad when this happened to them? What do you think would make them feel better?" And kind of just talking about how perspectives are complex and different things can be happening all at the same time.

Jenny Woo: That sounds great and that actually led me to think about how this is done in the classroom. I can certainly see the type of inquiry-based method done through writing and talking. Tell me what have you done as an educator, a teacher in the schools that you've worked at?

Lindsay Clements: One thing that I have seen a lot of my students enjoy is some of the more project-based learning where children have a lot of agency or input in what it is that they're going to be doing so they can choose a topic, choose how they research it and choose what their final product is--whether it's a paper, an art project, a video, they can work with their teacher to decide what it is that's most important to them and then students can look around and see that other students have different interests for them. Different preferences for how they go about their research for what kind of project that they want to produce and that can help them understand that what I'm doing is important to me for these reasons and I can ask other people what you are doing and why is that important to you.

Jenny Woo: Very useful. Lindsay, if I want to learn more about perspective-taking and even executive function skills. Where can I go?

Lindsay Clements: Executive functioning is becoming a more popular area of research as well as a more popular area of discussion for both parents and researchers in that partnership. There's a lot of resources through different projects, one of which I work on is called The DREME project, D.R.E.M.E. And that's out of Stanford University. There's a lot of researchers working on that around the country. We do a lot of work on the parent-child connection in terms of executive functioning and also as a secondary interest in math. We have a great website that has parent blogs as well as different research projects that we're working on and little blurbs about what those mean. I would encourage any interested parents or teachers, if they have a moment, to look at that website. We also linked to other parent resources or teacher resources that might be interesting for those who want to do a little deeper research on that topic.

Jenny Woo: That sounds great. I'll be checking it out soon. Thank you so much for your time, Lindsey for being here with us. And thank you for joining us for 52 Essential Conversations.