How Empathy Interviews Transform Stakeholder Engagement into Shared Ownership

By: Jennifer Poon and Doannie Tran

What do you picture when you hear “stakeholder engagement?” A warm scene of solidarity and shared purpose, or a cold image of lip service and performative posturing? Too often, we’ve seen education leaders invite feedback from stakeholders in superficial ways that lead to the latter impression.

Many of us are working to flip that script, using terms like co-creation to describe a deeper kind of stakeholder engagement–one that doesn’t just ask students, families, and community members for their opinions (with no promise of action), but includes them in the very rooms where decisions are made. We’ve seen investments in co-creation result in systems and strategies that better address root problems and create broad community buy-in.

Understandably, not every leader is in a position to commit to a full, end-to-end co-creation process. Doing so requires time, structure, and thoughtful facilitation. But in our experience, co-creation always starts with one step, and it happens to be one that any education leader can commit to with immediate benefits.

That small but mighty step is the empathy interview.

An empathy interview is a one-on-one, open-ended conversation designed to surface not opinions or preferences, but beliefs, emotions, and needs. Not a sterile focus group or a town hall where the loudest opinions reign, an empathy interview is a conversation between two people, in which one of them — the interviewer — is trying as hard as possible to understand the lived experience of the other. The questions are open. The follow-ups are curious, not leading. The goal is to get to the story underneath the answer.

Why is An Empathy Interview Powerful?

In 2021, we supported Burlington School District to co-create its next strategic plan with a coalition of community representatives. We trained district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and community members on the coalition, who conducted more than 75 interviews by going into their own networks, talking with neighbors, family members, and people who would never show up to a school board meeting or a town hall.

The results were striking. The process allowed district leadership and the coalition to connect with new people in order to bring in insights that are typically unavailable, and to see patterns across those experiences. For example, one interviewer said, “It was really eye opening to [hear others] sharing painful stories about how students were not being served and their frustrations. This was profound for me… I had a fuller picture from it all.”

A district leader reflected on what the process made possible for them personally:

“The empathy interviews were incredibly powerful. [My children] are white, cis-gendered, able-bodied students, so I had a very limited perspective. But the empathy interviews, and hearing all the different stories… gave me pause, and really allowed me to expand my vision and my view.”

This is what empathy interviews do that focus groups and surveys can’t. They reach the people and the stories that don’t make it into the room on their own. And they do it through relationships and the simple, radical act of one person saying to another: Tell me what your experience has been. I’m here to listen.

By bringing all of their interview experiences together, the Burlington coalition identified patterns and common issues that became the focus of the district’s strategies and actions. We’re now gearing up to support Burlington’s next round of strategic planning, leveraging the district’s capacity to conduct empathy interviews and build from their community’s collective experiences.

Meanwhile, we created this Guide to Empathy Interviews so others can learn more about the process and find out how to get started.

Who Conducts the Empathy Interviews?

In our Guide to Empathy Interviewing, we asserted that leaders who conduct empathy interviews will be able to “create systems that address real needs, build broad support, and foster shared accountability for important work ahead.”

But that’s only half-true. Results don’t come from just using the tool. We’ve learned that how you use it, specifically, who conducts the interviews, and what you do with the data afterward, that matters most.

Recently, CIE supported district leaders in Burlington School District, Vermont, to design empathy interview questions to ascertain what different groups of people think of the district’s current work and priorities. The effort will help inform the priorities, action areas, and metrics of the district’s next strategic plan.

On its face, there’s not that much different here than any fact-finding process. But here’s the catch: we (the consultants) support the overall process, but Burlington leaders and members of their community will be the ones conducting the interviews. A district leader intently listening to a teacher or student. A parent interviewing another parent. A student interviewing a peer.

A lot changes when you shift the driver’s seat from outsiders to members of the community. When a consultant interviews a community member, that person is being studied. When a neighbor interviews a neighbor, that person is being heard by someone who already shares some part of their context, and who is going to carry their story back to a group that will make decisions informed by what they hear.

This changes whose knowledge gets centered and what questions even get asked. A student who has experienced a particular kind of exclusion knows what follow-up to ask that no outside researcher would think of. A parent who has navigated a system not built for their child understands immediately when another parent is describing a similar experience and knows how to inquire with discernment and respect.

We don’t prioritize interview uniformity. The interview adapts to the interviewee as it unfolds, shaped by the context that they share.

One other thing that happens when district leaders and members of the community conduct the interviews: the interviewers themselves are changed. Time and time again, the people we have trained to conduct empathy interviews have called their experiences “eye opening” and “incredibly powerful.” The act of sitting with someone else and deeply listening to how they experience the world impacts how we perceive the world, too. And that changes everything about what the interviews can produce.

What You Do With It Matters

We have found that the interviews are critical, but they really are only the beginning.

Once the coalition of district leaders and community interviewers brings their anonymized interviews back to the group, the work of sense-making begins. And this is where something important happens that gets lost if consultants do all the work.

Every coalition member reads synopses of every interview. Not just the ones they conducted, but from a broader range of perspectives beyond their own. The breadth of what the coalition absorbs together becomes the foundation for a shared reality. The synthesis they create together is not a compromise between competing interests, but a genuinely expanded picture of what’s true for the community the district serves. And from that shared reality, the coalition can begin to identify root causes together: not from the individual wounds and victories that each person entered with, but what the aggregation of all those stories points toward. Forging a shared reality is challenging and exciting facilitation work, but worth the effort.

When members of the community aren’t just interviewed, but are invited to make sense of the data and shape what comes next, they become participants. Participants become co-creators. Co-creators become stewards of a plan they helped build. They advocate for it, and they also hold the district accountable for upholding it.

The result is not just a better strategic plan. It is the start of a more reciprocal relationship between a community and its schools. One where community members feel they have a stake in what happens with their district, because they were “in the room where it happens.” They were there when the questions were asked, and there again when the answers started to become decisions.

When we ask who gets to conduct empathy interviews, we’re really asking something deeper: Whose knowledge counts? Who gets to be the author of our shared understanding? Who are we trusting to carry the community’s stories into the room where decisions get made?

Those are not neutral choices. They communicate something. And in Burlington, the answer is: the students, caregivers, educators, and community members that have a stake in the future of its young people. Trained, supported, and empowered coalition members who will go into their own networks, have honest conversations, and bring back what they find. These finding are not just data points, they stories that will reshape how the district understands itself.

That’s what empathy interviews make possible. That’s why it matters who does them, and what happens next.

This post was originally published on the Center for Education Innovation Substack. Read the original post here.

Doannie Tran is a Partner at the Center for Innovation in Education.

Jennifer Poon is a Partner at the Center for Innovation in Education.