Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What exactly is empathy, and how does it play a role in the lives of modern school-age children?

Teaching Suggestion: Dear Evan Hansen focuses on feeling alone and finding community. In the first chapters, we learn of Evan’s anxiety and Connor’s suicide. The Connor Project works to make sure everyone knows that they matter. Giving students a chance to reflect on empathy before reading can help ground the study of the book and build community in the class throughout the unit. The following or similar resources might be helpful in establishing a class-wide working definition of empathy to be considered throughout reading. Returning to the video below at different points throughout the novel may offer students the chance to analyze characters’ responses compared to those in the video. The poem below offers the opportunity to become familiar with internal monologues, important to the novel’s style. Willingham’s poem also provides a glimpse into a speaker who could use empathy. One option might be to discuss ways of applying the video’s ideas to a conversation with the poem’s speaker.