Designing a School-Based Intervention Package to Enhance Students’ Self-Awareness, Empathy, and Social Responsibility
Keywords:
self-awareness, empathy, social responsibility, school-based intervention, social-emotional learning, students, qualitative researchAbstract
This study aimed to design a school-based intervention package to enhance students’ self-awareness, empathy, and social responsibility based on the lived experiences and perspectives of students, teachers, school counselors, and educational psychology experts in Tehran. This qualitative study was conducted using thematic analysis. The participants included 24 students, teachers, school counselors, and educational psychology experts from Tehran who were selected through purposive sampling with maximum variation. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, and the interview process continued until theoretical saturation was achieved. Each interview lasted between 35 and 65 minutes. After transcription, the interview texts were read repeatedly and analyzed using NVivo software. Data analysis followed the main phases of thematic analysis, including familiarization with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the final report. To enhance trustworthiness, member checking, peer debriefing, inter-coder agreement, analytic memo writing, and an audit trail were used. Data analysis led to the identification of four main categories: “reflective self-awareness and emotional recognition,” “empathic literacy and perspective-taking,” “social responsibility and ethical action in school,” and “implementation requirements of a school-based intervention package.” Based on these categories, a ten-session intervention package was designed, including emotion mapping, conflict narratives, active listening exercises, empathic role-play, behavioral consequence analysis, small-scale social responsibility projects, and group reflection. The findings indicated that school-based intervention should go beyond direct instruction and should be implemented through experience-based learning, dialogue, feedback, group participation, and connection with students’ everyday school life. The findings suggest that enhancing students’ self-awareness, empathy, and social responsibility requires a multidimensional, active, contextualized, and school-participatory intervention package. The proposed package can serve as a practical framework for social-emotional learning interventions in secondary schools and may contribute to the development of students’ personal, interpersonal, and social competencies.
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