It is a truth universally acknowledged that elementary schools can teach kids to sound out words, recite multiplication tables and draw turkeys for Thanksgiving by tracing their hands and adding feathers...but can schools teach kids to empathize?

"Yes," says Hastings' Hillside Elementary School Principal Laura Sullivan.

"I truly believe that you can teach kids empathy. Though some are more prone to demonstrating it on their own, every child has the capacity to understand what it's like to experience life from someone else's point of view," she said. "Especially through experiential learning, I believe children can come to understand what it's like to live with challenges, even if they don't have them themselves."

Starting last week, Hastings adopted the education initiative "Walk in My Shoes,"—an experiential learning program that allows mainstream kids to feel what it's like to have sensory challenges—like movement disabilities, dyslexia, Asperger's Syndrome and Attention Deficit Disorder. 

Though the program is recommended as a one-day break from the regular schedule, Sullivan and her special education team at Hillside have stretched it out to last a full month. From Jan. 9 through Feb. 3, all Hillside students will participate in activities which demonstrate what it's like to like—quite literally—to live in another child's shoes.

"Last Wednesday, all the kids at Hillside were faced with an obstacle course to navagate," said Mia Johnson, president of Hastings' SEPTA, the Special Education Parent and Teacher Association. "Then they had to do it again with big clown shoes on."

The idea of the exercise was to show what it's like to try to walk across a balance beam, for example, when you struggle with keeping your balance.

Earlier this year, SEPTA parents Johnson, Vice President Nina Segal-Kennedy and Treasurer Jo Ann Weinig began brainstorming how to work together with parents of children who don't have learning challenges to teach mainstream kids to empathize with their peers who struggle more.

"Special Education teacher Rebecca Myers suggested this 'Walk in My Shoes' Program," Weinig explained. "And the special education tem along with the school's administration have worked extremely hard to tailor it speciifically to Hastings."

Week one focused on sensory challenges, week two, on reading; week three, making friends and social skills and the final week will revolve around speech and language.

After an assembly which kicked off the initiative last Monday, students in kindergarten through grade four spent time last Wednesday walking through the "clown-shoe obstacle course" and then attempting to string beads on a thread wearing gloves.

Then on Friday, Sullivan and her assistant principal Jim Boylan went from classroom to classroom to discuss individually with each group of students what it means to have sensory and motor challenges.

"What's unique about this program is that it addresses challenges in which children may look and seem the same but learn and move differently," Sullivan said. "With the challenge of stringing beads while wearing gloves, for example, a child with fine motor challenges may have hands that look perfectly normal, but his or her hands may not work as easily as other kids'." 

During the debriefing sessions last Friday, Boylan was especially impressed with the older students who were able to make connections between more severe sensory challenges and smaller issues they themselves face.

Though for some kids sensory sensitivity is more severe—like needing to wear headphones to assemblies—even kids who have not been diagnosed with sensory issues were able to relate. "I remember one child saying 'I don't like it when sleeves are too tight against my skin,'" Boylan recalled. "It was neat to see the light bulbs go on—to see them making connections."

For the SEPTA parents who spearheaded the initiative, the seamless integration between both parents with and without special-needs children and children with and without learning challenges has been extremely gratifying.

"We have a list of more than 100 parent volunteers to help out with the program, and it's totally mixed between parents in SEPTA and parents with children without learning challenges," Segal-Kennedy said. 

Johnson went with Sullivan last Friday to some of her classroom discussions on Wednesday's activities. "It was really powerful to ask the kids what it was like for them to do an obstacle course with big clown shoes on, hear their answers, and then ask, 'What would it be like if you couldn't take them off at the end?' I think that's when they really started to get it."

Johnson, Segal-Kennedy and Weinig hope to continue the "Walk in My Shoes" program at Hillside and eventually add some elements to the Farragut Middle School program as well. 

"Some kids are, of course, more understanding and patient with students with challenges than others," Weinig said, echoing Sullivan's earlier statement. "But if you can make all children begin to understand what it's like to live in somebody else's body—with somebody else's brain—then you're moving in the right direction." 

Watch the video above to see how kids learned the experience of Dyslexia.