Dear Evan Hansen

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. Another might be to pose these connected questions for journaling: Reflect on a time a person really helped you feel better. What did they do? Why was it truly helpful?

• This video about empathy based on a Brené Brown speech illustrates different responses people might have to someone struggling and highlights the power of offering understanding and being there for others.
• “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame” by Katie Willingham presents an inner monologue in which the speaker muses about various worries. 

Short Activity

Consider your knowledge and observations regarding social media. Based on reputable online resources and articles plus your own observations, write 5-10 rules, guidelines, or expectations we should have regarding social media in our school.

Teaching Suggestion: Reading and annotating part of these or other articles together, possibly with a teacher think-aloud, can build common understanding. Students might benefit from working in pairs to increase discussion and build community. This may be a chance to read together your school’s current rules that apply to social media.

• This Pro/Con article provides arguments for both the benefits and the harms of social media.
• In “The Truth About Teens, Social Media, and the Mental Health Crisis,” NPR presents eight-minute audio and text options that examine studies on social media’s effects.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the novel.

How did you feel on the first day of school this year? What makes you feel most connected, accepted, and supported in school?

Teaching Suggestion: Evan is starting 12th grade. Whatever grade your students are in, they have experienced the first day of school multiple times, maybe with a variety of feelings. Even if theirs are drastically different from Evan’s, reflecting on this shared experience can help them relate to the book and the characters. Sharing in small groups or as a whole class can also build community—a focus in the novel. The mindfulness website below provides resources, many of them concise and approachable, that could be used to practice self-care within a classroom setting. This communal self-care can be a way to build community, too.

• In the two-minute TED Talks Education video “High School Training Ground,” Malcolm London speaks his truth about high school.
• This mindfulness website features resources for teens. It offers videos, meditations, and other practical guidance.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who have not built a strong community in class yet or those who would benefit from interpersonal skill-building, it might be helpful to incorporate community building activities; this prompt opens an opportunity to do so. Consider conducting a conversation line with your class: Students form two lines facing each other and discuss high-interest prompts for short periods of time, after which one line moves, so everyone gets a new partner to talk with. This activity can lead to students speaking with classmates they might not ordinarily talk with much; it can be conducted for as short or as long as is needed.