Today Jason Okonofua is a newly minted psychology professor at Berkeley whose research focuses on empathy. As a Ph.D. student, he examined how helping couples understand each other’s feelings enabled them to talk to, not at, each another. Then he began applying the idea to education: How can you help teachers understand the ways adolescents make sense of the world? Tackling the problem from the teachers’ instead of the students’ perspective was a novel approach. If he could change the behavior of a single teacher, could he improve the chances of a whole classroom of Jason Okonofuas?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Mini-rebellions like young Jason’s unfold in classrooms thousands of times a day. The Department of Education estimates that 7 percent of the student population — nearly 3.5 million students in kindergarten through high school — was suspended at least once in the 2011-12 academic year, the last for which these data are available. Despite the Checkpoint Charlie climate in many urban high schools, where students are herded through metal detectors when they enter the building, suspensions are rarely prompted by violence. Ninety-five percent are for “willful defiance” or “disruption.”

African-American students are hit hardest. They are more than three times as likely than their white classmates to be suspended or expelled. As a result, as early as middle school, many black students have concluded that when it comes to discipline, the cards are stacked against them. They stop trusting their teachers, and their negative attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They fall behind when they’re suspended, and many drop out or are pushed out.

Getting rid of bad-seed students is supposed to benefit their “good” classmates, but that turns out not to be the case. When students witness their classmates being shown the door for trivial offenses, they worry that they may be next. Studies show they grow anxious and do worse on high-stakes math and reading tests.

In short, this kind of discipline is a lose-lose proposition. What’s to be done? Enter empathy.

Many new teachers are driven to give poor kids the tools they need to do well in school and beyond. But within a few years teachers often grow disillusioned by the struggle to maintain control of their classroom. Dr. Okonofua, together with the Stanford psychologists Gregory M. Walton, Jennifer L. Eberhardt and Dave Paunesku, wanted to change this.