A comprehensive education empowers students to acquire knowledge and perspective to critically and creatively think about the challenges found within this world and it guides them to act in a manner that is both compassionate and selfless. Our students are the future leaders of tomorrow so how they see and act in this world matters. The goal of this study was to better understand how teachers are encouraging empathy and altruism in their students. This study used a phenomenological approach to gain insights from the experiences of other teachers to help identify fundamental practices that they felt are vital in the development of empathy and altruism in the classroom. The data from this study indicated that building empathy and altruism in a Middle Years classroom begins with nurturing a healthy classroom community, expanding on student perspectives, and strengthening altruism through experience. Participants described students as falling somewhere on the Empathy Altruism Continuum, somewhere between being selfish and being selfless. The goal of the participants is to move students towards a more selfless version of themselves by building on their understanding and perspectives of others and choosing altruism more often.