"We Became the Kids in the Classroom!" Promoting Responsive Teaching Through Cultivating Teachers' Epistemic Empathy

• In Event: Teacher Reflection and Shifting Instructional Practices

Abstract

This work examines one aspect of how engaging teachers in doing science in responsive ways translates into responsive instructional practices. We draw on data from a PD designed to engage teachers in doing science and connect those experiences to their teaching. Using classroom videos, we found that over time teachers more stably took up students’ contributions as scientific and built on them responsively during instruction. Moreover, our analysis shows that teachers drew on their own science experiences to connect to their students. Engaging in inquiry, we argue, provided a basis for cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy—their capacity for tuning into their students’ epistemic experiences—that helped stabilize teachers’ attention to students’ work, explaining in part their progress towards responsive teaching.

Authors

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University

• Vesal Dini, Tufts University

• David Hammer, Tufts University