Teacher empathy driving innovation for equity

• In Event: Teacher Agency, Well-Being, and Equity: Professional Development and Leadership in Diverse Contexts

Proposal

‘Building Capacity for Gender Equity and Inclusion in Caribbean Schools’, locally known as the Full Potential Program, is a three-year study funded by the Global Partnership for Education through the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange in collaboration with the International Development Research Centre. The Full Potential Program is supporting the use of a human-centered design (HCD) approach to innovation across schools in three Eastern Caribbean countries to address persistent challenges in education.
There are numerous resources that describe the process of HCD for social innovation broadly, and the education sector specifically (IDEO, 2013). Using empathy to understand how intended beneficiaries of a new solution (e.g., students, teachers, parents) experience the problem or opportunity is a foundational step in the HCD process. Research on the relationship between teacher empathy and classroom practices has yielded mixed results (Aldrup et. al., 2022) potentially due to differences in measurement approach. However, new work that more carefully defines ‘adaptive teacher empathy’ as a context-specific construct that combines internal and external (behavioural) processes, argues that this form of empathy contributes to more equitable instructional practices and improved student outcomes (Vomund & Miller, 2025). Early findings from the Full Potential research show that teachers who develop a deeper understanding of student experiences show a greater openness and curiosity toward more equitable classroom practices.
The presentation will first summarize the literature on teacher empathy, then position adaptive teacher empathy as a core factor for innovation that improves teaching and learning. The second part of the presentation will use a case study approach to describe how Caribbean teachers used empathy to understand the students’ perspective of the problem, as the first step in a human-centered innovation process. In professional development sessions, teachers learned to craft sensitive and inclusive questions that invite authentic, open responses from students rather than defensiveness or silence. In practice, teachers used both formal (e.g., surveys) and informal (e.g., conversations with students and classroom observations) approaches to collect information about classroom experiences. For some teachers, this was their first time collecting the opinions and stories of their students. Teachers reflected on the data to generate new insights about the school experiences of students and developed actionable solutions related to classroom organization, instructional practices and student engagement.

Authors

• Carrie Wright

• Angel Caglin, Caribbean Innovation & Leadership Lab

• GEZEL Mondesire-Charles, Caribbean Innovation & Leadership Lab

• Yvette M Antoine, Caribbean Innovation & Leadership Lab