A Study On The Teacher’s Empathic Ability And Its Training

Teacher empathy refers to the ability to understand students’emotion and their perspective during teacher’s interaction with them. Then the teacher will pass this understanding consciously to the students using proper language skills. In this way, it makes the students feel understood. Thus it helps the students to grow up psychologically. It is also an educational strategy used by teachers in the process of educating. This strategy includes a series of the following language skills. Cognitively understand and respond to what the students express, and this can be accomplished by repeating its contents. Emotionally respond to the feelings the students express, this is achieved by affective responding, emotional expression, and self-disclosure. Behaviorally point out the students’ deficiency by offering guidance and suggestion. Teacher’s empathic ability mainly reflects in the tendency to understand others, and the ability to express empathy to others in specific situations. It will only achieve the best effects by proper expressing consciously. The study researches mainly through currently in-service teachers and pre-service teachers. It aims at investigating the availability of teacher’s empathic strategy and the characteristic of teacher’s empathic ability, and inspecting the training effect of empathic training on teachers through two questionnaire surveys and training of empathic ability.The study contains 3 parts.Study 1 aims to examine the effectiveness and usability of teacher empathic strategy through a Self questionnaire survey on teachers. Result shows that:(1) Teacher’s empathic strategy has good effectiveness. (2)Teacher’s empathic strategy has good usability. (3) Empathic strategy is appropriate for different genders and different temperament students.Study 2 aims to investigate the current situation of teacher’s empathy ability through the Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C and self empathic situational response test materials. The result of questionnaire survey on in-service teachers shows that:(1) On the situational response of empathy, teachers who have learned empathy score significantly higher than those who have not learned empathy. (2) On the situational response of empathy, the subscale of IRI-C imagination, personal distress and total scale, female teachers score significantly higher than male teachers.(3)On the score of situational response of empathy,the teachers whose teaching age between 11-20 years get significantly higher than those beyond 20 years.(4) On the score of situational response of empathy, teachers in primary school get significantly lower scores than those in secondary school. (5) On the scores of the subscale of IRI-C imagination, the arts teachers get higher than cultural and sports teachers; the scores of personal distress and IRI-C scale suggest that arts teachers get significantly higher both than science teachers and cultural and sports teachers. The study on pre-service teachers suggests that:(1) On the subscale of empathic concern, non-only-child scores significantly higher than only-child. (2) On the subscale of IRI-C imagination, empathic concern, personal distress and total score of IRI-C scale, female’s score is significantly higher than male’s. (3) On the subscale of IRI-C imagination, junior students’scores are higher than freshmen’s, sophmores’and seniors’. (4) On the subscale of IRI-C empathic concern, arts teachers scored significantly higher than science teachers and cultural and sports teachers. The comparison of empathy between in-service teachers and pre-service teachers suggest that:on the scores of situational response of empathy, IRI-C perspective-taking, IRI-C empathic concern and IRI-C scale, in-service teachers get significantly higher than pre-service teachers. And IRI-C personal distress score of in-service teachers is significantly lower than pre-service ones.Study 3 aims at investigating the effect of empathic training on 30 pre-service teachers using self empathic training materials. The results of situational response of empathy and IRI-C perspective-taking subscale show that the empathic training has significant influence on the experimental group. The control group has no significant change in scores.The conclusion of the study includes:(1)Teacher empathy strategy has good effectiveness and usability;(2)Teacher empathy can be influenced by learning, gender, teaching age, grade and subject.(3)The empathy of pre-service teachers is influenced by only child, gender, grade and subject.(4)Generally, in-service teachers have better empathic ability than pre-service teacher.(5)The situational response of empathy can be improved by empathic training.