The Role of Affect in Sustaining Teachers' Attention and Responsiveness to Student Thinking

Attending and responding to the substance of students' scientific thinking is an important aspect of reform-oriented science teaching. Explanations of why teachers do or do not focus on student thinking have largely centered on elements of teachers' cognition, such as whether teachers have the skills required to engage in this sort of teaching or conceptualize their teaching in conducive ways. In this paper, I analyze two classroom episodes in which teachers' in-the-moment affective experiences seemed to play a role in sustaining their attention and responsiveness to student thinking. I explore the nature and role(s) of the teacher's affect in each case, concluding with a call for continued work along these lines as we seek to understand more about what influences teachers' attention and responsiveness to students' ideas.