Abstract:

Design thinking is an actual educational perspective, which is aimed at developing students’ creative thinking, but with a focus on solving real problems and finding innovative solutions to the needs of real people. At the center of this approach is empathy, which is used to identify urgent problems and then look for effective non-standard solutions to help real people in specific problem situations. In the design thinking process, empathy is a psychological construct that is built and / or developed by all participants in the process of pedagogical communication (teachers, students, other educational persons). Empathy supports the search for non-standard, but socially effective and humane solutions, using the full available potential of teachers and students - intellectual, motivational, emotional, social. It is expressed both as a skill and attitude to understand the feelings of others, to take their position and respect for different points of view, but also as a manifestation of altruistic behavior resulting from the cognitive experience of the individual. The aim of this study is to establish the relationship between the bulgarian primary teacher's empathy and its expression in his professional activity. It is based on the assumption that teachers have a high level of empathy, understood as emotional sensitivity to students' problems, but they fail to use empathy in teaching to achieve educational goals. In the study empathy is discussed as a part of teachers' professional skills and attitudes to apply design thinking approaches in teaching process and is named with the concept "professional empathy". The research is realized in two parts with two-component methodology and covers 250 primary teachers. In the first part of the study, respondents have been studied with the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale - BEES, developed by A. Mehbian and modified by N. Epstein (Mehbian & Epstein, 1972). The scale contains 25 closed-type statements – both direct and reversible. Statements are evaluated on a 4-degree Likert scale, where 1 is completely agree and 4 - completely disagree. In the second part of the study is the author's scale used to determine the professional empathy of the teacher in the educational activity. The scale contains 25 statements – both direct and reversible. The statements are also evaluated on a a 4-degree Likert scale, where 1 completely agree and 4 - completely disagree. The results are analyzed in three stages: Evaluation of the Scales internal consistency; Factor Analyze and Correlation Analyses.

Keywords:

Empathy, professional empathy, design thinking.