Efforts to promote reform-based instruction have overlooked the import of affect in teacher learning. Drawing on prior work, I argue that teachers’ affective experiences in the discipline are integral to their learning how to teach the discipline. Moreover, I suggest that both affective and epistemological aspects of teachers’ experiences can serve to cultivate their epistemic empathy—the capacity for tuning into and valuing someone’s intellectual and emotional experience within an epistemic activity—in ways that support student-centered instruction.