The appropriate facilitation of students’ small group work by a supportive teacher is an essential factor. The study presented in this paper investigates the teacher’s empathic understanding and the development of students’ self-efficacy in a course for pre-service teachers on algorithms and data structures. We examined a group of N = 8 pre-service teachers at two measurement time points during one semester. In addition, at each measurement point, students’ self-efficacy is assessed before and after tasks on programming. Initial implications of the study show that the teacher’s empathic understanding as perceived by the students does not influence the students’ self-efficacy in programming.