An Appraisal Perspective of Teacher Burnout: Examining the Emotional Work of Teachers

K-12 teaching is a profession characterized by high levels of burnout and emotional exhaustion. Teacher burnout has been widely reviewed and studied; however, only limited literature examines the emotional aspects of teachers’ lives and its connection with teacher burnout. The purpose of this article is to review the literature on teacher burnout and teachers’ emotions and to examine the role of teachers' appraisal of their emotional exhaustion. Through reviewing the literature on teacher burnout and emotions, I argue that the habitual patterns in teachers’ judgments about student behavior and other teaching tasks may contribute significantly to teachers’ repeated experience of unpleasant emotions and those emotions may eventually lead to burnout. In order to ease teacher burnout, I argue that more studies on the antecedent appraisals that teachers make are necessary to help teachers better understand how their emotions were triggered and then learn how to regulate those emotions.     

Exploring the relationship among teachers' emotional intelligence,emotional labor strategies and teaching satisfaction

The results of a survey of 1281 Chinese school teachers support a second-order factor structure of emotional intelligence. It is found that teachers' emotional intelligence has a significant impact on teaching satisfaction and their use of two emotional labor strategies, i.e., deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotions, but it is not a significant predictor of surface acting. Among the three emotional labor strategies, only expression of naturally felt emotion significantly influences teaching satisfaction. These findings could be explained by differences in the nature of various emotional labor strategies. Implications for teaching and teacher education are put forward.     

The Relationship Between Teachers' Perceptions of Student Motivation and Engagement and Teachers' Enjoyment of and Confidence in Teaching

This paper examines teachers' perceptions of their students' motivation and engagement and their enjoyment of and confidence in teaching. Drawing on Martin's Student Motivation and Engagement Scale, 10 facets of motivation and engagement were explored amongst a sample of 1,019 teachers. These facets comprised three adaptive cognitive dimensions of motivation (self‐efficacy, valuing of school, mastery orientation), three adaptive behavioural dimensions (planning, study management, persistence), two impeding dimensions (anxiety, failure avoidance), and two maladaptive dimensions (uncertain control, self‐handicapping). Male teachers tended to report significantly higher student motivation and engagement than female teachers (though effect sizes were small) and primary school teachers reported significantly higher student motivation and engagement than high school teachers (effect sizes were moderate). Adaptive dimensions were more strongly associated with enjoyment and confidence in teaching than impeding and maladaptive dimensions. Of the adaptive dimensions, students' mastery orientation was the strongest correlate of teachers' enjoyment of teaching and students' persistence and students' planning were the strongest correlates of teachers' confidence in teaching. These associations were more marked for male teachers and relatively independent of years spent teaching. Implications for teacher education and professional development are discussed.     

Teacher Stress in the Low-Trust Society

Stress is a widespread feature of work in teaching. Recent accounts of teacher emotions and cultures of teaching have noted that unsatisfactory social relationships with adults, e.g. colleagues, headteachers, parents and inspectors, elicit hostile emotions from teachers and appear to be a source of stress in teaching. This article examines why this should be the case. Some commentators have used labour process theory to argue that the intensification of work and government policies promoting managerialism in schools are the roots of the problem. This article uses qualitative data from a study of primary teacher stress to examine staff relationships in the primary school. It argues that while intensification of teachers' work is certainly involved in eroding positive staff relationships, it is also the changing trust relations in high modernity that are shaping the social relations of low-trust schooling, and impacting negatively on teachers' physical and emotional well-being and their collegial professional relations.     

Designing a Pedagogy of Inquiry in Teacher Education: Moving from resistance to listening

This paper reports a study of preservice teachers who investigated their own teaching during a field-based component of a mathematics education methods course. The course was designed to engage the preservice teachers in both mathematical and pedagogical inquiry. Analysis of video recordings of course discussions, audiotaped interviews with preservice teachers, audiotaped discussions of instructor's planning meetings, and copies of the instructor's and preservice teachers' journals identified two critical incidents that depict students' resistance to the course directions. Analysis of these critical incidents suggests that prospective teachers' interactions with their students can become the mirror through which we can investigate their interactions with us, as teacher educators, and with our course activities. In this way we might reframe the problem of resistance to one of listening—listening to the students, to each other, and to ourselves.     

Teacher incentives in the Third World

Based on Kemmerer's earlier work on teacher incentives, this study examined the extent that teacher incentives (or the type that might be influenced by central ministries of education) were related to teachers' instructional practices and career satisfaction of junior secondary school teachers in Botswana. Results indicated that the level of incentives teachers received was meaningfully related to teachers' career satisfaction, but was not related to teachers' classroom teaching practices. Findings suggest that, while incentives to improve teachers' overall career satisfaction might stimulate teacher recruitment and encourage retention in teaching, those incentives would not necessarily lead to improved instructional practices.     

‘That's not treating you as a professional’: teachers constructing complex professional identities through talk

Public debates about the role of teachers and teacher performance place teachers at the center of a range of national and local discourses. The notion of teacher professional identity, therefore, framed in a variety of ways, engages people across social contexts, whether as educators, parents, students, taxpayers, voters or consumers of news and popular media. These highly contested discourses about teachers' roles and responsibilities constitute an important context for research on teachers and teaching, as researchers and educators ask how changes to the teaching profession affect teacher professional identity. This article investigates the identity talk of three mid‐career teachers in an urban, public school in the USA, to better understand how the teachers used language to accomplish complex professional identities. Research approaches to teacher identity often focus on teacher narrative as a key tool in identity formation. The analysis presented here extends our understanding of language as a resource in teacher identity construction by using discourse analysis to investigate how speakers use implicit meaning to accomplish the role identity of teacher. The analytical lens draws on an interdisciplinary framework that combines a sociological approach to teacher as a role identity with an investigation of language as a cultural practice, grounded in the ethnography of communication. The analysis focuses on how teachers use specific discourse strategies – reported speech, mimicked speech, pronoun shifts, oppositional portraits, and juxtaposition of explicit claims – to construct implicit identity claims that, while they are not stated directly, are central to accomplishing teacher as a role identity. The analysis presented here focuses on the particular implicit role claim of teacher as collaborator. Findings show that, in their identity talk, the teachers strategically positioned themselves in relation to others and to institutional practices, actively negotiating competing discourses about teacher identity by engaging in a counter discourse emphasizing teachers' professional role as knowledge producers rather than information deliverers, collaborative, rather than isolated, and as agents of change engaged in critical analysis to plan action. Awareness of how these counter discourses operate in the teachers' conversation helps us better understand the cultural significance of identity talk as a site for the negotiation of the significances for the role identity of teacher. In addition, the notions of role identity and implicit identity claims offer an accessible way to talk about the complexity of teacher identity, which can be helpful for increasing awareness of the importance of teacher identity in teacher education and professional development, and in bringing teachers' voices more prominently into the debates over education.     

From Behind the Pupil's Desk to the Teacher's Desk: A qualitative study of student teachers' professional learning in Hong Kong

This paper presents a qualitative study of student teachers' school-based learning in a teacher education program for secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. Learning to teach is examined through the lens of a personal-professional conceptualization of learning. An in-depth study of two cases of student teachers' professional learning is reported. Research methods used include interviewing, tape-recording supervisory meetings, field observation and document analysis. Through an inquiry into the individual's interaction with pre-training influences, the teacher education program and the teaching practice context in the two cases, this study extends our understanding of student teachers' professional learning in terms of the formation of the teaching self and the process of framing in the action and socio-professional contexts of teaching practice.     

Elementary Teachers' Classroom Practices and Beliefs in Relation to US Science Education Reform: Reflections from within

This study unveils the stories of 3 public school elementary teachers from the USA who reflected on their beliefs about science education reform, and implementation of the reform in their classroom teaching, in response to state recommendations for change in science education. The teachers' stories show how various factors assisted or impeded the implementations of reform in their teaching, the various challenges related to their grade-level teaching, and the teachers' personal struggles to make sense of reform recommendations. Within each case study, we describe 4 common themes from the teachers' interviews. These themes are related to teachers' science teaching strategies, their science teaching efficacy beliefs about adopting reform, the types of science learning outcomes teachers target, and the types of teaching resources available to them. Implications for teacher education and practice are discussed in relationship with study findings.     

A Comparison of Student Teachers' Beliefs from Four Different Science Teaching Domains Using a Mixed Methods Design

The study presented in this paper integrates data from four combined research studies, which are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The studies describe freshman science student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning. These freshmen intend to become teachers in Germany in one of four science teaching domains (secondary biology, chemistry, and physics, respectively, as well as primary school science). The qualitative data from the first study are based on student teachers' drawings of themselves in teaching situations. It was formulated using Grounded Theory to test three scales: Beliefs about Classroom Organisation, Beliefs about Teaching Objectives, and Epistemological Beliefs. Three further quantitative studies give insight into student teachers' curricular beliefs, their beliefs about the nature of science itself, and about the student- and/or teacher-centredness of science teaching. This paper describes a design to integrate all these data within a mixed methods framework. The aim of the current study is to describe a broad, triangulated picture of freshman science student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning within their respective science teaching domain. The study reveals clear tendencies between the sub-groups. The results suggest that freshman chemistry and—even more pronouncedly—freshman physics student teachers profess quite traditional beliefs about science teaching and learning. Biology and primary school student teachers express beliefs about their subjects which are more in line with modern educational theory. The mixed methods approach towards the student teachers' beliefs is reflected upon and implications for science education and science teacher education are discussed.     

Teachers' democratic and efficacy beliefs and styles of coping with behavioural problems of pupils with special needs

This study examines how teachers actually cope with behavioural problems of included students. In order to understand the impact of individual differences on teachers' coping strategies, the authors looked at the relationship between these strategies and teachers' democratic beliefs and self‐efficacy. Participants were 33 teachers in Israel, who teach inclusive classes (1st–3rd grade). Data were collected through classroom observations, teacher interviews and questionnaires. In the interviews, teachers reported that they preferred helpful strategies as a solution to behavioural problems; however, classroom observation revealed that teachers actually used more restrictive responses. These results indicated that there is a gap between teachers' hypothetical knowledge and their applications of this knowledge in authentic classroom situations. In addition, positive correlations were found between teachers' democratic beliefs, teacher efficacy and the use of helpful strategies in regard to different behavioural problems. Practical implications for teacher education are discussed.     

The Effect of a Collaborative Mentoring Program on Beginning Science Teachers' Inquiry-based Teaching Practice

This study investigated how a collaborative mentoring program influenced beginning science teachers' inquiry-based teaching and their reflection on practice. The one-year program consisted of five one-on-one mentoring meetings, weekly science education seminars, weekly mentoring group discussions, and self-evaluation activities. The participants were three beginning science teachers and three mentors at the middle school level (7–9th grades) in an urban area of South Korea. For each beginning teacher, five lessons were evaluated in terms of lesson design/implementation, procedural knowledge, and classroom culture by using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol. Five aspects of the beginning teachers' reflections were identified. This study showed that a collaborative mentoring program focusing on inquiry-based science teaching encouraged the beginning teachers to reflect on their own perceptions and teaching practice in terms of inquiry-based science teaching, which led to changes in their teaching practice. This study also highlighted the importance of collaborative interactions between the mentors and the beginning teachers during the mentoring process.     

University Teachers' Views on the Distressing Elements of Pedagogical Interaction

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the aspects of pedagogical interaction that give rise to negative emotional experiences among university teachers. The study used a phenomenological approach and the data was gathered by interviewing eight teachers from various disciplines in an open manner. The aim of the analysis was to identify the distressing aspects of various pedagogical situations and to identify the potential sources of teachers' negative experiences. The study showed that coping with the emotional load placed on them by the students, making pedagogical decisions under uncertain conditions and facing conflicting expectations and beliefs concerning the teaching‐learning process were the sources of negative emotions. Keeping in mind the subjectivity of human experience this study suggests that university teachers need to be better informed about the complex nature of pedagogical interaction especially when a teacher is regarded as a facilitator of learning.     

Developing Teachers' Leadership Knowledge: Pillars for the “New Reform”

This work describes how teacher education programs can inform teachers' knowledge and practice of leadership. We introduce a leadership typology to illustrate how teachers can lead organizational reform for pedagogical excellence and socially just practices. The model provides teacher educators ways to identify and resolve conflicts generated by imparting innovative pedagogies to teachers who in turn use them in antiquated and inequitable school environments. The model can also be used to develop teachers' professional knowledge of the contexts that mitigate or marginalize their leadership potential. Several examples from current teaching practices in teacher education are used to illustrate how teachers develop leadership knowledge.     

The appraisal of teachers' performance and its impact on the mutuality of principal-teacher emotions

The current study examines the mutual discrete emotions among superiors and their above- and below-average workers within a hierarchical organisation (school). Using a survey method within a random sample of 40 elementary schools in Northern Israel, each principal and four of his or her teachers (two who had been appraised as excellent and two who had been appraised as poor-performing) completed two questionnaires which addressed the teachers‘ perceived performance and emotions toward the principal/teacher. As expected, the above-average teachers were found to be more favourably professionally evaluated by their superiors than the poor-performing ones. The principals expressed very positive emotions toward them. These highly regarded workers shared mutually positive feelings and similar teacher performance appraisals with their principals. In contrast with the principals’ evaluations, the below-average teachers perceived their own performance as very good. Unlike the teachers' mainly positive feelings, the principals experienced mixed emotions. The lower intensity of emotional ‘tone’ reflects the principals’ hesitation about taking any action which might lead to a deterioration in relationships with these teachers. The discussion proposes the theoretical framework of a vicious circle, in which the principal's undelivered direct feedback does not reach the teacher, who mistakenly believes that if nothing is said everything is all right, and therefore maintains his or her high self-esteem and poor performance.     

Research on Job Satisfaction of Elementary and High School Teachers and Strategies to Increase Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is an important topic in teacher education research. Exploring the issue of teacher job satisfaction helps us gain a deeper understanding of teachers' mental state, such as their occupational attitudes, zeal for teaching, and work enthusiasm, which affects the quality of teaching and education. From an examination of teachers' job satisfaction studies conducted in China (including Hong Kong) in the past ten years, we identified changes in job satisfaction among China's teachers and proposed suggestions that school and educational administrators may find relevant in their decision making and administration.     

Teaching and learning about solid waste: aspects of content knowledge

This paper investigates aspects of content knowledge related to teaching and learning about solid waste, focusing on the processes of learning and teaching by Elementary School teachers in Brazil, in two modalities of continuing education: courses and school‐based meetings. We analyse elements of teachers' reflections whilst referring to three dimensions of environmental education: knowledge, values (ethic and aesthetic), and political participation. We identify which dimensions are predominant, or absent, and the aspects included and developed in projects elaborated by teachers. The results raise issues we consider important to support teacher education and curriculum programmes and help teachers develop more substantial, critical and effective projects about the subject.     

“The music is why I teach”: Intuitive strategies of successful teachers in culturally diverse learning environments

This study explored the classroom learning environments and instructional strategies of four teachers in culturally diverse classrooms. All teachers were deemed successful by their school colleagues, including administrators and instructional specialists, at meeting the needs of their culturally diverse students. The teachers in the study, who were teaching in four different regions of the U.S.A. and who represented different grade levels, taught in schools that contained richly diverse student populations. Using the constant comparative method of data analysis, I conducted a cross-case analysis of the teachers' learning environments. A primary focus of the research was the relationship between teachers' biographies and culturally sensitive classroom instruction. Three themes about culturally sensitive teaching emerged during data analysis: reshaping traditional school curriculum, rethinking the role of the teacher, and acquiring and using cultural sensitivity. Implications for preparing teachers for culturally diverse learning environments are discussed.     

I felt so guilty: emotions and subjectivity in school‐based teacher education

Research in the field of emotions in relation to teaching is relatively new, but expanding. However, studies addressing the emotional dimension of preservice teacher education, particularly with respect to the role of school‐based teacher educators are currently under‐represented in the literature. This paper reports findings from a study focussed on the emotional dimension of the practicum for school‐based teacher educators as they support preservice teacher colleagues. It adopts a qualitative method informed by feminist post‐structural theory in an attempt to give meaning to teachers’ narratives of their personal responses to supporting a less than successful preservice teacher. The study investigates teachers’ shifting sense of agency throughout the experience as they work within apparently intersecting discursive frames. The case study reveals the depth of emotions experienced by teachers and examines the impact of the emotions on teacher identity. It appears that the tertiary sector has failed to recognise the emotional costs of such experiences and the associated needs of school‐based teacher educators. Finally, the paper asks in what ways can staff in universities work collaboratively with teachers to address the concerns being raised by a study such as this, as there appears to be a genuine need to assist teachers copes with the emotional outcomes of working with problematic preservice teachers.     

Teacher Education Programmes and Their Contribution to Student Teacher Efficacy in Classroom Management and Pupil Engagement

This study focuses on how different educational programmes contribute to student teachers efficacy for classroom management and their abilities to provide learning opportunities and good classroom outcomes. Data were gathered from 491 student teachers attending different teacher education programmes in Norway and analysed via structural equation modelling. The results revealed the following: (1) problem behaviour in the classroom has a negative effect on student teacher efficacy, (2) students' perceptions of the integration of pedagogic knowledge and practice supports students' efficacy beliefs, (3) support from supervisors contributes positively to student teachers' efficacy beliefs, and (4) student teachers in university college programmes for primary school teaching report higher teacher efficacy than students in university programmes for secondary school teaching.