Teachers Work And Emotions

Being a teacher is often thought of as an emotionally fulfilling job, with many positive experiences in watching students grow and mature. However, as Tsang’s research shows, there are plenty of negative emotional experiences in this line of work as well. Given the recent attention towards mental health and well-being, this book addresses these negative experiences and provides recommendations for dealing with them. Focusing on teachers in Hong Kong, Tsang investigates the social mechanisms that arouse such negative emotional experiences, otherwise known as caam2. He asserts that these feelings are socially constructed, and it is only by understanding the causes and feelings can we begin to improve teachers’ emotional well-being and teaching quality. Using a theoretical framework based on a critical review and synthesis of five existing perspectives, including labor process perspective, school administration perspective, emotional labor perspective, social interaction perspective, and teacher identity perspective, Tsang does precisely that, exploring the social process of these emotional experiences and the interplay between teacher agency and social structure. These findings go a long way in ameliorating teacher experiences all over the world.

Within educational research that seeks to understand the quality and effectiveness of teachers and school, the role emotions play in educational change and school improvement has become a subject of increasing importance. In this book, scholars from around the world explore the connections between teaching, teacher education, teacher emotions, educational change and school leadership. (For this text, “teacher” encompasses pre-service teachers, in-service teachers and headteachers, or principals). New Understandings of Teacher’s Work: Emotions and Educational Change is divided into four themes: educational change; teachers and teaching; teacher education; and emotions in leadership. The chapters address the key basic and substantive issues relative to the central emotional themes of the following: teachers’ lives and careers in teaching; the role emotions play in teachers’ work; lives and leadership roles in the context of educational reform; the working conditions; the context-specific dynamics of reform work; school/teacher cultures; individual biographies that affect teachers’ emotional well-being; and the implications for the management and leadership of educational change, and for development, of teacher education.

Some reports estimate that nearly 50% of teachers entering the profession leave within the first five years (Alliance for Excellent Education 2004; Ingersoll, 2003; Quality Counts 2000). One explanation of why teachers leave the profession so early in their career might be related to the emotional nature of the teaching profession. For example, teaching is an occupation that involves considerable emotional labor. Emotional labor involves the effort, planning, and control teachers need to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions. As such, emotional labor has been associated with job dissatisfaction, health symptoms and emotional exhaustion, which are key components of burnout and related to teachers who drop out of the profession. Research into emotional labor in teaching and other aspects of teachers’ emotions is becoming increasingly important not only because of the growing number of teachers leaving the profession, but also because unpleasant classroom emotions have considerable implications for student learning, school climate and the quality of education in general. Using a variety of different methodological and theoretical approaches, the authors in this edited volume, Advances in Teacher Emotion Research: The Impact on Teachers’ Lives, provide a systematic overview that enriches our understanding of the role of emotions in teachers’ professional lives and work. More specifically, the authors discuss inquiry related to teachers’ emotions in educational reform, teacher identity, student involvement, race/class/gender issues, school administration and inspection, emotional labor, teacher burnout and several other related issues. This volume, then, represents the accumulation of different epistemological and theoretical positions related to inquiry on teachers’ emotions, acknowledging that emotions are core components of teachers’ lives. Advances in Teacher Emotion Research takes an eclectic look at teacher emotions, presenting current research from diverse perspectives, thereby making this volume a significant contribution to the field.

Taking a critical approach that considers the role of power, and resistance to power, in teachers’ affective lives, Sarah Benesch examines the relationship between English language teaching and emotions in postsecondary classrooms. The exploration takes into account implicit feeling rules that may drive institutional expectations of teacher performance and affect teachers’ responses to and decisions about pedagogical matters. Based on interviews with postsecondary English language teachers, the book analyzes ways in which they negotiate tension—theorized as emotion labor—between feeling rules and teachers’ professional training and/or experience, in particularly challenging areas of teaching: high-stakes literacy testing; responding to student writing; plagiarism; and attendance. Discussion of this rich interview data offers an expanded and nuanced understanding of English language teaching, one positing teachers’ emotion labor as a framework for theorizing emotions critically and as a tool of teacher agency and resistance.

"Clears out the bureaucratic techniques of impersonal management and focuses the core of leadership on dealing with school change as a most human endeavor. When all is said and done, the quality of education revolves around the aspirations, commitments, and wellness of teachers giving their best." —Carl Glickman, Scholar in Residence The University of Georgia Develop a leadership approach that responds to the emotional needs of teachers! School leaders know that an engaged and committed faculty is critical to student learning and the success of a school community, yet traditional leadership practices often fail to take the affective needs of teachers into consideration. Kenneth Leithwood and Brenda Beatty draw on theory and empirical evidence to show how teachers′ emotional well-being can affect their performance in the classroom. This invaluable resource provides principals and other school leaders with specific practices to positively influence teacher perspectives, and examines teacher emotions in five key areas: Job satisfaction and morale Stress, anxiety, and burn-out Sense of individual and collective self-efficacy Organizational commitment and engagement Willingness and motivation to improve their practices When educational leaders create conditions that support teachers in their work, schools can experience higher teacher retention rates, improved climate and culture, and increased student achievement.

Teachers’ emotions have been issues drawing the attentions of educational scientists. Since teachers’ emotions has been regarded as a psychologial phenomonon, the educational scientists explain how teachers feel and how their feelings affect educational process with psychological theories. However, more and more educational scientists note that teachers’ emotions are socially constructed and the social construction of teachers’ emotions is not explained by the psychological theories. As a result, they swith their theoretical perspectives from psychology to sociology. In the literature, the sociological theories they have employed include the labor process theory, theory of bureaucracy, emotional labor theory, post-structuralism, theory of emotinoal geographies, and identity theory. Nevertheless, each of the theories has some limitations. Therefore, the goals of this book is to (1) introduce and review the sociological theories which are applied to explain teachers’ emotions critically and (2) propose a sociological framework and research agenda for further studies based on the critically review.

To date, the majority of work in language learning psychology has focused on the learner. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to teacher psychology. This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by bringing together various strands of research into the psychology of language teachers. It consists of 19 contributions on well-established areas of teacher psychology, as well as areas that have only recently begun to be explored. This original collection, which covers a multitude of theoretical and methodological perspectives, makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of language teacher psychology as a domain of inquiry within language education.