This paper seeks to provide a rationale for further researching the everyday events that keep teachers motivated or that discourage them. We put forward the idea that routine Affect Triggering Incidents (ATIs) are an important area for researchers to investigate in terms of how they impact teacher motivation and resilience. Two groups of participants in separate consecutive studies kept weekly diaries of incidents that made them feel good or bad about themselves in their work as teachers (Study 1) and added weekly inventories of their commitment to teaching as well as measures of self-efficacy and self-esteem (Study 2). An analysis of the ATIs in these diaries revealed that student engagement and student achievement are major factors in incidents triggering regular positive feelings while students' behaviour and perceived difficulties around home influences are major factors in regular dissatisfaction. These everyday ATIs are important in the sense that they correlate significantly with measures of commitment to teaching, especially in the case of positive ATIs.

To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day-to-day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes. Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in Ireland strongly suggest the absence of positive experiences undermines commitment and efficacy rather than the occurrence of negative events. Furthermore, while remote structural factors may heavily influence teaching, it is the perception of events at micro-level that impinge most strongly on motivation. Finally, the importance of particular experiences was, crucially, more related to their frequency than intensity. A major implication for teachers' job satisfaction is the suggestion that while adverse episodes may be inevitably experienced, positive events (that occur independently of negative ones) fortify motivation and resilience. IntroductionChildren showed greater understanding of the concepts involved in recycling and composting…some told how they got their parents to recycle…I felt that their learning was worthwhile and how teaching can really make a difference.A child completed a sentence scrambling exercise, recalling words learned since last September, completely and independently. I felt the work was paying off.In the staff-room, a teacher made a remark that some of my previous class cannot read…I feel so worried that I didn't do enough for them…was my teaching good enough? Is it good enough at the moment? Are children losing out by being in my class?*Corresponding author. University College Cork, Department of Education, Cork, Ireland. Email: k.kitching@ucc.ie An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AERA annual meeting, Chicago, April 2007. We did some standardised tests to identify children needing learning support. I did play down the importance of the tests but…one child got really upset as she couldn't do it all. I felt terrible that I would put a child in a situation where they felt stressed or inadequate. (extracts from diary of teacher satisfaction/dissatisfaction of SP, a 2nd grade teacher, for a week in late January 2006)The extant literature goes to great lengths to document the reasons why people enter teaching-as well as on the important factors influencing teacher retention-but gives very little information on the influences that sustain teachers on a daily basis. There is considerable evidence from the US that teachers enter teaching for reasons to do with the intrinsic nature of the work: including 'making a difference', 'doing work they will enjoy' and 'enhancing lives of children ' (Shipp, 1999;Farkas et al., 2000). With regard to teacher retention, US data indicate that the absence of support structures (Johnson & Birkeland, 2003), low influence on their work and poor leadership (Stockhard & Lehman, 2004) and low earnings (G...

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This paper examines teachers' experiences and displays of negative emotion as a means of partially exploring how identities at work might be formed and regulated. It uses the concepts of emotional labour and subjectivation to interrogate the negative emotions teachers may experience and/or express at work. It suggests that emotion display rules are developed and come to partially define the teacher self in tandem with overlapping, synthetically discussed discourses of the teacher as moral/caring agent, expert and purveyor of social control/social efficiency. The field of emotional labour is explored here using diary entries of teachers who were between their second and fifth year of teaching in Irish primary schools. Teachers' experiences are read with less of a concern for the original 'authenticity' thesis of emotional labour in order to foreground an analysis of how certain truths about teachers' emotions are legitimated and solidified in the labour cycle. It is argued that spaces for multiple teacher identities and interrogation of emotional display must be carved out in teacher education. This space might include an acknowledgement of ambivalence towards the profession.

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