Examining the nature of teachers’ emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teachers’ instruction. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers’ lives and instruction, research on teachers’ emotions has not paid much attention on teachers’ emotions in the context of daily teaching. This paper explored elementary teachers’ emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching mathematics, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of five cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle, pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. In order to compare teachers’ emotions with instructional quality, coaching sessions were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported six categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, blended-positive, blended-negative, and mixed), described emotions often in non-typical ways (e.g., “not nervous”, “anxious but in a positive way”), and experienced mixed emotions (co-occcurence of positive and negative emotions) as the most dominant emotion. Teachers also had more positive emotions anticipating teaching than actually teaching the lesson. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected the complex and context-specific nature of teaching, a phenonemenon not currently described in the teacher emotion literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers’ emotions related to active instruction.
Preparing future mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) with knowledge that are needed to effectively support pre-service teachers (PSTs) is very important. However, little attention was paid to MTEs’ knowledge development, which is multifaceted and complex. This study investigates successes, challenges, and tensions that four international graduate MTEs and one mathematics teacher educator (TE) experienced in developing their identity as math teacher educators. In total, 20 h of interactive interviews were analyzed by using qualitative methods. Emerging themes include how MTEs establish a sense of credibility and how they feel they are navigating multiple identities. Among the graduate MTEs, credibility was described as having the following: (a) knowledge of and experience teaching in the US education system; (b) experience in teaching using a problem-solving approach; (c) the ability to enact theory in practice. While navigating multiple identities, graduate MTEs recognize their ethnic identities are central and influence their perceptions of self as MTEs, and how they think they are perceived by others. The results highlight the importance of understanding MTEs tensions and challenges and provide “in-the-moment” support along the journey of becoming teacher educators.
Positive teacher–student relationships are considered essential for effective classroom management. Thus, focusing efforts to understand better and strengthen teacher–student relationships in order to improve student outcome metrics is prudent. This study examined seven elementary teachers’ descriptions and enactment of mathematically productive relationships (MPRs), a type of teacher-student relationship, and their influence on classroom management practices. Teachers’ descriptions of MPRs incorporated four themes: (a) creating safe, mistake-friendly environments, (b) developing trust and respect between the teacher and the students, (c) establishing and maintaining clear and high expectations, and (d) ensuring that classrooms remain safe spaces. However, these features did not always appear in the teachers’ classrooms. The enactment of MPRs varied across cases, with the participants’ classroom management priorities lying along a continuum from behavioural management to cognitive engagement. Implications of MPRs and the influence of different classroom management practices on students’ learning opportunities are discussed.
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