The Dominance of Blended Emotions: A Qualitative Study of Elementary Teachers’ Emotions Related to Mathematics Teaching

Abstract

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.

School heads’ clinical supervision practices and emerging teacher emotions in Tanzania secondary schools

“…The surveyed literature 67 , 68 , 69 ] highlights that teachers’ emotions are at the heart of teachers’ teaching profession lives. Teachers’ emotions are a complex state of feeling that continues to develop at the workplace [ 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 ]. [ 76 ] points out that teachers tend to construct their teaching emotions from societal interaction with colleagues, administration and school community members.…”

“…It means social contexts are important in developing teachers’ emotions. Literature [ 68 , 69 , 71 , 72 , 74 , 76 , 77 , 78 ] indicates two classifications of teacher emotions as being either positive or negative. Regarding positive emotions, these are positive feelings (pride, feel proud, love, satisfaction, happiness, enjoyment, gratitude, hope, and joy about success [ 68 , 69 , 70 , 77 , 79 ].…”

“…Negative emotions, on the other hand, are negative feelings (fear, worry, irritable, doubt, brood, confusion, dissatisfaction, anxious, and despondent [ 69 , 70 , 75 , 80 ]. [ 72 ] write: “negative emotions tend to be accompanied by physiological and cognitive responses that interfere with mental and physical functioning. With that, this is considered non-conductive to effective teaching” (p.4).…”

A Review of AI Cloud and Edge Sensors, Methods, and Applications for the Recognition of Emotional, Affective and Physiological States

“…Emotion blends could be of three kinds: (a) Positive-blended emotions were blends of only positive emotions; (b) negative-blended emotions were blends of only negative emotions; and (c) mixed emotions were blends of both positive and negative emotions, as well as neutral ones. The way teachers have described blended emotions reflects that mathematics teaching involves many and complex tasks, where the teacher has to continuously keep gauging the level of progress [ 81 ].…”

Las emociones percibidas por el profesorado en activo en el uso de metodologías activas en el aula

“…Asimismo, dichas emociones influyen en el entorno, como es el caso de la emoción positiva de los profesores respecto al aprendizaje del alumnado (Zhao, Han, Lin, Zhang, y Li, 2022), así como en sentido inverso, donde el clima del aula es un factor de bienestar psicológico (Lucas-Mangas, Valdivieso- León, Espinoza-Díaz, y Tous-Pallarés, 2022). Ahora bien, no debemos olvidar que en el contexto educativo, muy probablemente, puede darse la situación de que los docentes sientan más de una emoción a la vez en sus clases (Francis et al, 2020).…”