Examining Emotional Regulation During the Act of Teaching

• In Event: Motivation and Emotion in Context: Exploring the Influence of Culture and Context on Teachers’ Lives

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to investigate the types of emotions teachers experience during the activities of teaching and the regulatory strategies they employ to deal with challenging situations in relation to their attributional beliefs.
Theoretical Framework. Engaging in the day-to-day act of teaching requires significant motivation and emotional work (Hargreaves, 1998, 2000). The emotional energy teachers expend daily often places them at increased risk of emotional burnout, which entails emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and decreased feelings of accomplishment (Maslach, 1982; Maslach & Leiter, 1997). To avoid burnout, it is essential that teachers develop the ability to regulate emotions by initiating, inhibiting and moderating internal feeling states (Gross, 2002; Gross & John, 2003; Lazarus, 2001).
Teachers’ abilities to manage and regulate these emotions appear to be related to the nature of the classroom events, and the attributions teachers make regarding the root causes of these events. Teachers’ attributional beliefs can be classified along three dimensions (Weiner, 1979, 1985): locus of control (external or internal); stability (stable or unstable); and, controllability (controllable or uncontrollable by the person), all of which seem to be related to teachers’ abilities to regulate their emotions.
Participants and Methods. This case study included two elementary school teachers, Mrs. Wylie and Ms. Eckles, who taught in a low SES, urban community. Data sources included individual interviews (with the teachers, parents and the principal), focus group interviews, classroom observations, email communications, and researcher memos. Thematic analysis was employed to reduce the extensive text into core themes (Le Compte & Preissle, 1993).
Findings. The teachers described three types of student-related struggles during the act of teaching that lead to unpleasant emotions: (1) struggles about teaching math concepts (e.g., “Even like small things with fractions, they still have such a hard time … they don't get because they’re not out there you know dividing anything.”); (2) lack of exposure to relevant learning resources (e.g., “ [I] want them to have like the resources, exposure to different kinds of things in the world. It's like draining sometimes cause I’m trying to accomplish something and I’m just like pouring it in but they have no idea what you're talking about.”); and (3) limited basic knowledge (e.g., “Our children don’t [have background knowledge] and they still have such a hard time on the assessments.”) When teachers attributed these events to stable (e.g., students’ learning environment is not going to be changed), external (e.g., it is due to parents’ irresponsibility), and uncontrollable (e.g., there is not much I can do to change it) causes, they tended to experience feelings of helplessness and despair, which seemed to be related to their lack of conscious effort to regulate those unpleasant emotions.
Significance of the Study. The findings help us understand the nature and intensity of teachers’ emotions during the act of teaching, teachers perceived causes of these emotions and the regulatory strategies they employ. Understanding teachers’ emotional regulation is a worthwhile endeavor for developing effective intervention strategies and increasing their motivation to teach.

Authors

• Dionne Indera Cross, Indiana University

• Ji Yeon Hong, University of Oklahoma