Exploring teachers’ emotions in Eastern Canada: Understanding positive, neutral and negative experiences

Abstract

Teaching is both deeply inter- and intrapersonal, with the vast majority of time spent with students in the classroom. Taking an interactionist, positive psychology perspective, this exploratory study aimed to describe the emotions involved in salient positive and negative teaching experiences. 68 teachers participated in this anonymous survey-based study. Thematic analysis resulted in themes from positive experiences such as student-successes, relationships, and gratitude. Negative experiences involved primarily misbehavior, administrative conflict, and trauma. Negative experiences were associated with narrowed perspective-taking; positive experiences were associated with broadened perspective-taking. All intense emotions involved self-regulation to remain on task and achieve instructional goals. Preservice teachers should be taught the deeply emotional nature of their work and be trained regarding how to engage in self-regulation and teacher-student co-regulation as central to instructional processes.