ABSTRACT Research consistently shows that teachers with satisfactory well-being are significantly more effective in their teaching, highlighting the crucial role of teacher well-being for learners’ educational outcomes. However, despite significant research efforts dedicated to investigating the well-being of both in-service and pre-service teachers, relatively little is known about their short-term fluctuations in well-being. Similarly, limited attention has been devoted to understanding how pre-service language teachers manage their well-being during critical moments of their training programmes. To address these gaps, this classroom-based study adopted an ecological approach to examine micro-scale changes in well-being of four prospective language teachers in Poland. The participants’ well-being trajectories were tracked using graphs over a six-week period, with measurements conducted during lectures and after individual microteaching sessions. The data were also drawn from weekly in-depth interviews and were further subjected to inductive thematic analysis. The findings provided further evidence for the dynamic nature of pre-service language teachers’ well-being, as the respondents’ trajectories exhibited significant variability both during and in between individual sessions. The participants’ well-being fluctuated in response to various personal, social, and contextual influences, including efficacy beliefs, insufficient technological literacy, classroom climate, training programme specifications and requirements, low professional awareness, and the lecturer’s instructional choices.
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