Are teachers' and students' emotions reciprocally transmitted in the classroom?

Abstract

Background: Understanding teachers' and students' emotions in the classroom is acknowledged as beneficial for teaching and learning. While existing studies have emphasized the relationships between teachers and students, it remains unclear how teachers' and students' emotions are transmitted from one lesson to the next.

Aims: We investigated the transmission of teachers' and students' emotions by exploring reciprocal relationships between their emotional experiences across lessons.

Sample: Twenty homeroom teachers and their students in Grades 4-5 (N = 306) in Taiwan participated.

Method: Using an intra-individual design, we collected teachers' self-reported lesson-specific positive and negative emotions (4 items per composite; n = 249 lessons) and students' perceptions of teachers' emotions as well as their own emotions (n = 3884 lessons) at the end of each lesson over 5 days. We specified cross-classified structural equation models (CCSEM).

Results: Most variance in teachers' emotions was at the teacher level (ICC = .62), whereas students' negative emotions varied the most at the lesson level (ICC = .49-.52). Teachers' and students' prior emotions carried over to subsequent lessons (positive/negative: β = .14-.20/.17-.27). We found a reciprocal transmission of same-valence emotions between students' perceptions of teachers' and their own emotions. Additionally, teachers' prior positive emotions were associated with students' positive emotions.

Conclusions: The study supports a reciprocal relationship between students' perceptions of teachers' emotions and their own emotions, whereas teachers' emotions are linked primarily to their own previous emotions. These results suggest that enhancing emotional experiences in class requires consideration of both teachers' and students' emotions simultaneously.