Mapping the emotional landscape of teaching and learning

Abstract

Background and Aims

Traditionally, research in educational psychology had overlooked teachers' motivations and emotions, focusing on students. This has changed markedly in the last 20 years, when recent studies have made rapid strides to study the motivations and emotions of teachers too, as documented in the contributions to this Special Issue. In this concluding article, I discuss four of the included articles focussed on teacher emotions, indicating directions for future research.

Results

The four studies showcase state-of-the-art analyses of teachers' situation-specific state emotions in relation to a range of correlates, incorporating observations and student reports additional to data from teachers across the contexts of Switzerland and Germany, Taiwan, Finland and Austria. They collectively attest to the importance of teachers' emotions in the teaching and learning enterprise. However, some of the studies used small samples or cross-sectional designs, and not all of the findings were consistent.

Future Directions

To inform theory and practice concerning the role of teacher emotions in teaching quality—the goal of this Special Issue—I recommend that we need to build the knowledge base in three key areas. First, which emotions are most influential, for what aspects of teaching quality? Second, by what processes do emotions affect teaching quality (and thereby student outcomes)? Third, how are teacher emotions shaped and how could they be shaped? To this end, it may be helpful for future studies to focus on causal designs, sufficiently powered samples of participants and timepoints, multiple informants, indicators for precise measurement and broadened emic and etic contextual aspects.