Mei-Lin Chang

Introduction: The return to “normal” schooling after the COVID-19 pandemic reactivated many of the emotional, instructional, and moral tensions teachers experienced during emergency remote teaching. Yet, little is known about how teachers’ emotional appraisals of post-pandemic classrooms intersect with deficit-oriented “learning loss” discourses. Guided by appraisal theory and Frenzel’s reciprocal model of teacher emotions, this qualitative study examined how mid- and late-career teachers interpreted perceived changes in students and how these appraisals shaped their emotions, emotion regulation, and adoption of or resistance to deficit framings. Methods: Ten K–12 teachers from the southeastern United States participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed through an inductive, consensual qualitative approach and a modified phenomenographic design. Results: Findings revealed that teachers most frequently appraised post-pandemic “changes in students” as gaps in (a) content knowledge, (b) self-regulation, and (c) social-emotional development. These appraisals were typically experienced as goal-incongruent and elicited unpleasant emotions—especially frustration, inefficacy, and stress. However, teachers who engaged in cognitive reappraisal and empathic perspective-taking maintained more pleasant emotions and resisted deficit narratives, instead interpreting students’ behaviors as adaptive responses to disruption. Discussion: The study highlights how teachers’ emotional appraisals function as a mechanism linking policy discourse, classroom experience, and teacher wellbeing. Findings suggest the need for professional learning that explicitly supports teachers’ emotion regulation and critical reflection on deficit narratives, alongside policy reforms that temper accountability pressures in post-crisis schooling. Theoretical contributions include linking emotion regulation strategies to the adoption or rejection of deficit perspectives and demonstrating how emotional responses vary within appraisal theory based on the type of goal that is threated.

Editorial: Teachers' emotion regulation and emotional labor: Relationships with teacher motivation, well-being, and teaching effectiveness

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated levels of stress and anxiety for P-12 teachers around the globe. The present study aims to understand teachers’ emotional experiences and feelings of burnout during the pandemic, and how individual (i.e., emotion regulation strategies) or contextual factors (e.g., school administrative support) intersect with different facets of their emotional experiences. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, we collected and examined survey and interview data from teachers in the southeastern United States. The structural equation model confirmed the relationships among the following latent variables: negative emotion, emotion regulation, autonomy support, burnout, and teacher enthusiasm. Qualitative findings provide further insight in the contextualized nature of these relationships and how they play out across various schools and districts.

Cognitive appraisal theories of emotions suggest that emotions are elicited by evaluations of events and situations and that our beliefs influence the ways we appraise or judge situations that we encounter. Gross and John (2003) theorized cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression as two general forms to regulate emotions. Although teacher emotion has been studied more extensively in the recent decade, Chang (2009b) has argued that there is a need for research into the ways that teachers' implicit beliefs and cognitive processes influence their emotional reactions to the sources of burnout. Particularly, how emotional display rules serve as underlying principles that guide teachers to make decisions either consciously or unconsciously to express or not to express emotions. This study aims to examine the relationships among teachers' beliefs about emotional display rules in the classroom, and the approaches in emotion regulation, and the subsequent feelings of burnout. Survey data was collected from 561 full-time teachers and subjected to hypothesis testing using structural equation modeling. The model provides evidence supporting a pathway between emotion display rules and expressive suppression. These display rules are particularly influential to expressive suppression which also leads to all three dimensions of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Further, uses of cognitive reappraisals are found negatively associated with teacher burnout in all three dimensions. Results of the study indicated that teacher education or profession development should be designed to help teachers to detect and reframe their beliefs about display rules and to engage in cognitive reappraisal so that they may effectively manage their day-to-day emotions in the classroom.

This research examined how teachers regulate their emotions in the context of student misbehaviour and what the affective consequence of this regulation is for teachers. In Study 1 we descriptively examined which strategies teachers use to regulate their emotions in response to student misbehaviour and found that teachers use a variety of strategies to regulate their emotions. In Study 2, using an Experience Sampling Method, we examined how teachers’ trait-level emotion regulation impacts their in-the-moment affective experiences and modulation strategies in the context of classroom misbehaviours. Results indicate that teachers who typically reappraise have the least negative affective experiences in the context of student misbehaviour and are less likely to suppress their in-the-moment negative emotions. This study adds to our understanding of how teachers could regulate their negative emotions when dealing with student misbehaviour in an adaptive way. Findings signify the importance of examining the efficacy of other regulation strategies.

Teacher quality has been found to offset the adverse effect of racial and socioeconomic differences in academic achievement; and teacher quality is often thought to be the product of a quality education. However, existing literature has produced mixed results regarding the relationship between student achievement and teachers’ possession of advanced degrees (ADs). Despite these mixed results, ADs are often the most efficient (if not the only) way for teachers to earn certification and salary upgrades. A longitudinal, multiphase mixed-methods explanatory study aimed to bridge shortcomings of existing research on the effects of teachers obtaining ADs. Associations between teacher credentials and middle grades students’ academic growth were examined by differentiating teachers’ degree level (bachelor’s, master’s, specialist’s) and field (content-related, non-content-related). Teachers and school leaders were also interviewed in order to broaden our understandings of the impact ADs make in areas besides student achievement. Findings suggest that inconsistency in associations between teacher ADs and student achievement may be attributable to variation in a number of individual, programmatic, and institutional factors.

The purpose of this study is to examine the psychometric quality of the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) with data collected from 554 teachers in a U.S. Midwestern state. The many-facet Rasch model was used to examine several potential contextual influences (years of teaching experience, school context, and levels of emotional exhaustion) on item functioning within the TSES. Results suggest that although TSES items are rather easy for teachers to endorse, sufficient variance in the item endorsement hierarchy of the scale exists to support the validity of score interpretations. The items are invariant across years of teaching experience or school locations, but not invariant across levels of emotional exhaustion.