Educational Psychology Perspectives on Teachers’ Emotions

In this chapter we focus on teacher emotion from an educational psychology lens. In doing so, we explicate some of the current theories related to the nature of emotion. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the debates about the nature and structure of emotion in psychology and educational psychology. In other words, are there distinct categories of emotions (e.g., anger, fear) or is it more useful to conceptualize emotion with a dimensional model (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant, active vs. inactive)? We use those perspectives to help us understand teachers' emotions and discuss research related to how teachers negotiate relationship boundaries with their students, how teachers develop useful emotional climates in their classrooms, and how teachers attempt to deal with the emotional labor needed in negotiating their role as a teacher.