Emotion in Teacher Learning and Professional Development

INTRODUCTION

Imagine a colleague is visiting your classroom to observe and provide feedback on your teaching. You might understand that this is an act of generosity that will ultimately help you improve in your practice. You know it’s a good thing, yet it can still feel bad. While challenge and feedback can spur change, they can also expose vulnerabilities and trigger strong emotions. For any learner, including teachers, learning is emotional.

As a community of educators and researchers, we understand that an important part of improving education involves learning and change on the part of teachers. The articles in this set argue that if we want to support such transformational change, we need to better understand the emotions that arise as teachers work with peers or coaches to improve their teaching. While all three articles involve teacher learning in K-12 contexts, they offer theoretical insights and practical applications relevant to the growing interest in supporting instructor learning in higher education.

MOVING BEYOND GENERIC PRAISE IN PEER FEEDBACK

Wu, M. Y. M., & Yezierski, E. J. (2023). Investigating teacher-teacher feedback: uncovering useful socio-pedagogical norms for reform-based chemistry instruction. Journal of Chemical Education, 100(11), 4224–4236. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00409

Peer feedback can be a valuable opportunity for teachers to reflect on their practice, but prior research has found that social pressure to avoid negative emotions can limit the substance of peer feedback. Teachers, quite understandably, want to maintain good relationships with their peers and spare them the emotional discomfort of feeling critiqued.

With this prior work in mind, Wu and Yezierski examined the socio-pedagogical norms shaping peer feedback among eight high school chemistry teachers. The teachers were participants in a professional development (PD) program called VisChem designed to support the use of visualizations in chemistry learning. As part of the PD teachers designed a short (90-minute) lesson and taught it to two other teacher participants who then provided written feedback.

The research team analyzed the written artifacts using two coding schemes. The first characterized the conversational function of feedback statements—for example to Praise, Suggest, or Critique. The second scheme categorized different aspects of disciplinary content specifically attending to different representational levels (Macroscopic, Symbolic, or Particulate) that are central to chemistry learning. They then examined overlap among the function and content of feedback.

Consistent with previous research, Praise was by far the most common function of feedback (93 out of 269 statements) and Critique was least common (7 out of 269 statements). As for content, just over half of the feedback statements were described as Chemistry-specific while the remainder concerned Non-chemistry issues such as pacing and logistics or contained generic statements about the instruction. Chemistry-specific statements were most often focused on the Particle-level (106 of 145 statements) and least often about Symbolic representations (3 out of 145). This result likely reflects the PD focus on using visualizations to teach about particle-level mechanisms.

The paper’s main claims emerge from the intersection in the coding schemes. First, Praise and other more descriptive forms of feedback (Describe, Recollect) were more frequently coded as Non-chemistry and often lacked detail that could inform instructional change (e.g. “You’re amazing”). In contrast, Critiques and to a lesser extent other action-oriented functions (Suggest, Take-up) featured Chemistry-specific feedback (e.g. “[We] didn’t really revisit our particulate drawings afterward to change/revise them”). The authors view these correlations as evidence that critically oriented feedback has greater potential to transform teachers’ instruction, thereby better supporting disciplinary learning. Second, feedback at the particulate level dominated Chemistry-specific and often included more action-oriented detail. The authors suggest that explicitly asking teachers to orient to molecular level mechanism in their feedback could lead to change that impacts students’ conceptual learning.

Wu and Yezierski acknowledge a paradox in their work: Courteous feedback can preserve positive feelings but may be less effective in promoting learning or change. Conversely, more critical feedback, while potentially more informative, might evoke negative emotions, undermining teacher confidence and shutting down learning opportunities. The next paper addresses this challenge by exploring how teachers can lessen the effects of negative emotions and deepen their learning.

COMFORT-BUILDING MOVES SUPPORT TEACHER LEARNING

Mahmood, M. S., Talafian, H., Shafer, D., Kuo, E., Lundsgaard, M., & Stelzer, T. (2024). Navigating socio-emotional risk through comfort-building in physics teacher professional development: A case study. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21949

Learning with other teachers can feel intellectually and emotionally risky, particularly when there are differences in power and experience level. In this study, Mahmood and colleagues aim to deepen understandings of when these risks occur and how they might be mitigated by comfort-building moves.

The term “comfort building” brings together two types of interactional moves described in prior studies: 1) those that reduce negative emotions by creating distance between ideas or contributions and the person making them, and 2) those that support vulnerabilities through demonstrations of empathy or care. By examining these moves in the context of a PD program for physics teachers, Mahmood and colleagues build knowledge of the mechanisms through which comfort-building moves can support teacher learning.

One aim of the PD was to deepen teachers’ physics knowledge. Due to the teachers^’ varying levels of experience, the team anticipated that working on physics problems together could reveal vulnerabilities. To address this, the facilitators, who were also university physicists, intentionally took steps to decenter their authority.

In this study, the researchers focus on how two teachers, with differing levels of experience, coconstructed a safe space in their professional learning. Lisa was the more experienced teacher having taught for 25 years. Jessica was a relative novice who just finished her Master’s degree and had not yet begun teaching. The research team collected audio and video recordings of this pair and used interaction analysis and inductive coding to characterize shifts in the focus and emotional tenor of their conversations. Emergent themes were later triangulated using stimulated recall interviews with both Lisa and Jessica.

Four types of comfort-building moves emerged from the analysis, each of which is illustrated in conversational episodes that show how they functioned to mitigate discomfort. For example, challenging the one correct answer was a move used frequently by Lisa to disrupt the idea that a physics teacher needs to quickly find the correct answer. As an alternative, Lisa positioned the physics problem as an opportunity to think about student ideas, which helped alleviate Jessica’s discomfort with not immediately knowing the correct answer. Revealing vulnerability was a move used by both teachers but initiated most often by Lisa and functioned to normalize vulnerability as inherent in teaching, making more space to be open about uncertainties.

Across the episodes analyzed in this paper, these and other moves gradually helped Lisa and Jessica engage in collaborative problem solving. Early on moves such as challenging the need to find one correct answer helped reduce tension, allowing the pair to keep some distance from potential evaluations of their respective knowledge. As the session progressed, the pair increasingly used empathic moves such as sharingvulnerabilities through short personal stories. These connecting moves helped normalize and diffuse discomfort, supporting deeper engagement with the physics ideas.

Mahmood and colleagues end by raising questions about the role of power in PD interactions, noting that Lisa’s status as the veteran teacher was important in creating space for Jessica. They suggest that moves like those made by Lisa could be intentionally developed and implemented by facilitators, an idea taken up in the next paper.

LEANING INTO THE INTENSE EMOTIONS OF COACHING CONVERSATIONS

Schneeberger McGugan, K., Horn, I. S., Garner, B., & Marshall, S. A. (2023). “Even when it was hard, you pushed us to improve”: Emotions and teacher learning in coaching conversations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103934

While the first two papers look at how teachers can avoid or lessen negative emotions, McGugan and colleagues explore how intense negative emotions can lead to learning and positive change. The authors call these “edge” emotions (e.g., overwhelm, fear, frustration) as they tend to surface when a person has reached the edge of their comfort zone. In coaching, as in other learning environments, both teachers and coaches may want to avoid these strong emotions. However, McGugan and colleagues document how these intense emotions can catalyze change.

The broader context of this work was a PD project for secondary mathematics teachers that involved coexamination of video and audio records of teaching by teacher-coach groups. The collaborative feedback process began with a question posed by a focal teacher about a specific lesson. Coaches would then observe and collect video of the lesson and organize a debrief that used video and classroom artifacts as evidence to examine the teacher’s question.

This study centers on a “critical event” in which a teacher—“Lizette”—had a strong emotional response to a video of her class presented by the coaches. In analyzing this event, the researchers sought to understand how these emotions could possibly be “harnessed for learning and change” as well as to better understand the role of the coach in supporting this learning.

The research team collected data surrounding the critical event including the team’s planning notes for the debrief, video of the debrief conversation, and video and field notes of the focal lesson. They also conducted follow-up interviews and informal conversations with Lizette to check their interpretations and used other data of Lizette’s teaching and participation to understand the context surrounding the critical event. The research team used interaction analysis to examine how emotions shaped Lizette’s learning.

In the video, Lizette is visiting small groups of students who are working on math problems. The class has over 40 students, a significant increase from prior years, and in an attempt to reach as many students as possible, Lizette cuts many of her interactions with students short. Students meanwhile are visibly overwhelmed and frustrated; many wait for extended periods, not knowing how to proceed. Viewing the video is difficult for Lizette, who identifies as a teacher who values engaging with her students’ thinking. She expresses disappointment, frustration, and embarrassment, and eventually leaves the meeting in tears.

With follow-up and support from the coaches, Lizette uses this moment to crystallize her understanding of how the increase in class size has impacted her teaching; her method of visiting groups is no longer enough support for her students. She takes up, adapts, and tests new instructional strategies to support her students, which both the authors and Lizette describe as a positive change in her teaching.

McDugan and colleagues next describe how the actions of the coaches—choosing to show her video of challenging event in her classroom, framing the event in terms of class size, showing empathy, and being available for follow-up—supported Lizette’s shift. Notably, the coaches had been hesitant to show the clip out of worry that it might be discomfiting. Yet, they also reflect that avoiding it may have been a missed opportunity for growth.

In concluding, the authors acknowledge that not all emotionally challenging moments will become opportunities for learning. Lizette’s willingess to reflect combined with the time and resources available to the coaching team made this a “best case.” Nevertheless, they argue that this case illustrates that coaches need not always avoid difficult emotions and that supportive attention to these emotions can support teacher growth.

CONCLUSION

The articles in this set make an argument that teachers in PD contexts are likely to experience negative emotions. But why should this be so? Each article locates the source of the discomfort in threats to teachers’ identities as good, knowledgeable, or caring. The idea that teachers have something to learn seems to suggest that there is something teachers lack, and the possibility of exposing that lack can evoke fear, frustration, or shame. Yet as McGugan and co-authors suggest, such threats only exists if there is such a thing as good and less good teachers. They suggest moving away from simple binaries, and instead embracing “teaching as an interactional accomplishment and therefore only partially dependent on teachers’ skill” (p. 4). The commonsense idea that good teachers cause good teaching is an oversimplification that puts an impossible burden on individual teachers. Instead, we can view moments of good teaching as outcomes that are more likely to occur when teachers have opportunities to work and think together in community.

IMPLICATIONS

Many in the Life Sciences Education community are invested in educational reform at the postsecondary level. University faculty are at the center of much of this work. Yet support for faculty learning is far less common in higher education than at the K-12 level (e.g. Gormally et al., 2014). While early work with university faculty has often positioned them as “adopters of best practices” (Henderson et al., 2011), the articles in this set offer an alternative framing of faculty as learners. This framing highlights a need to study the cognitive and affective aspects of faculty learning and to use those understandings to design PD initiatives that support collaborative transformative learning.

REFERENCES