Teacher well-being in Taiwan: from real-time experience in class to general well-being

23rd November 2020 : 12:45 - 13:45

Abstract

Teachers’ well-being is crucial for their own careers but also important for their students’ learning and well-being. Based on the emotional contagion theory, emotional transmission could exist between students and teachers in the classroom. Previous research has focused most on students’ emotion and well-being, and how teachers influence their students. However primary school teachers, especially home-room teachers, spend most of their time with students in their daily lives, thus it is valuable to explore how they feel in the classroom and how students influence teachers’ teaching emotion and wellbeing. Going beyond previous cross-sectional and longer-term longitudinal studies on teachers’ well-being in Taiwan, this study investigates the associations between real-time emotions and teaching experiences (every lesson during one-week period), daily end-of-day well-being, and general well-being. 20 homeroom teachers from 8 primary schools who taught fourth or fifth grades participated in this study. Using experience sampling, teachers completed repeated electronic questionnaires at the end of each lesson (average responses per teacher M = 13.15, SD =, Range=7, Total nldt =263 ), brief end-of-day work life well-being (average responses per teacher M = 4.5 , SD =.607, Range=2, Total ndt = 90 ), and a survey of teachers’ general well-being (n = 20). To investigate primary school teachers’ experience of real-time emotions and students’ engagement in class, as well as what is the role of teachers’ real-time experience on their daily and general well-being, we specified multilevel structural equation modelling using Mplus.