Teacher emotional labour, instructional strategies, and students’ academic engagement: a multilevel analysis

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to explore links between teachers’ emotional labour, class-perceived instructional strategies and their students’ self-reported academic engagement. Data on emotional labour from N = 95 high-school teachers and their students’ (N = 2,111) perceptions of instructional strategies and self-reported academic engagement were analysed through doubly latent multilevel SEM. The results indicated systematic links between teachers’ emotional labour strategies and class-perceived instructional strategies and student self-reported engagement. The more frequently teachers reported to hide or suppress their feelings in class, the lower was the instructional strategies as perceived by the students. Teachers’ faking emotions were found to be positively linked with class-level engagement. The obtained results imply that interventions fostering teachers’ emotion-regulation strategies can be very promising, as they likely are beneficial both for teacher well-being and for teaching performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher emotional labour
• class-perceived instructional strategies
• students’ self-reported engagement
• multilevel analysis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The intraclass correlation ICC 1 is the average agreement between any two pairs of students within the same class (i.e. a proportion of the total variance occurring at the class level), while ICC 2 is the reliability of the group average (i.e. the degree of agreement between students) (Lüdtke, Marsh, Robitzsch, & Trutwein, 2011). ICC 1 values should be close to or higher than.10 (Lüdtke et al., 2011), and ICC 2 values should exceed.70 (Marsh et al., 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Croatian Science Foundation [Grant No. UIP-11-2013-5065].

Notes on contributors

Irena Burić

Irena Burić is an associate professor at Department of Psychology of the University of Zadar. She teaches courses in basic and advanced statistics and educational psychology and is currently the Acting Head of the Department of Psychology. She has received two large national grants from Croatian Science Foundation (CSF). Her research work mostly pertains to emotional processes in educational context. In recent years she has been investigating the role personality, emotion, and emotion regulation in explaining teacher well-being and job performance by implementing a mixed-method approaches and utilizing complex longitudinal and multilevel designs with large samples of teachers and students.

Anne C. Frenzel

Anne C. Frenzel is a full professor of Educational Psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Münich. She is academic director of the interdisciplinary Master's Program on Learning Sciences. Her research expertise pertains to students' and teachers' motivation and emotion, and their interaction. A specific interest of hers is reciprocal emotional transmission between teachers and learners. She predominately works with large-scale self-report data, but aslo employs experimental and video-based obervation approaches.