Building Teachers’ emotional competence: A transactional training model

Author

Caroline FultonFollow

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Date of Graduation

5-2-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Department of Graduate Psychology

Advisor(s)

Elena Savina

Kenneth L. Critchfield II

Trevor F. Stokes

Abstract

Classrooms are complex entities, where the emotions of students and teachers interact to influence learning, relationships, and students’ social emotional development. Teachers’ understanding of emotional processes within the classroom is critical to effective teaching, promotion of healthy child development, and attaining desired learning outcomes. Further, emotions have powerful consequences for teachers themselves. They affect teachers’ well-being, self-efficacy, and ultimately whether teachers remain in the profession or not. Therefore, teachers need skills to recognize and respond to emotional experiences in the classroom. In the present research project a set of emotional competences relevant to educational practices were developed. These competencies include awareness of one’s own experience, capacity for effective self-regulation, knowledge of emotional transmission, and maintenance of emotional well-being. In addition, there are competencies related to understanding emotions in systemic and relational contexts, utilizing emotions to promote learning, recognizing and responding to emotions in students, and building students’ emotional competence.This research project further offers a conceptual model of training of emotional competencies to preservice teachers by employing a transactional, process-based approach. The transactional aspect of the model emphasizes that emotions emerge as a result of interpersonal transactions in the classroom informed by teachers’ and students’ personal histories and experiences. The process-oriented aspect emphasizes that teachers must develop an understanding of how and why emotions emerge through an increased awareness of self, emotional experiences and expression in self and others, as well as the individual goals that pervade the classroom. The training model provides a rational for each emotional competency, an illustrative example that describes the competency in practice, and means for instilling the competency in pre-service teachers.

Recommended Citation

Fulton, Caroline, "Building Teachers’ emotional competence: A transactional training model" (2019). Dissertations, 2014-2019. 218.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss201019/218