The emotional aspects regarding the professional development of physical teachers in training: Methodology and results.

Abstract

Introduction The aim of this study is to understand the professional development of Physical Education Teachers in Training (PETT) from emotional striking events in a class setting. Teaching is a task with important emotional aspects and teachers in training are subjected to both positive and negative emotion during teacher education. Reports of high attrition rates among teacher in training suggest that the new teachers need help to develop strategies of coping. Beginners have a limited repertoire of problem-solving strategies. Some authors confirm that the teachers in training’s initial contacts with students results in a variety of important emotional impacts, impacts who are stronger with the students than during lectures at University. These initial contacts make up a large part of unforeseen influences. Many papers emphasize the influence of the subjective nature of teaching according to teacher’s comfort or discomfort. Research has shown that starting to teach is a lonely experience with little support regarding the subjective part of the profession and exploring the way in which teacher in training cope with emotional striking events could help to better prepare students for making the transition into the professional role as a teacher. To better prepare beginning teachers for the transition to working life, it is crucial to know which event are particularly source of emotion.

A review of the international literature about the emotional aspects of the beginning teacher allows us to identify four areas of questions: 1. What types of emotional striking events are present by the PETT in a class setting during their first year at the University of teacher education? 2. What correlations exist between those emotional striking events and the different types and different intensities of emotions ? 3. With whom those emotional striking events are discussed ? 4. What effect those emotional striking events on the PETT?

A mixed research design based on a questionnaire on the one hand and on the clinical activity procedure on the other hand was adopted. In this paper we will focus on the first method.

Method The data presented is taken from questionnaire responses by 98 PETT’s at the University of Teacher Education in Lausanne (Switzerland). The students are all physical education specialists. They graduated at the University of Lausanne in Sport Science and they are now learning education at the University of teacher Education. The 98 PETTs have different backgrounds, but most of them made replacements in school and experienced emotional striking events, even before coming to the education center. In the questionnaire they had to write an emotional striking events they lived during teaching. The questionnaire took into consideration three main areas of significance: immediate impact of an event as well as the emotion and the degree of the emotions experienced from the event. We inquire also with whom those emotion from striking events are discussed. In order to evaluate this data, the 196 responses were categorized according to the procedures of the Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). This data was then crossed with verbal material of PETTs collected from the clinical activity procedure regarding a follow up of five PETT’s during one year. This verbal data, material of the PETTs, as taken from self-confrontation interview (SCI) and crossed-confrontation interview (CCI) allows us to define indicators of development according to the methods borrowed from Bruno (2015). The indication about the emotions, their intensity and the persons with whom the events are discussed were treated in a statistical point of view that allows us to answer to the questions of this study.

Results The evaluation of the data from the questionnaires shows that the emotional striking events are more often linked to the students and their: engagement/disengagement, order/disorder, compliance/conflict, and cooperation/agitation with the PETT. The results reveal that emotional impacts from negative moments are much more frequent and have greater impact than those related to positive moments (132 negative moments and 54 positive moments). Some emotional striking events begin being negative and then they end in a positive way (9/198). Most often, negative moments are associated with: a) a violation of the rules by the students (44/196), b) conflicts between students (28/196), c) difficulties to manage students with special needs (19/196), and d) injury or physical harm to a student (23/196). The positive moments are most associated with the student’s motivation (20/196) and the success of the students (17/196). Events that occur out of the lesson plan and which are a surprise result in the most dominant impacts. Overall, these sensitive and more subjective moments enhance the training of the PETTs, most notably, when they are shared and discussed with others, but not necessarily with professionals (friend, spouse, director, tutor, lecturer). Each emotional striking event impacts (in a positive or negative way) the continuation of education.

Discussion The developmental process of the PETT takes into account the individual potential to be affected by an event or situation and the emergence of intrapsychic conflicts. Our hypothesis states that this process is triggered only if the development of the PETT is within an environment of intrapsychic conflicts and the realm of the profession, i.e. « the collective of work » (Vygotski, 1934/1985). Additionally, there is an evidence that the development is possible only with a “scaffolding” during the intrapsychic conflicts with other professionals (Vygotski, 1934/1985). We suggest that our findings might be considered in teacher education to improve the emotional competencies of prospective teachers. Moreover teacher training should provide opportunities to deal with emotional striking events and to use them in a positive way in their developmental process. We could for example introduce in teacher education the analysis of professional practice through narrative emotional events or use video analysis showing PETT in an emotional situation. Finally these results challenge traditional teaching methods and open up the potential value in alternation of physical education teachers in training particularly when taking into account the subjective nature of the teaching profession.