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Teacher Procrastination, Emotions, and Stress: A Qualitative Study.

ABSTRACT: Stress and negative emotions in teachers can lead to occupational burnout, poor performance in the classroom, and decreased job-satisfaction. Apart from having negative personal and physical effects for the individual teacher, teacher stress and burnout are also thought to have negative effects on the respective students and student achievement. As one potential source of teacher stress, procrastination has been speculated about. However, research on the phenomenology and prevalence of procrastination among teachers, as well as its relevance for their emotional and stress experiences, is very scarce. Further, most of the existing research on teacher procrastination used general self-report scales to obtain results. The present study therefore investigated the phenomenology of teacher procrastination as well as its links with emotional experiences and stress, using a qualitative approach. Twenty-seven male and female teachers from Germany were interviewed personally (Mean age = 35.7, SD = 9.64, Min = 25 years, Max = 67 years). Nine of those teachers reported to never needlessly delay an action concerning their profession or not to perceive their dilatory behavior as negative and stressful. Data from the remaining 16 teachers (Mean age = 35.06, SD = 7.01, Min = 26 years, Max = 48 years) were analyzed on the basis of qualitative content analysis by using deductive as well as inductive category application. Results revealed that these teachers procrastinate on an array of professional tasks, such as administrative and organizational tasks and correcting students' work. The results showed that teachers delayed these tasks for different reasons but mainly due to task aversiveness. Further, teachers reported experiencing mainly negative emotions when procrastinating and perceiving their procrastination behavior as moderately stressful, indicating that procrastination is a potential stressor in the teacher profession. Limitations of the study are discussed and directions for future research are proposed.

SUBMITTER: Laybourn S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6798067 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Examining the nature of teachers' emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teachers' instruction. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers' lives and instruction, research on teachers' emotions has not paid much attention on teachers' emotions in the context of daily teaching. This paper explored elementary teachers' emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching mathematics, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of five cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle, pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. In order to compare teachers' emotions with instructional quality, coaching sessions were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported six categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, blended-positive, blended-negative, and mixed), described emotions often in non-typical ways (e.g., "not nervous", "anxious but in a positive way"), and experienced mixed emotions (co-occcurence of positive and negative emotions) as the most dominant emotion. Teachers also had more positive emotions anticipating teaching than actually teaching the lesson. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected the complex and context-specific nature of teaching, a phenonemenon not currently described in the teacher emotion literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers' emotions related to active instruction.

Project description:Teacher emotions are complex as emotions are unique to individuals, situated within specific contexts, and vary over time. This study contributed in synthesizing theories of the complexity in two characteristics of multi-dimensionality and dynamics. Further, we provided large-scale empirical evidence by employing big data and computational text analysis. The data contained around one million teachers' online posts from 2007 to 2018. It was scraped from three representative forums of teachers' workplace events and personal life occasions in a popular American teacher website. By conducting thread-level sentiment analysis in forums, we computed word-frequency-based eight discrete emotions ratios (i.e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust) and the degrees of sentiment polarity (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral). We then used latent Dirichlet allocation for topic classifications. These topics, proxies of contexts, covered a holistic range of teachers' real-life events. Some topics are in the main interest of scholars, such as teachers' professional development and students' behavioral management. This paper is also the first to include the less scholarly studied contexts like professional dressing advice and holiday choices. Then, we examined and visualized variations of emotions and sentiments across 30 topics along with three scales of time (i.e., calendar year, calendar month, and academic semesters). The results showed that teachers tended to have positive sentiments in the online professional community across the past decade, but all eight discrete emotions were presented. The compositions of the specific emotion types varied across topics and time. Regarding the topics of students' behavior issues, teachers' negative emotions' ratios were higher compared when it was presented in other topics. Their negative emotions also peaked during semesters. The forum of teachers' personal lives had positive emotions pronounced across topics and peaked during the wintertime. This paper summarized the evidenced multi-dimensionality characteristic with the multiple types of emotions as compositions and varying degrees of sentiment polarity of teachers. The dynamics characteristic is that teachers' emotions vary across contexts from their workplace to their personal lives and over time. These two characteristics of complexity also suggested potential interplay effects among emotions and across contexts over time.

Project description:Future-oriented emotions could influence our decisions in everyday life and help understand why some individuals are physically active whilst others are not. Current literature distinguishes between two future-oriented emotion constructs: anticipatory and anticipated emotions. While anticipatory emotions are currently experienced emotions about a future event, anticipated emotions refer to the emotions that a person is expected to experience when confronted with a future event. The main aims of the present study were (1) to identify and describe (a) categories of anticipatory emotions experienced before exercise, and (b) categories of anticipated emotions expected to be experienced during and after exercise, and (2) to develop a theoretical model of anticipated emotion categories. Sixteen participants (M age = 26.03, SD = 6.66) were recruited for semi-structured interviews, and their statements were analyzed using principles of the Grounded Theory. In total, 13 different anticipatory and anticipated emotion categories were identified, such as enjoyment, anxiety, pride, self-anger, and relief. Anticipatory emotions seem to reflect the current affective valence of exercising and may be influenced by daily factors. With regards to anticipated emotions, the results show that regular exercisers anticipated also negative emotions such as anxiety, disappointment, and self-anger, and non-regular exercisers also anticipated positive emotions such as enjoyment, pride, and satisfaction. Therefore, future research should not only focus on the valence of future-oriented emotions, but should investigate the possible impact of specific anticipated emotions on exercise behavior. In addition, a theoretical model of anticipated emotion categories in exercise behavior derived from the interviews. The model outlines different categories of anticipated emotions based on appraisal processes. In conclusion, we assume that this developmental process of anticipated emotions may be embedded in a broader, cyclical process within the context of exercising.

Project description:Procrastination is a form of self-regulation failure characterized by the irrational delay of tasks despite potentially negative consequences. Previous research on procrastination was mainly conducted in academic settings, oftentimes combined with a focus on individual differences. As a consequence, scholarly knowledge about how situational factors affect procrastination in work settings is still scarce. Drawing on job stress literature, we assumed that work characteristics go along with cognitive appraisals of the work situation as a challenge and/or hindrance, that these cognitive appraisals affect employees' self-regulation effort to overcome inner resistances, and that self-regulation effort should in turn be related to workplace procrastination. In our study, we focused on three specific work characteristics that we expected to trigger both challenge and hindrance appraisal simultaneously: time pressure, problem solving, and planning and decision-making. We hypothesized serial indirect effects of these work characteristics on workplace procrastination via cognitive appraisal and self-regulation processes that unfold within individuals over short periods of time. Consequently, we conducted a diary study with three measurement occasions per workday over a period of 12 days. Overall, 762 day-level datasets from 110 employees were included in Bayesian multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM; controlled for sleep quality and occupational self-efficacy). Our results revealed negative serial indirect effects of all three work characteristics on workplace procrastination via increased challenge appraisal and subsequently reduced self-regulation effort. Further, our results showed a positive serial indirect effect of time pressure (but not of problem solving or planning and decision making) on workplace procrastination via increased hindrance appraisal and subsequently increased self-regulation effort. Overall, our study showed that work characteristics are linked to workplace procrastination via within-person processes of cognitive appraisal and self-regulation. Because not all work characteristics triggered hindrance appraisal, we argue that it may make sense to further differentiate challenge stressors in the future. Moreover, cognitive appraisals affected self-regulation effort only on the within-person level. On the between-person level self-regulation effort was strongly negatively related with occupational self-efficacy. Thus, we conclude that depending the perspective on procrastination (e.g., differential psychology perspective vs. situational perspective) different variables will be considered relevant to explain the emergence of procrastination.

Project description:BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to examine social media and technology use during a time in which technology served as adolescents' primary form of socialization. The literature is mixed regarding how increased screen time during this period affected adolescent mental health and well-being. The mechanisms by which screen time use affected adolescent psychosocial outcomes are also unknown.ObjectiveWe aimed to deepen our understanding of how social media and technology use, social connectivity, and emotional well-being intersected during pandemic-related school closures.MethodsEnglish-speaking adolescents aged 13 to 17 years were recruited on Instagram for a brief screening survey; 39 participants were purposefully selected to complete a semistructured interview regarding their social media and technology use during the pandemic. Interview summaries were abstracted from recordings, and deductive codes were created for the primary question stems. These codes were subsequently reviewed for the main themes.ResultsThe main themes were as follows: adolescent social media and technology use during school closures usually allowed for more and easier social connectivity, but the amount and relative ease of connectivity differed according to purpose and type of use. Emotions, particularly those of stress and happiness, were connected to whether adolescents actively or passively engaged with social media and technology.ConclusionsOur results suggest a nuanced relationship among social media and technology use, adolescent social support, and emotional well-being, including during the pandemic. Specifically, how adolescents use or engage with web-based platforms greatly influences their ability to connect with others and their feelings of stress and happiness. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and as technology in general remains at the core of the adolescent experience, future research should continue to examine how adolescents navigate and use web-based spaces in beneficial and harmful ways. This will inform education and interventions that foster healthy social media and technological habits.

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Teacher Procrastination, Emotions, and Stress: A Qualitative Study.

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