Leadership Effects on Student Learning Mediated by Teacher Emotions

Abstract

This chapter assumes readers' familiarity with the overall framework for the book (see Chap. 1): in brief, school leadership influences student learning indirectly by improving key learning conditions on each of four "paths"-Rational, Emotional, Organizational and Family paths. Concerned only with the Emotional Path, this paper reviews evidence about the effects on student achievement of four teacher emotions or dispositions and those leadership practices likely to help improve the condition of each. While evidence indicates that leaders' attention to variables on all four paths can improve student learning (e.g. Leithwood et al. 2010; Sun and Leithwood 2015), teacher emotions are especially critical since they "seep across paths" thus shaping leaders' success in improving most variables on the other three paths. A narrative review by the second author (Leithwood and Beatty 2008) of more than 90 empirical studies of teacher emotions and their consequences for classroom practice and student learning pointed to a large handful of teacher emotions with significant effects on teaching and learning including both individual and collective teacher efficacy, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, morale, stress/burn-out, engagement in the school or profession, and teacher trust in colleagues, parents, and students. Based on a series of meta-analyses by us, teacher trust in others, teacher commitment, teacher collective efficacy and Organizational Citizenship Behavior or OCB (reasons for classifying OCB as an emotion appear below) were selected as most significant and the focus of this chapter.