Team teachers’ emotions and their antecedents in the classroom

Abstract

Team teaching requires close collaboration and frequent social interactions between two teachers. Within these interactions, it is expected that the teachers experience various emotions. This study aims to investigate team teachers’ emotional lives; in particular, which discrete emotions team teachers experience in working with their team partner and why. We used an appraisal–theoretical understanding of emotions and structuring qualitative content analysis to analyse 30 semi-structured online interviews with Austrian team teachers from lower secondary schools. Our results show that the team-teaching setting, values and goals, the collaboration characteristics (e.g. workload division) and the lesson (e.g. variety of methods) trigger emotions such as joy, gratitude, anger or insecurity within the other teacher. Moreover, additional sources of emotions are the two teachers’ personal characteristics, the team partner’s relationship with students and the relationship in the team. We discuss the practical implications for team teaching.