Teachers’ emotions in the classroom play a critical role in how students learn, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
The APA says that when teachers experience enjoyment, they deliver higher-quality instruction that boosts students’ confidence in their abilities, interest and academic performance, while teacher anger is linked to poorer teaching and worse student outcomes.
“We decided to conduct this research because teaching is not only an intellectual activity but also an emotional one,” said lead author Ms Marina Elena Pfeifer PhD of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
“We wanted to understand this full chain of events connecting how a teacher feels to how a student performs.”
The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, analysed data from 679 mathematics teachers and more than 17,500 students across eight countries: Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
During the study, students studied the same maths lesson, which allowed researchers to fairly compare classrooms across different countries.
Teachers reported their levels of enjoyment and anger, while students rated their teachers’ teaching quality, reported their own confidence and interest in the subject and completed a performance test.
Researchers focused on three key aspects of teaching quality: classroom management, supportive teacher-student relationships, and cognitive activation, which involves encouraging students to think critically.
“We hypothesised that a teacher’s emotions act as a domino effect in the classroom, linking to student outcomes indirectly through the quality of their instruction,” Ms Pfeifer said.
Teachers who reported greater enjoyment were more likely to manage classrooms effectively, build supportive relationships with students and use cognitively engaging teaching strategies. These teaching practices, in turn, were associated with higher student confidence in their abilities, greater interest in learning and improved test performance.
In contrast, teachers who reported more anger showed lower levels of teaching quality across all three areas and were associated with less favourable student outcomes.
The researchers also identified a counterintuitive finding: more supportive teacher-student relationships were sometimes linked to lower student performance. Ms Pfeifer suggested this may reflect teachers providing more emotional support when students are struggling academically.
“Despite considerable cultural, economic and linguistic differences, the mechanisms by which a teacher’s emotions shape teaching quality and student outcomes remained remarkably similar across the globe.”
The findings highlight the importance of supporting teachers’ emotional well-being as part of improving education systems.
“The major real-world implication is that supporting a teacher’s emotional well-being is not just a ‘nice-to-have’ – it is critical to student success,” Ms Pfeifer said.
The researchers suggest that schools and policymakers should prioritise reducing teacher stress and providing tools such as mindfulness-based interventions to help educators regulate their emotions.
