Emotion Based Professional Development Training and First Year Teachers` Attitudes to Students

Background: Teachers’ practice involves facing challenges with personal emotions - excitement, anxiety, love, anger, disappointment, etc., in addition to cognitive coping and dealing with pedagogical content (Hoekstra & Korthagen2011; Oplatka ,2017). More and more researchers from the field of education and psychology call for bringing back the component of emotion such as caring and empathy to teaching in the classroom. Their main assumption is that it is not possible to separate cognition from emotion. Therefore, in recent years more attention is addressed to research on emotions in teacher education (Zach, 2010; Rosenblum, 2015).

Aim: The aim of the current research is to study the contribution of an emotion based professional program `Lovecircles` for first year teachers.

Methods: The emotion based program is a three staged program: from the personal to group dimension including experiential, verbal and arts activities, as well as role-playing and simulations which were photographed and recorded. These experimental activities enable participants to attend to their personal emotion and develop attention to others. The activities enabled participants to face issues from personal narratives (such as the impact of inspirational people, memories of diverse experiences and their meanings) and from a professional narrative (documentation of challenging events through an integration of elements such as metaphors and emotions, styles of communication, such as opening or inhibiting). Photographs and video were analyzed by two researchers in order to identify the impact of the course on the development of the perceived emotion based teaching approach.

Results: Results indicate that participants developed awareness, perception and appreciation of the role of emotions on their practice and acquired abilities to regulate emotions and act upon them. Participants perceived a new developmental approach to teaching based on attention, dialogue, empathy and regulation of emotion. These results highlight the impact of `Lovecircles`, the emotion based professional development program, on physical and sport educators’ interaction and performance, due to their participation in the program. Consequently, the contribution of this study might be significant in the integration of emotional aspects of physical education teachers` personal dimension during their professional development process. Decision-makers will then be able to deliberate the integration of emotions in personal development within the sport education professional development program.