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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Emotional Self-Regulation Strategies for Teachers
Last Updated 11 October 2023/ By Zineb DJOUB
Teaching is an emotionally laden process for both teachers and students. It is not just about imparting information and supporting students to improve and learn, but also enhancing positive emotions that lead to learning. As teachers, we also face situations that may make us feel angry, frustrated, disgusted, sad, or even excited. To create a supportive learning atmosphere, we need to be able to regulate our emotions by using effective strategies. What is emotional self-regulation? And what emotional self-regulation strategies do we need to thrive in teaching?
Emotional Self-Regulation
Emotions are part of our everyday lives. They encompass feelings, mental states, and reactions (behaviours) to a person or event.
Teaching makes different demands on our emotions. We are expected to be calm and controlled, even in stressful situations. This is through regulating our emotions or adjusting them at an optimal level in each situation.
For example, when our excitement to use a new activity in class is intense, it might end up overloading our students with much content and confusing them (we need to down-regulate). Showing, however, a lack of interest in using it is likely to make students uninterested and unwilling to get involved (up-regulating is required).
As the psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson has found, too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges. So, self-regulation is all about moderating our emotions to bring up that balance.
Strategies for Emotional Self-Regulation
Here are 5 emotional self-regulation strategies that can support you in regulating your emotions, avoiding any drain of your energy, and maintaining a healthy learning atmosphere.
1. Set a professional code of conduct
Regulating emotions involves monitoring feelings and establishing a professional relationship with students. To achieve this goal, teachers must set a code of conduct for themselves underlining the do’s and don’ts as follows:
• Monitor what you are feeling
When intense positive or negative feelings are aroused (happy, angry, anxious, etc.) do not try to suppress them (an avoidance approach). Research has shown that suppression consumes cognitive resources making the teacher unable to carry out the lesson since the unpleasant emotion is not likely to go away (Gross, 2002; Kimura, 2010).
But, this does not mean letting your emotions rule over you. Try to show them adequately and consistently with the situation. Don’t shout, yell, cry, or say words to your students that would ruin your professional identity. Instead, evaluate (reappraisal) that situation to find out about the ‘why’.
For example, if students are making disruptive behaviours, show them that this is unacceptable by talking to them with an angry tone of voice without losing respect or being violent (show angry feelings, not angry actions).
Then try to understand why they are behaving in that way. Talk to them quietly and mostly listen to them (in class making direct eye contact with them or individually after class).
They may not be interested in your activity or they have not understood your instructions, etc. So, focus on the actual problem, how to cope with it more successfully, and direct actions to avoid it in the future.
Don’t focus on your emotions (how they have driven you mad) and take things personally because these unpleasant emotions will come over and over again to you and make you feel burnout and escalate conflicts with your students.
When feeling stressed, not interested in a given activity or even demotivated by the school reform, administrators, etc., never display your feelings and try to act indifferently. You must be a role model who inspires, motivates, and boosts students’ learning.
Except when you are tired or sick, whether your students are told about it or not, they may know about it from your face, voice, behaviours and they will probably understand (understanding depends on how serious and committed the teacher is).
• Establish a professional teacher-student relationship
Establishing and maintaining a professional relationship with your students helps a lot in the process of emotional self-regulation. This is because it can support you to know what professional boundaries to make and how you should behave accordingly.
To have a professional relationship for yourself, be friendly (not a friend) with your students. Care about and show interest in their learning. Respect their privacy and dignity, and guide them to learn and improve.
Also, be wary of creating personal relationships outside of the class, showing preferential treatment to students, and using your authority to harm them.
2. Be self-confident
Self-confidence provides you with the power to regulate your emotions in different situations and respond appropriately to embarrassing situations or problems.
I still remember the first days of my teaching. I could not hide my fears, my face reddened with embarrassment, and shaky hands when the materials did not work or when my adult students asked questions I had no answer to.
Being unable to regulate my emotions I could do nothing to escape from their sceptical eyes and sarcastic comments. I realized that I was not self-confident enough to deal with such situations.
So, believe in your capability to regulate your emotions and deal successfully with whatever classroom situation and utter always the magic sentence I CAN do it to reinforce such feeling.
3. Equip yourself with the tools to feel secure
It is necessary to have the tools that help you deal with different situations. This makes you feel secure and able to regulate your emotions effectively. Here they are:
• Know more about your students
Invest time and energy to know your students’ emotional, physical, and cognitive needs. You can seek the school counsellors’ help and collaborate with parents to understand your students and solve problems that may interfere with their success.
• Cope proactively
being well-prepared is essential to feel secure and comfortable. Yet, you also need to expect the unexpected and plan for it. Indeed, you cannot anticipate all possibilities, but you can prepare for more alternatives.
While preparing your lessons, think about ‘what could happen. So try to foresee relationship challenges and then decide ‘what should be done in this case’ by making your plan and building up resources for upcoming risks and demands.
So, do not wait until problems occur (coping reactively) but think about your students, and how they could behave and prepare yourself to deal with those situations.
• Learn about how to deal with embarrassing situations
If your students ask questions that you have no answers to or you are not sure of them. If you make a mistake and it is noticed by students…..What would you do in such situations?
So, read books, articles, and blog posts about classroom management strategies, ask experts, and network with other teachers to learn more about them.
•Collaborate with your colleagues
Share new materials, activities, lesson plans, teaching ideas, etc., with your colleagues before introducing them in class. Reflect together on how these could be perceived by students, how they would react, and reach a common consensus on what should be done. Then report your observations and review your decisions if necessary.
4. Lift your spirit in difficult moments
When we are experiencing a problem or deep personal loss at home, our emotional state is very likely to get further exasperated by any student’s misbehaviour.
We may lose our temper, shout, yell, curse, share our problems with our students, cry, etc. So, we allow others to witness our emotional display just to seek relief from what we are confronting. In these moments, it is not easy to regulate our emotions.
However, the classroom is not the context to pour out our emotions. This will lead us nowhere apart from losing our students’ respect and engagement in learning. So, to minimize the impact of these hard moments on students:
#On your way to work, listen to your favourite music, or song or read a book, a magazine, or whatever writing interests you. You can also read your schedule for the week and plan for doing further activities.
#Before starting your first class, try to come a bit earlier. Talk to your colleagues (those who are cheerful and you like chatting to) about travelling, shopping, fashion, work, etc. (but not about your problems). Or talk to your students about what they have been doing in their free time, what they are planning to do, etc.
#Whenever you feel overwhelmed with negative feelings, try to remember happy (also funny) moments or events that can help you feel well.
#Ask for a colleague’s help to run off extra photocopies, gather lesson materials, etc. You can return the favour when you’re feeling better.
If you still find regulating your emotions impossible, take breaks. You can travel or do things that help you relax and think over your life.
5. Keep reflecting
Reflecting regularly on emotion-provoking stimuli that are aroused in your classroom and the way you are handling them is a must-do process. This can aid you to enhance your ability to self-regulate your emotions.
Whether your reflection is in-action (occurs during activity and interaction) or on-action (happens before or after a given action or event for the sake of planning or evaluating the process), try to maintain it daily to understand how and why students behave.
To make it more systematic and organized, you can set a reflective framework for yourself. You can use, for example, observation checklists, reflective worksheets, or journals.
Sharing your emotions with your friends, and people you know, will not only help you release your tension but also reflect on them and become more aware of your emotions, your ability to regulate them, and how you need to develop this ability.
Emotions are central to the construction of our identity as teachers. But, when we do not manage and control them appropriately they can wreck students’ learning.
The above emotional self-regulation strategies will support you in learning how to regulate your emotions in the classroom. Because I have been using them along with my teaching experience and they have proved to be effective. So, try them you will see the difference.
References
Gross, J.J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences.Psychophysiology,39(3),281-291.
Kimura, Y. (2010). Expressing Emotions in Teaching: Inducement, Suppression, and Disclosure as Caring Profession. Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook, 5, 63–78.
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