Pedagogical Well-Being: Reflecting Learning and Well-Being in Teachers' Work
Source: Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Volume 16, Issue 6, 2010, p. 735 - 751.
The current paper focuses on exploring teachers' experienced pedagogical well-being.
The authors examine the kinds of situations that teachers themselves find either empowering and engaging or burdening and stressful in their work.
The study aims to: (1) identify the primary contexts of teachers' experienced critical incidents of pedagogical well-being; and
(2) determine the kind of action strategies teachers have adopted in these contexts when they are reported as empowering and engaging.
The study included data collected from the teachers of nine case-schools around Finland. Altogether, a selected group of 68 comprehensive school teachers, including both primary and secondary school teachers, were interviewed.
The results suggested that interaction with pupils in socially and pedagogically challenging situations constitutes the core of teachers' pedagogical well-being.
Success in both the pedagogical goals and more general social goals seem to be fundamental preconditions for teachers' experienced pedagogical well-being.
Further investigation showed that teachers' approaches to socially challenging situations varied.
Results suggest that teachers' pedagogical well-being is centrally generated in the challenging social interactions of their work. Moreover, the way in which a teacher acts in the situation is found to be a regulator for experienced pedagogical well-being.