Primary teachers' strategies of fear management

The master's thesis deals with the emotion of fear in classroom teachers and with the strategies of fear management. In the theoretical part, we define emotions as complex compound processes that include individuals' cognitive, physiological, expressive, and behavioural responses. Subsequently, we present different emotions: fundamental and complex, pleasant and unpleasant, strong and weak. We describe fundamental and complex emotions in detail. We also present emotion management strategies, explain the importance of the teacher's awareness, understanding and regulation of emotions in the classroom, and the level of the teacher's professional development. In the empirical part, we present the course and results of the research, which included 84 class teachers from 15 Slovenian elementary schools. We got the data by busing a survey questionnaire designed by H. Smrtnik Vitulić and S. Prosen (2016). We were interested in how often classroom teachers experience fear in their work at school and at home, what are the most common situations that cause teachers to experience fear in their work, how often they use different strategies to control their work, and whether the strategies they use vary depending on the level of professional development of teachers. The results showed that for most of the time teachers did not experience fear in their work at school, but they also did not think much about the fear they experienced there. When they did experience it, this was in a variety of situations, which included performing professional tasks, dealing with injured students, contacting parents, dealing with health issues, and when in relation with management and staff they were dealing with their influence on them. Teachers stated that they use different strategies of fear management in their work environment. Of the five groups of fear-management strategies, teachers most frequently used »shifting of attention«, then »change of situation«, »cognitive revaluation« and »selection of the situation«, while the »change of response« was most rarely used. For teachers in different stages of professional development, the frequency of using individual fear management strategies differed statistically only in the selection of situation strategy (this was used more in Phase 3 than in Phase 1 and Phase 2, and more often used in Phase 4 than in Phase 2 of professional development). For the teachers, it is necessary to identify appropriately, express and regulate emotions (including the feelings of fear), while similarly handling of emotions (fear) is also essential for quality work with students