What Factors Influence Teachers’ Engagement in Practices and Strategies that Promote Students’ Emotional Wellbeing?

Given that students spend anywhere from 25-35 hours per week at school, educators, support staff, and school administrators have a responsibility to care for students. Teachers are tasked with implementing emotionally intelligent behaviors to provide an environment where students feel like they can reach their personal and academic goals. When discussing emotional intelligence, my dissertation uses the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso (2014) four pillared model of “perception of emotions, understanding emotions, regulating emotions, and using emotions” as a framework for my overall approach, which includes my research questions and hypotheses, survey instrument questions, and interview protocols.My study surveyed 56 K-12 educators from six schools in Southern California. The six schools included three public and three private schools, spanned the grade levels from K to 12, and varied in terms of the socioeconomic status of students’ families (percentage of students qualifying for Free/Reduced Lunch ranged from 1% to 72%). As it relates to addressing student wellbeing, the educators were asked a variety of questions, such as what issues they perceived as most adversely impacting their students, to matters of teacher self-efficacy and classroom practices. Follow up interviews were then conducted with six credentialed educators, each representing different grade level divisions (elementary, middle, and high school), with half of the educators having taken no courses on emotional intelligence. Coding and statistical analyses were conducted, and resulting composite scales were determined to see what patterns emerged that linked teacher supports, self-efficacy, and engagement factors to the implementation of emotionally intelligent practices and classroom strategies. The results indicated that teachers felt that teacher credential programs should incorporate courses that helped teacher candidates develop emotionally intelligent behaviors, and that such curricula should be reformed to reflect input from educators and support staff. The findings of my dissertation therefore provide important implications for how administrators and higher education teacher programs can best support and train new teachers so that student wellbeing is effectively addressed to the greatest extent possible