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The Emotional Experience of First-Time Teaching

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The article that I read, titled “The Emotional Experience of First-time Teaching: Reflections from Graduate Instructors, 1997 – 2006,” found in the Teaching Sociology journal, discusses some of the challenging and rewarding emotional experiences that first time graduate student instructors had during their first semester of independent teaching. The method used for this study was content analysis of 86 end-of-the-semester reflections written by first-time graduate student sociology instructors. This study lead to a variety of findings. First, first-time teaching was a highly emotional experience for many people and some experiences were positive and others were negative. The study did not find much difference in emotional experience by race or gender. Support from departmental programs, campus resources, and colleagues were generally found to be helpful, although not always. Thus, these findings suggest that training and support should be made available to first-time instructors both before and during their first teaching experiences, and they should incorporate attention to the emotional aspects of teaching.

The instructors found formal support through a pedagogical course to be helpful by providing a comfort zone for them to discuss their experiences with others, and to give them an opportunity to discuss their concerns with a teaching mentor, thereby alleviating many of their worries. It has also been found that many of the instructors’ expectations did not match up with reality, and thus having someone to discuss this mismatch with was tremendously helpful on an emotional level. Moreover, this article addresses the point that there is a general gap in the existing literature on emotions and teaching, and that further research is needed to more fully describe the impact of emotional experiences on teachers and teaching. Further longitudinal research that examines whether and how the emotional aspects of first-time teaching change with subsequent teaching experience is especially necessary. This article can be accessed through the following link:

http://tso.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/07/0092055X13508377.full.pdf+html


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