The Emotional Job Demands of Special Education: A Qualitative Study of Alternatively Certified Novices’ Emotional Induction

Abstract

As of 2015, approximately one in five special educators received licensure through an alternative pathway. Although evidence suggests that emotional exhaustion contributes to special educator attrition, few studies examine firsthand the emotional experiences of novice, alternatively certified special educators. Guided by Tuxford and Bradley’s model of emotional job demands, we explore the ways in which eight teachers perceive and navigate their new profession. Findings indicate that novice special educators (a) experience a range of intense emotions, ranging from extreme pride to deep despair, (b) regulate emotional displays toward students and colleagues to meet professional norms, and (c) invest in the emotional well-being and development of their students. Participants report widespread barriers to this work. Results have implications for researchers, teachers, and administrators interested in retaining novice special educators, and point to several clear pathways for future research in this important and under-researched area of teacher induction.

Keywords

qualitative methods research methods teacher learning teacher preparation participant characteristics induction teacher preparation policy/service delivery alternative routes to certification

Teachers’ emotional experiences within schools affect their retention in the profession (Billingsley, & Bettini, 2019; Brunsting et al., 2014). In particular, teachers’ first few years in the classroom have the potential to bring forth a complex mixture of positive and negative emotions, which may both benefit and hinder novice teachers’ professional paths (Intrator, 2006; Jones & Youngs, 2012). Emotions associated with loving and caring for students may motivate teachers to develop highly effective instructional practices and strong relationships with students; likewise, student success may trigger strong positive emotions associated with professional accomplishment or fulfillment (Hargreaves, 2001; Nias, 1996). Novice teachers may also experience negative emotions associated with anxiety, frustration, and inadequacy, which may challenge their professional success and lead them away from teaching (Chang, 2013; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003).

Novice special educators face particularly complex emotional job demands due to the nature of their roles and their students’ needs (Jones et al., 2013; Kerr & Brown, 2016; Mackenzie, 2012). Special educators cite emotional stress and exhaustion as key factors contributing to attrition (Billingsley & Bettini, 2019; Brunsting et al., 2014). Not surprisingly, districts have found themselves facing shortages of special education teachers for decades (Cross, 2017).

In response to shortages and high attrition rates, districts are increasingly relying on alternative certification programs to meet special education teacher shortages (Billingsley et al., 2009; Quigney, 2010; Rosenberg et al., 2007). As of 2015, approximately one in five special education teachers received licensure through an alternative program (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2018), which is defined as a pathway that is “anything but a 4-year undergraduate program housed in a school of education” (Walsh & Jacobs, 2007, p. 13). In some areas, these numbers are even higher: for example, in California, two thirds of special education teachers hired in 2016 to 2017 had intern credentials, or short-term permits or waivers, rather than preliminary credentials (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). Unfortunately, in hiring alternatively certified teachers, a vicious cycle is formed: As schools scramble to fill positions vacated due in part to overwhelming demands, the new, novice teachers they hire enter the classroom with even less training and experience to meet the demands of their new roles (Quigney, 2010; Rosenberg & Sindelar, 2005). Despite the odds of emotional burnout being stacked against them, alternatively certified novices are sent to navigate the complex “emotional geographies” (Hargreaves, 2001) of the classroom with little guidance.

So long as shortages exist, schools will continue to depend on alternatively certified teachers, and student outcomes will be directly impacted by the ways in which these teachers experience and navigate the demands of their work. Yet, despite the fact that hundreds of students with disabilities depend on this pool of alternatively certified teachers, there is very little research on the experiences of these teachers or knowledge of the specific supports that they need. Extensive research exists debating the merits of alternative licensure as a solution to teacher shortages; therefore, this article does not seek to argue for or against alternative licensure pathways. Instead, we aim to fill a gap in the literature by exploring the ways in which eight novice, alternatively certified special educators perceive and navigate the emotional demands of their new profession. In doing so, we provide insight into the crucial areas of support that alternatively certified, novice special educators may need to continue in the profession.

Emotional Job Demands

To interpret how novice, alternatively certified teachers experience the demands of their work, this article draws on Tuxford and Bradley’s (2015) model of emotional demands. Teaching includes emotional, physical, and cognitive demands (Näring et al., 2012), all of which “require sustained physical or mental effort” (Demerouti et al., 2001, p. 501) and therefore necessitate significant resources to sustain (Demerouti et al., 2001).

In this analysis, we focus on novice teachers’ perceptions of the emotional demands of teaching and the extent to which they are able to access associated resources to meet them. To do so, we rely on Tuxford and Bradley’s (2015) model of the emotional job demands of teaching, which includes three components: exposure to intense emotional situations, engaging in emotional labor, and giving emotional support.

First, teaching involves exposure to situations in which teachers experience a wide range of intense emotions (Frenzel, 2014; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003; Taxer & Frenzel, 2015). Interacting with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents to overcome academic challenges and resolve conflicts requires teachers to navigate a variety of emotions. For special educators, exposure to intense emotional situations may be increased both by their students’ unique emotional and behavioral needs as well as others’ affective responses to them (Carter & Spencer, 2006; Heiman, 2002). We also note here that because disability and the labels associated with it are social constructs (McDermott, 2001; Skrtic, 1991), the identification and placement process of their students may carry emotional job demands for special educators beyond responding to the actual manifestation of the identified disability. While traditionally certified teachers may adjust to this level of emotional intensity more gradually through practicum, internship, or student teaching experiences, alternatively certified teachers usually begin teaching without these experiences or this gradual exposure, making these emotions even more pronounced. In interviews with 49 directors of alternative certification programs, Walsh and Jacobs (2007) found that less than half of the programs provided participants with a teaching opportunity before starting to teach full-time and only one third of programs included weekly visits from a mentor during participants’ first semester of teaching.

Second, compounding the broad range of emotions that special educators experience in their work is the fact that not all emotions associated with these intense experiences are considered professional to display. Therefore, special educators must engage in emotional labor, or “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). Emotional labor is the work that teachers do to ensure that their emotional expressions match the emotional norms of their school (Diefendorff & Richard, 2003). For special education teachers, the demand to evoke, suppress, or reappraise emotions may be particularly important, both because their work is often misunderstood by colleagues, and because they may teach students who struggle with emotional regulation (Kerr & Brown, 2016; Mackenzie, 2012). Alternatively certified teachers, who may symbolize the embodiment of policies with which their colleagues disagree (Thomas, 2018b), may face additional emotional demands of positioning themselves as legitimate professionals while at the same time needing additional guidance in navigating their work.

Finally, teaching involves giving emotional support, or the expectation that teachers maintain students’ emotional well-being (Strazdins, 2000). Teachers are expected to create positive, nurturing environments where students feel safe, cared for, and even loved. For special educators, this work may be intensified by their interactions with students whose emotional processes are different than their typically developing peers (Lewis & Sullivan, 2014; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013). In addition, while general educators may choose to develop lessons around students’ social emotional development, special educators are more likely to face the legal requirement to do so if they teach students with a specific social emotional Individualized Education Program (IEP) goal, such as emotional regulation. Yet, given the relative brevity of their coursework opportunities, alternatively certified teachers are unlikely to receive any training on how to do this work, setting them up for even more complex emotional demands than teachers who receive traditional, 4-year trainings.

Access to Resources for Navigating Job Demands

To meet the emotional and other demands of their work, special educators must rely on a variety of physical, psychological, social, and organizational resources (Demerouti et al., 2001); however, these resources may be scarce. Research suggests that special educators often face complex working conditions in which resources are limited (Billingsley & Bettini, 2019; O’Brien et al., 2019). They also may lack the social support enjoyed by their general education counterparts, who are more likely to have mentors, support from administrators, and departmental collaboration (Bettini et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2013).

Alternatively certified teachers are particularly likely to face a lack of resources needed to meet emotional job demands of their roles. Alternatively certified teachers are more likely to work in under-resourced schools (NCES, 2018) which often have insufficient resources and challenging working conditions (Fall & Billingsley, 2011; Johnson et al., 2004). They are also likely to work in schools with high turnover, resulting in difficult school culture or a lack of guidance and experience upon which to depend. In addition, due to their alternative licensure status, their colleagues may be less willing to trust their professional decisions, isolating them from collaborative opportunities.

Therefore, due to the likely imbalance of demands and resources for alternatively certified novice teachers, it is particularly urgent to examine how they experience and navigate the emotional demands of their professional roles. Doing so may allow us to retain these teachers and prevent burnout and attrition. In this study, we interviewed eight novice, alternatively certified special educators to understand the ways they perceive and navigate the emotional demands of their work. Our research was guided by two questions:

How do novice alternatively certified teachers experience the emotional demands of their professional roles?

What barriers do novice teachers face in navigating these emotional job demands?

Method

Program Selection

Alternative certification programs vary in terms of infrastructure, instructional delivery, and teacher candidates (Rosenberg et al., 2007). We selected Teach for America (TFA) as a case study for this research for several reasons. TFA is one of the largest alternative certification programs for special education: during the 2017 to 2018 school year, there were 6,500 total teachers participating in the program; 1,008 (15.5%) of these were special educators. In all, the program has accumulated over 60,000 alumni since its start in 1989. TFA’s program includes a 5-week summer training before trainees’ first year of teaching, ongoing professional development workshops during the year, weekly coaching and observation with a TFA staff member, and email communication from TFA throughout participants’ 2-year commitment in the program.

In a recent qualitative study of five special education teachers at TFA, Thomas (2018a) found that the teachers perceived a lack of explicit support from TFA staff members and insufficient training in special education procedures. Although TFA launched an initiative focused on developing special educators in 2015, participants reported that they received little specialized training, and that the TFA employees who trained them were often from a different state or novice teachers themselves.

Participants

We recruited first and second year, novice special educators through regional TFA e-newsletters and TFA Beta, a LinkedIn-style platform for teachers. Eight teachers were recruited, none of whom had participated in student teaching or worked in a special education classroom before their first year as a full-time special education teacher with TFA. Four teachers identified as male and four identified as female. One was in their first year of teaching and the rest were in their second year. When asked to self-describe their race and ethnicity, five identified as “white,” one as “biracial,” one as “Puerto Rican,” and one as “Latinx.” They taught in public and charter schools in four different states. Table 1 describes participant demographics, and Table 2 describes characteristics of the schools they worked in.

Table 1.

Participant Demographics.

Participant pseudonym	Gender	Race/Ethnicity	Students’ grade levels	Special education setting	Years teaching
Ally	Female	Biracial (White and East Asian)	9th and 10th	Inclusion and self-contained	2
Nick	Male	White	9th to 12th	Inclusion and self-contained	2
James	Male	Puerto Rican	6th to 8th	Inclusion and self-contained	1
Jim	Male	White	9th	Inclusion	2
Julian	Male	Latinx	9th to 12th	Inclusion and self-contained	2
Abigail	Female	White	6th to 8th	Self-contained	2
Izzy	Female	White	9th to 12th	Inclusion and self-contained	2
Bailey	Female	White	Kindergarten to 2nd	Self-contained	2

Table 2.

School Contexts.

Participant pseudonym	Geographical location	School size	% of White students; % of students of color	% of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch	% of students receiving special education services
Ally	MA	1,500	15 White; 85 students of color	75	25
Nick	NY	450	0 White; 100 students of color	85	15
James	CA	800	5 White; 95 students of color	80	10
Jim	IL	600	0 White; 100 students of color	95	25
Julian	IL	500	0 White; 100 students of color	95	20
Abigail	IL	500	0 White; 100 students of color	90	20
Izzy	IL	750	0 White; 100 students of color	95	10
Bailey	OH	300	30 White; 70 students of color	100	20

Note. To protect privacy, school sizes were rounded to the nearest 50 and percentages were rounded to the nearest 5%. Citations are omitted to protect privacy, but all information was gathered from public information.

Data Collection and Analysis

To understand how novice teachers perceive and navigate the emotional demands of their work, the first author conducted 1-hour semi-structured phone interviews with each teacher. The interview protocol is attached as an appendix. We then sent follow-up emails to collect additional demographic information which was not clear from interviews. At the beginning of each interview, the first author built rapport by disclosing that she had participated in an alternative special education teacher training program herself and had experienced a range of intense emotions during her first few years of teaching. She explained that our purpose was to document and better understand the emotional work of teachers.

We asked all participants to select a pseudonym and applied these to the interview transcriptions. Although some (e.g., Jim and James) selected similar and potentially confusing names, we chose to use their first choice to retain their voice in the analysis. We then analyzed the transcripts using both inductive and deductive coding cycles (Saldaña, 2015).

First, we read through the transcripts multiple times to familiarize ourselves with the data, writing memos about themes that we were noticing. As we read through the transcripts, we used NVivo software to categorize relevant data into four broad categories as follows: descriptions of emotions experienced; reasons for experiencing/regulating emotions; experiences of managing emotions; and barriers to meeting emotional demands. These codes came from the conceptual framework of emotional job demands described above. Our initial codebook is presented in Table 3.

Table 3.

Initial Deductive Codebook.

Code	Definition
Descriptions of emotions experienced	Descriptions of their affective responses to particular experiences in their professional lives
Experiences of managing one’s own emotions	Descriptions of the triggers or circumstances of their affective responses and their expressive responses
Experiences of supporting others’ emotions	Descriptions of affective work to facilitate students’ emotional well-being and development
Barriers to meeting emotional demands	Descriptions of barriers participants experienced when experiencing, managing, or supporting emotions

After aggregating all responses relating to a particular aspect of emotional demands, we then created and explored subthemes for each set of data and coded according to these categories. For example, under descriptions of emotions experienced, we used the thematic subcodes of positive emotions and negative emotions.

Trustworthiness

Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2012), we aimed to draw meaning from data by identifying what is common across participants’ experiences (Braun & Clark, 2012). We therefore used a variety of methods to establish the trustworthiness and credibility of this analysis (Brantlinger et al., 2005). We solicited feedback and clarifying questions from education faculty and doctoral students at an informal colloquium in which the first author presented preliminary findings, and incorporated feedback into subsequent analytical decisions. We included thick descriptions to accurately represent the experiences of the participants. We offered all eight participants the opportunity to review the manuscript and offer feedback through member checks. One participant provided important clarification regarding the terms she had originally used to describe her emotions, asking that another term be substituted that she felt was more accurate, and providing additional important context for one of the anecdotes she had shared in her original interview. The rest of the participants did not request any specific changes.

We acknowledge our own role as researchers within this constructive analytical process. We recognize that intersectional aspects of our identities, as white female researchers and former special education teachers, impact the way participants responded to us, the biases and lenses we used to interpret data, and the conclusions we draw from it. While our own experiences supported us in better understanding participants’ explanations of their work, we also endeavored to set aside our preconceived notions to focus on our participants’ lived experiences. For example, the first author shared her assumption that most participants would describe interpretations of student behavior as one of the most emotionally salient aspects of the profession, and was surprised to find that many of the participants described students’ academic achievement as an equally, if not more, emotionally salient aspect of their work. The semi-structured nature of the interviews allowed the first author to adjust her questioning to clarify aspects of these teachers’ experiences which were different from her own. In addition, to ensure we were representing their experiences authentically, we sought disconfirming evidence any time our analysis indicated that the participants’ perspectives aligned with our own assumptions and prior experiences.

Findings

Emotional Job Demands

Alternatively certified novices reported complex emotional job demands specific to their roles as special education teachers. Evidence of these job demands is presented below, organized in accordance with the three components of Tuxford and Bradley’s (2015) model of emotional job demands: exposure to emotionally intense situations, emotional labor, and giving emotional support. We then describe participants’ perceived barriers to meeting emotional job demands, which include a lack of administrative or collegial support, resources, and explicit training.

Exposure to emotionally intense situations

Special educators described their professional experiences as emotionally intense. When asked to describe the most salient emotions associated with their work, teachers often described their emotions as wavering between, as Bailey put it, “two extremes of emotions,” such that they were exposed to intense positive and negative emotional experiences on a regular basis. Izzy explained, “Our emotions are . . . up and down, like on a roller coaster.”

Intense, positive emotions teachers reported experiencing as part of their professional work included happiness, pride, gratification, affection, care, love, inspiration, and joy. They found their students’ attitudes and perseverance in the face of academic and social difficulties inspiring. Jim explained, “On good days . . . I feel joy . . . working with the people I’m working with and . . . the students.” Julian stated, “Joy is probably the number one emotion that I experience as a teacher . . . I think that the thing that teachers have that other professions don’t [have] is . . . built in comedians entertaining us throughout our entire day.” Izzy described being “happy to be surrounded with . . . children who . . . bring me joy . . . they inspire me with their ability to . . . laugh and . . . continue on and show up to school every day.”

Teachers described various triggers for these strong positive emotions. They linked these positive emotions to student growth, student personalities, and relationship building with students. In light of their students’ significant needs, the teachers frequently sought opportunities to celebrate their students’ successes, even if they were “small” compared with those of their peers. For example, Bailey described “jumping up and down . . . just elated” when one of her students put his iPad away without prompting. Often, the resilience and perseverance of their students evoked intense, positive emotions.

Despite these positive emotions, however, teachers also described how their jobs frequently evoked intense negative emotions, including sadness, despair, frustration, and shame. Because their students had exceptional behavioral and academic challenges, special educators found themselves frequently exposed to emotionally intense interactions. These interactions often triggered negative emotions for novice teachers, which they associated not with student deficits but with deficits in themselves. For example, Ally explained,

The frustrating thing to me, and the thing that . . . just absolutely breaks me down, is when I see the kids starting to get emotionally dysregulated or starting to flip out, or starting to fight with each other, because they’re confused and they don’t know what to do . . . they wanted help and they wanted to feel successful, but they were not receptive or I wasn’t communicating in the right way, so basically it was just . . . this big chaos of escalating frustration on both sides.

Bailey recalled,

I was sitting on the floor with [a student] trying to de-escalate, and he dug into my wrist and it hurt really bad and it’s so frustrating cause I was failing at deescalating and I hate that . . . sometimes I just am lost, I just have no idea what to do sometimes.

Similarly, teachers experienced intense negative emotions when they felt they were inadequate to help students overcome academic challenges. Jim explained that at times his sense of “despair and the [feeling of] ineffectiveness” arose from his experience of being a ninth-grade math teacher of students with second to fifth grade levels of understanding. He described, “that hits you harder than any kind of behavior.”

Julian also experienced intense negative emotions as a result of his sense of incompetency in addressing his students’ academic needs. He explained,

You think to yourself, there’s no other way I can explain this, or there’s no way I can make this simpler, and [I] just don’t understand why a student, a group of students, a whole class, is just not understanding . . . I don’t know what I’m missing, and that can be very frustrating . . . I think I experience that on a daily basis as well.

The teachers described emotional reflections regarding their decisions during intense interactions. Izzy described experiencing “a burden of [wondering] what could I have done better.” Bailey added, “there’s also such a compilation of traumatic memories that even happened in the classroom because I couldn’t stop them, and I don’t know, you never feel like you’re good enough.” Even when teachers were successful at instructing students with disabilities, it was hard for them to feel successful. James described how, after his supervisor showed him his students’ standardized test results, which demonstrated extensive academic growth, he still felt inadequate. He explained,

In that moment I didn’t get excited; I didn’t see the joy; I kind of was just frozen . . . it . . . made me think in that moment, “Wow this is really trying to get to me, I can’t even treasure the little victories,” I think I’m so caught up in this idea . . . yes, my students have grown but my expectations for them are really high . . . I feel as though even though they’ve grown, they’re not where they could or should be . . . it’s hard for me sometimes to revel in those moments that are supposed to be little golden nuggets, little victories.

Engaging in emotional labor

The second component of emotional job demands described by the participants was the requirement to regulate emotional displays to meet professional norms. Despite the intensity of the emotions they experienced, novice special education teachers believed that not all of their emotions could be displayed in professional settings. In response, all the teachers in the sample described manipulating their emotional displays to serve professional purposes—both when interacting with adults and with students.

Adult-facing emotional labor

Like most professionals, special educators in this sample wanted to demonstrate competency in their roles, despite being novices and having minimal training. Many demonstrated a belief that it was unprofessional to display emotions signifying weakness or incompetency. Nick explained that although intense emotions experienced in school are “very natural emotions that come up in your everyday life outside of school . . . in the classroom . . . you definitely have to subdue those, for . . .people observing your classroom.” Jim added,

I try not to give off the vibe that I’m not doing a good job . . . because I don’t think that’s very healthy in, you know a professional environment . . . Being radically candid with people is really difficult . . . so I think that restricts how I’m able to express my emotions.

This emotional demand was intensified by participants’ roles as special educators. Teachers reported that general education colleagues did not always understand their roles or appreciate the effort it took to meet students’ needs. For example, Izzy explained,

When you’re in a co-taught position, it’s . . . one teach one assist unless you have an amazing model . . . [and] in our school that model isn’t mastered, so it’s more at the one teach one assist . . . sometimes I fear that my gen ed [sic] teachers think that I’m not doing enough . . . I feel often times misunderstood by my colleagues as a special education teacher.

Many of the novice teachers felt the emotional burden of a lack of shared responsibility for their students. For example, Julian described his frustration with the lack of understanding regarding the capabilities of students with disabilities,

There’s a culture of . . . “I don’t know what an IEP is, I’m not a sped teacher so I’m not going to worry about it, I’m just going to I don’t know make sure that the kid passes”. . . if there’s anything that’s wrong with . . . student work or if there’s a behavior, [they assume] it’s because they have a learning disability . . . or emotional disability . . . teachers know that they don’t fully understand or aren’t fully aware or capable of teaching the diverse learner students but they . . . push that to my side. . . their deficit based thinking [is] that “Because they have IEP’s, I have to dumb it down for them to make them pass my class.”

Student-facing emotional labor

Teachers also experienced the emotional job demand of constantly regulating the extent to which they expressed genuine emotions to students. Although these teachers expressed a range of beliefs regarding the extent to which teachers should express emotions at all, teachers across the sample expressed a belief that intense negative emotions should be displayed infrequently. Some respondents directly named emotions that they believed were inappropriate to display at school, including anger, frustration, and irritation. Jim stated, “In the classroom obviously I’m never going to be expressive with my emotions” and explained that he was taught to deliver consequences, “without any sort of emotion . . . very neutral, it’s just you don’t want to upset you know the kids . . . or let yourself get upset about it.” Abigail agreed, saying,

If I were having a really bad day I probably . . . try not to let that be super evident . . . if I feel really angry or frustrated I’m not going to display those emotions if possible because I just don’t think that’s appropriate.

Others, however, felt that some negative emotion could be displayed, but that it must be displayed in an appropriate way. For example, Bailey described announcing to her students when she was frustrated and verbalizing the strategies she would use to help herself calm down, so that students could learn from her. Although teachers shared that they were not always able to regulate their emotions in the moment, they had clear conceptions of what emotions they should not display. Ally described reflecting after some lessons that she was “a little harsher than I should have been” and recalled hearing other teachers at her school regret or feel guilty about speaking harshly to students.

Teachers described expending great emotional energy to foster their students’ success, sometimes accentuating their emotions to demonstrate care for students and respond to various and simultaneous emotional situations in the classroom. Bailey stated,

I do sometimes intentionally put on my happy face when it needs to be there even though I’m not feeling it in the moment because the kids need a lot of positive reinforcement . . . I could have two students fighting in the corner while my other one’s making a huge breakthrough on the other side of the room and I have to switch back and forth constantly between . . . having my serious face for those kids who need it and then having my happy face for that kid who just did something he’s been trying to do for forever.

At other times, teachers demonstrated care by strategically hiding their emotions to shield students from them. They felt that their emotions could potentially harm their students, or that they did not have a right to experience negative emotions, considering their relative position of privilege as a working professional. Ally explained,

No student has ever said this to me, but in the back of my head I’m always thinking: Why should they care about your problems, or feel empathy that your life is hard right now when they have it so much harder?

Nick described subduing annoyance and frustration in class because he recognized that these feelings usually arose from his own feelings of incompetence. In addition, he felt that students might perceive his annoyance as hesitation to help them or that they were beyond help.

Giving emotional support

Finally, novice special educators described the emotional job demand of giving emotional support. Part of nurturing their students’ emotional well-being was advocating for the support and opportunities their students needed to be successful.

For many of their students with disabilities, school was not necessarily a place associated with positive emotions or success, so teachers put in additional emotional work to demonstrate care to the students. Ally explained her work to reappraise student behavior,

Students don’t expect teachers to have faith in them, because there’s been such high turnover, and they don’t expect teachers to be like, real, and generous or kind with them when they’re misbehaving and so a lot of them the reason that they misbehave is because they know that that’s their escape, cause they can just frustrate the teacher and the teacher will give up and then they won’t be held accountable for any academic standards, or behavioral standards, because the teacher will just chalk it up to like, oh well that kid’s a mess.

James also discussed reappraising student behavior, explaining,

If a kid is frequently displaying challenging behavior . . . we don’t say “that’s a bad kid”. . . we also . . . know that certain kids just need a lot more . . . it’s a matter of finding out what it is that they need and can we deliver.

Often teachers had to advocate for disability-informed approaches to behavioral challenges when other staff members were not on the same page. For example, Izzy explained,

One of my students who has an IEP just got in school suspension for . . . the second time in eight days, so when I emailed the gym teacher and I said, “I see there’s a recurring issue, can you explain the issue to me”. . . he’ll say . . . “Jonathan doesn’t stay on task, or Jonathan is disruptive, or Jonathan is . . .” then I’ll say, “What are you talking about? These things don’t warrant in-school suspensions, I need more detail.”

Barriers to Meeting Emotional Job Demands

In addition to high levels of emotional demands, novice special educators reported navigating these emotional job demands with limited resources and little explicit guidance or support. In the sections below, we describe the barriers that novice, alternatively certified teachers experienced navigating emotional job demands.

Lack of administrative or collegial support

As participants sought to advocate for the best possible outcomes for their students, they experienced tension and frustration due to other people’s understanding of disabilities. For some teachers, the emotional job demands included working to influence the mindsets of colleagues who did not support or value their students. For example, Bailey described,

A lot of emotion [involving] the other adults, because I do have those students who are ready to be included, but in my district . . . that’s kind of a new thing for them and so I’m still working on breaking down the barriers for my students [since] their least restrictive environment is not [necessarily] my secluded classroom . . . right now people are having differences with me because I’m having my kids in their classrooms.

Others described having to constantly advocate to administrators for their students’ access to opportunities. For example, Julian experienced disappointment because most of the time his students were not included in all-school awards ceremonies because the administration did not understand how to measure their progress. He explained that “[my students are] capable of doing a lot of great things, but they don’t get recognized for it.” He concluded,

I’ve had to fight on so many different ends about . . . so many different things . . . I don’t have the energy to do that when I’m also having to teach, and I also have teacher responsibilities . . . I just constantly feel like I have a lack of support.”

Bailey echoed this frustration. She said,

I’ve just had a conversation with the principal and then it’s supposed to get addressed within the next two weeks and it never gets addressed. And it just . . . never happens and I know that that’s also on my part to follow up with that and keep pressing and be more persistent about it but I mean there’s also so many things that I have on my plate that I don’t know why, I have a hard time making sure that I am persistent about doing some of these things.

Lack of physical resources

Despite their commitment to their students’ emotional well-being, many of the teachers described the challenges of having insufficient physical resources to do their jobs well. These frustrations were shared by their students. When students expressed frustration over the distribution of resources within their schools, the teachers used intentional emotional displays to empathize with the students and acknowledge the injustices. For example, Julian said,

You can only imagine how hard it is to [be] teaching students [without any technology] who are in the twenty-first century with all this technology available . . . they are very aware of the fact that my classroom does not have all the things that it needs to be in functional classroom . . . I definitely display emotions around them, because they’re very honest with me about what they think that they should have, so obviously I reciprocate that—I’m not going to hide my emotions.

Despite their best efforts to nurture their students, a lack of physical resources often became a burden for developing their students’ emotional and academic wellbeing. Julian described his frustration after being “moved into a different [room that] was not a classroom . . . it was the staff lounge.” Similarly, Abigail stated,

About 75% of the time, students who are in [in school suspension] or detention are sharing my room, so it’s very stressful to both me and my students to hear [those other] students making comments or being extremely distracting.

Finally, the teachers described feeling a sense of overwhelm when thinking about inequities within the school system as a whole which particularly impacted their students. James explained that most of his frustration with the system’s injustices, “stems from my interactions with my students . . . and then when I go to other [teachers] at other schools and hear from them their story, some of the stories . . . give me a negative perception of the public or the whole school system in general.”

Ally echoed these feelings,

When you recognize that the system is so broken, I think it can have an even more profound impact in special ed, on your mental health, because, not only is the system broken as a whole, but the system is broken especially for these kids, who have it harder than other people, and it’s been your job, you’ve been tasked, with this . . . immense job, of supporting these kids who are even more vulnerable in an already broken system. And it just feels like you’re up against, such a mountain, that it can just feel like, you are helpless. And there is . . . no hope . . . you don’t really know what to do.

James also spoke of this overwhelmed feeling about his students’ success within the system, stating, “[My students] will have maybe more challenging lives and more challenging career paths . . . so all of that was just weighing on me [last year]. . . it still does now.”

Lack of explicit training

With the exception of Jim, who stated that his school paid for teachers to receive 8-hour-long sessions of free talk therapy, none of the other participants described receiving support from their schools to process the intense emotional aspects of their work. In addition, professional development regarding emotional aspects of teaching was generally absent from these teachers’ induction experience. In fact, Izzy mentioned that even after losing a student to suicide, the school only held two meetings about processing grief, both of which occurred several months after the loss. Abigail, echoing the experiences of many teachers, described frequently receiving messages such as, “Teaching’s so hard, teaching’s so hard, teaching’s so hard, be sure you’re taking care of yourself,” but reflected that even though her school tried to provide self-care opportunities, the things her administration did to “improve our lives, like you know, donuts and . . . going to the escape rooms . . . aren’t necessarily what we need.” Other teachers described administrative efforts which tangentially addressed emotions but were not what teachers actually needed; for example, Bailey reported having to take a survey during a professional development session at her school on student trauma during which she was asked to assess her own level of childhood trauma. Yet after staff members reported various childhood traumas, the school did not offer teachers more support for addressing trauma in their lives or that of their students.

Discussion

Each year, approximately one in five special educators enters the classroom without having graduated from a 4-year teacher preparation program. Often, these teachers work in schools with high turnover, filling challenging positions with difficult working conditions. They are met with not only the cognitive and intellectual demands of preparing and delivering lessons, but also the emotional demands of responding to intense emotions, regulating emotional displays, and giving emotional support (Tuxford & Bradley, 2015). Despite the potentially significant implications for thousands of students with disabilities, no previous studies have documented novice, alternatively certified special educators’ emotional experiences of their work. In particular, there is almost no research examining the experiences of the over 1,000 teachers from TFA who serve students with disabilities each year. In examining the ways in which the special education teachers in TFA experience induction into the emotional demands of teaching, two key contributions emerge. First, we find that the emotional job demands of novice educators are significant and warrant increased attention from teacher preparation programs and induction programs. Second, we find that teachers are experiencing an imbalance between these demands and the resources they have to meet them.

The eight novice teachers in this study all clearly communicated the power of emotions in their daily work as teachers, experiencing both intense positive and negative emotions on a regular basis. Often, teachers did not associate maladaptive student behavior or lack of academic achievement with the particular student, but with deficiencies within themselves, leading to feelings of shame, guilt, and frustration. As new teachers, they reported feeling overwhelmed by insecurities about whether they were handling behavioral and academic situations appropriately or feeling unsure how to respond to or address them at all.

The teachers all described regulating their displays of emotions, while also perceiving a range of norms regarding the professional display of emotions within their schools. In interactions with adults in the building, some teachers demonstrated a need to appear professional at all times, while other teachers were able to more openly express their emotions with other teachers and administrators. In interactions with students, teachers engaged in the emotional labor of regulating their emotions to meet student needs. Although they were asked whether they ever felt the need to express their emotions in particular ways due to differences between themselves and their students, none described specific ways in which aspects of their identity or that of their students influenced their emotional displays in the classroom. Finally, the teachers also engaged in work to support others’ emotions. They took it upon themselves to advocate for their students when others misunderstood them, and they worked hard to make sure the way they were communicating their own emotions to students was supportive and affirming.

Despite these high emotional demands, the participants described significant barriers to fulfilling them: a lack of administrative or collegial support, physical resources, and explicit training. The participants in our study experienced an imbalance between these demands and the resources they had to meet them. Many of these teachers were hired to fill shortages in schools with high turnover where administrators struggled to recruit teachers. Yet, the teachers were positioned for failure to the extent to which the demands of their jobs exceeded the resources accessible for meeting them. This imbalance between demands and resources suggests that many of these teachers are at risk of burnout (Demerouti et al., 2001), continuing patterns of turnover within their schools. While our purpose in this research is not to predict the retention or attrition of this teacher sample, we note that without increased access to resources, these teachers are likely to be a part of the vicious cycle of special education teacher attrition. In the sections that follow, we describe implications of these two findings for teacher educators, school administrators, and researchers.

Implications for Teacher Educators

Despite the increasing attention paid to student social emotional learning (Taylor et al., 2017), teachers’ own emotional experiences and needs are rarely acknowledged (Caringi et al., 2015), even in traditional teacher preparation programs and licensure systems (Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 2013). Yet, teachers’ ability to regulate and navigate the emotional demands of their work has significant implications for both teachers and students.

Although it may be impossible to devote an entire course to this aspect of teachers’ work, instructors in traditional educator training programs should incorporate more discussion of the emotional demands of teaching into existing coursework and supervision meetings. They may consider providing coursework which helps teachers understand the psychology of emotions or incorporate reflection on teacher candidates’ emotional experiences during practicum or internship supervision experiences.

For alternatively certified teachers, it is imperative that programs also incorporate discussion of the emotional demands of teaching into training and supervision activities. Teachers must develop the awareness that they will need to learn the emotional rules of their schools over time and actively develop a toolkit of emotional regulation strategies. For alternative certification programs, this may involve reconsidering aspects of their mission. For example, TFA has recently rebranded itself as a leadership development program, encouraging its participants to see themselves as leaders in schools. This may be dangerous to the extent that leadership within a school assumes a level of competency which novices cannot possibly demonstrate without continued training and experience. Emotional management skills are learned over time, just like other aspects of the job, such as writing IEPs or assessing students. Novice teachers cannot be expected to learn these skills implicitly or overnight, nor to lead others in their school from their first years in the classroom.

Implications for Administrators

Just as novice teachers are socialized into the politics of their schools and districts, participation in school routines and practices, and new responsibilities (Billingsley et al., 2009), they are also socialized into the emotional norms of their schools. When they enter schools, novice teachers are socialized both by the words and actions of their colleagues, as well as the overall culture of the school in which they work (Billingsley et al., 2009).

Therefore, school administrators should pay attention to who novices are learning from within their schools and assign them a qualified mentor whenever possible (Griffin, 2010). Social resources are crucial for navigating emotional job demands. Administrators should ensure that novice teachers have access to a mentor with whom they feel comfortable and who has special education experience. In addition, as novice teachers often rely on mentors and coaches in developing their professional identities, it is important for school leaders to consider the language that these formal or informal coaches are using when discussing emotions with new teachers in the building. Current research does not provide a sufficient research base to know what type of supervisor language is most useful for induction into emotional norms, or whether making professional display rules explicit could benefit teachers. At the very least, however, administrators and coaches can support teachers by challenging their thinking when teachers are taking on an emotional burden for things outside of their control, and acknowledging the complex emotions that teachers are likely experiencing. Finally, to ensure that all teachers have the resources needed to meet emotional demands, school administrators should facilitate school-wide professional development/conversations on emotions and consider the ways in which norms regarding emotions are being made explicit within their schools, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Finally, without large-scale, systemic changes to the ways in which schools are funded and organized, special educators will not have the resources their students need to make academic progress. We urge leaders at all levels to ensure that special educators have access to equitable resources and be seen as equal contributors alongside their general education counterparts.

Implications for Researchers

This study serves as a pilot investigation of aspects of teachers’ lives which are largely undocumented, namely, novices’ induction into professional emotions. Although we hope to generate more interest in this subject and begin to generate theory, we recognize that this study explores one aspect of teacher emotions and represents the emotional experiences of a particular set of teachers.

Future research should explore how each of the emotional demands and barriers identified in this study are impacted by aspects of teachers’ identities. Researchers have found that teachers of minoritized sexual (Neary et al., 2016) and racial (Evans & Moore, 2015) identities often experience additional emotional burdens beyond those of teachers belonging to the majority identity. Researchers have also found that White pre-service teachers experience particular emotions when confronting their privilege and identity in the classroom (Adair, 2008). Because we did not explicitly ask questions about the relationship between teachers’ gender identity, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity and their experiences of emotions in schools, data on these aspects of teachers’ emotional experiences were limited. Future research should explore the complex intersection of identity and emotional experiences for teachers.

Future research should also address the ways in which contextual factors influence the emotional job demands teachers experience. The present study is limited by the fact that we only interviewed one teacher within each school context. Future studies should include interview data from multiple teachers within a single school, to ascertain the extent to which emotional job demands are unique to a particular identity or role within a school. The present study could be expanded by addressing similar questions with a larger sample to uncover patterns across a greater variety of settings and participants, or by using longitudinal data collection to understand changes in teachers’ experiences over time.

Conclusion

Along with the physical and cognitive demands of their work, special educators experience a high level of emotional job demands. If researchers and school administrators are to pilot effective interventions for helping teachers navigate their emotional experiences, sufficient evidence is needed to document the nature of emotional job demands and the barriers teachers face to navigating them. For novice teachers, these emotional job demands can feel overwhelming, particularly when they do not have the resources they need to navigate them effectively. If novices are to persist within the profession of special education, it is crucial that they are trained to navigate this complex emotional landscape.

Given the current shortages of traditionally trained teachers, it is likely that districts will continue to rely on alternatively certified novice special educators. Regardless of one’s political stance toward alternative certification, the reality is that a significant number of students with disabilities are being taught by alternatively certified teachers each year. For these students to receive the instruction they need, the unique emotional job demands of alternatively certified teachers must be carefully investigated and understood. In addition, the associated resources to meet these emotional job demands must be provided. We encourage teacher educators, administrators, and researchers to continue to support novice teachers in the complex process of emotional induction.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kristabel Stark

Author Biographies

Kristabel Stark is a doctoral student at Boston University. Her research interests include measuring and understanding the conditions that shape teachers’ instruction and commitment, including both environmental factors and teachers’ affective responses to these conditions.

Jessica Koslouski is a doctoral candidate at Boston University. Her research interests include understanding effective supports to buffer against secondary traumatic stress and burnout, trauma-informed teaching and schools, and educators’ emotional experiences.

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