Experts have sought ways to explore emotional aspects of teachers’ professional identities. Through a mixed method design, this study investigated teachers’ professional identities through one component of teaching—emotional labor, or the way in which employees display or conceal their emotions to achieve workplace goals. 468 K-12 teachers in 22 U.S. schools completed The Emotional Labor of Teaching Scale and described their surface acting, deep acting, and perceived emotional display rules through open-ended questioning. Findings revealed that 100% of participants engaged in emotional labor. Second, schools rarely communicated emotional display rules explicitly. Finally, when teachers’ feelings conflicted with their image of the ideal teacher, participants admitted “playing the role” by pretending to be warm and caring teachers. Implications are relevant for teacher preparation, supervision, enrichment, and retention.
Brown et al. (2014) studied this question.