Student engagement and teacher emotions in student-teacher dyads: The role of teacher involvement

We investigated teacher emotions and individual students' engagement in real-time classrooms and considered the role of teachers’ involvement level. The sample included 20 teachers in Taiwanese public primary schools and four target students for each teacher (80 target students in all). Teachers reported their own emotions and each student's engagement at the end of each lesson for a calendar week (nti = 249). T-tests showed that teacher-student relationships are a reflection of teachers being relatively more involved with students they had both close and conflictual relationships with. For students with whom the teacher was relatively more involved, multilevel structural equation models (MSEM) showed they were more engaged in lessons and had a stronger effect on teachers’ positive and negative emotions. This study expands the understanding of teacher-student dyads in the real-time classroom by demonstrating the effect of individual students' engagement on teachers' positive and negative emotions by taking teachers’ involvement levels into consideration.