The role of passion for teaching in intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes.

The purpose of this study was to determine the role of passion in teachers’ burnout symptoms, work , and perceptions of positive student classroom behaviors. The dualistic model of passion (Vallerand et al., 2003) proposes 2 types of passion: harmonious and obsessive. In previous studies, passion has been shown to lead to adaptive outcomes (e.g., well-being and satisfaction), obsessive passion has been shown to lead to less adaptive outcomes (e.g., shame and negative ). In this study, 494 teachers completed measures of passion for teaching and various outcomes with the teaching profession twice over a 3-month period. Results of a cross-lag model based structural equation modeling revealed that increases in harmonious passion for teaching predicted in work satisfaction and decreases in burnout symptoms over time, while changes in obsessive were unrelated to such outcomes. In addition, increases in both harmonious and obsessive predicted increases in teacher-perceived adaptive student behaviors over time. Overall, the results the present study suggest that passion for teaching is an important concept to consider in education.