Emotion Teacher Teacher-child Interaction

With the rapid development of early childhood education and expanding of its teacher staff, research in childhood education teachers becomes an important subject in pre-primary education research areas. Teacher emotions, as an important power in the growth of children and teachers, provide a significant perspective to examine teachers’ professional practice. Recently years, scholars did many researches about teacher’s emotional health, emotional regulation and emotional intelligence from the individual perspective. However, emotion as one of the products of the interaction of individual and external environment is fundamentally relational existence. Investigating teacher emotion from the view of teacher-child interaction can help us describe the actual performance of teacher emotion in natural contexts and understand the functions of teacher emotion in early childhood education. Based on the social interaction perspective, this study focuses on the performance of teacher’s emotion expression and gives focal analysis to the types, performances, processes and functions of teacher emotion, and then explores the strategies of improving teacher mental health and emotional performance.This study adopted qualitative research design. The researcher selected three classes of a kindergarten in Nanjing, observed the emotional performance of the six teachers from September to December, and conducted interviews with some of these teachers. Based on the sorting, coding and analysis of236teacher-child interaction cases with obvious emotional characteristics of the teacher and interview materials, the researcher developed the basic framework of the paper.The results show that early childhood teachers express various positive and negative emotions, with negative emotions prevailing. The average frequency of teacher’s negative emotions increased from junior class to senior class. The frequency of teacher’s negative emotions is highest in teaching activities and transitional activities, while positive emotions frequency is highest in teaching activities. Teacher emotions mainly results from the children behaviors in teacher-child interaction, while the positive emotions derive from "children behaviors that meet teacher’s expectation" and negative emotions come from "children behaviors that affect class order". The appearance of different kinds of teacher emotions involves many factors. The positive emotions derive from the realization or close to realization of teachers’ goals, satisfaction of teachers’ need and the fluency interaction process. The reasons of negative emotions includes high expectance of teachers towards children, the influence of teachers’ personality trait, the lack of teachers’ conducting experience and skills, teachers’ misunderstanding of the reason for children behavior and teachers’ need to show their own authority. Teacher emotions presents4types of "transform and adjust","terminate and avoid","upgrade and conflict" and "continue and spread", among which "transform and adjust" is the main type. From the perspective of "Social Dramatic Theory", teacher emotion plays an important part in teachers’"personal front desk", besides, it is prominent strategy for teacher construction and adjustment and is an important way that influences children’s definition of the situation, and has various affects in kindergarten’s educating and teaching activities. The positive functions of teachers’ emotions involved with promoting children’s emotional socialization, improving educating and teaching efficiency, maintaining the safety and order of class and consolidating the teacher-child relationship. And the negative functions of teachers’emotions not only includes the negative influence over children’s self-determination, social behavior ability and the whole physical and mental health, but also the harm to teachers’ physical and mental health. The research suggests that the joint effort of all parties of the society is needed to maintain the pre-school teachers’ emotional health and better teachers’ performance in teacher-child interaction.