Values in Teaching Practices: A Tentative Model

Student teachers may not realize what values they bring to their teaching practices and the potential differences between these values and the values advocated in their teacher education programs. Such differences might be experienced by student teachers in Asian countries, such as China, confronting the disparities between the imported Western constructive teaching approaches and the still accepted traditional teaching values. Such differences may elicit negative emotions in student teachers and thus hinder their professional development. Therefore, it is essential to support student teachers in understanding their values by making these explicit based on their teaching practices. In the current study, we conducted stimulated recall interviews to explore how eight Chinese student teachers enacted values by investigating the emotion, cognition, and follow-up behavior in their emotional incidents in classes. The results showed that the values of the student teachers were associated with their choice of emotional incidents, the emotions they experienced during the incidents, and their follow-up behavior. A tentative model was proposed to describe the associations in teaching practices. The tentative model could allow student teachers and teacher educators to trace the roots of student teachers’ emotions in teaching and understand their thinking and behavior in teaching.