Profiling Language Teachers’ Implicit Theories of the Future: Future Mindsets as Predictors of Language Teachers’ Emotions

Abstract

This study explored language teachers’ beliefs about the malleability of their futures and their relationship with their teaching emotions of enjoyment, anger and anxiety. Drawing on Dweck’s mindset theory, the present study introduced the concept of future mindsets and explored whether teachers’ beliefs about the changeability of their futures could predict their emotions of enjoyment, anger, and anxiety. The data were collected from 300 Iranian language teachers using the Teachers’ Future Mindset Scale (Dweck, 2006) and the Teacher Emotions Scale (Frenzel et al., 2016). Latent profile analysis showed three distinct profiles of future mindsets: growth-oriented, mixed, and fixed-oriented. The of the study also showed that age and gender did not significantly predict profile membership, but future mindset profiles significantly predicted emotional outcomes. The results also showed that teachers with growth-oriented future mindsets reported higher enjoyment and lower levels of anger and anxiety. These findings suggest that promoting growth-oriented future mindsets can increase teachers’ emotions and emotional experiences in educational contexts.

 

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Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank all of the teachers who participated in the study.

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interests.

Funding: The authors received no fund for doing the study.

Data Avalability: The data are available upon request sent to the corresponding author.

Ethical Statement:  All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent: Informed consent was obtained from the participants prior to the study.

Generative AI Use: The author did not use generative AI at any stage of the study.

Author Contribution: Alireza Mohammadzadeh Mohammadabadi: Conceptualization, Writing , Data collection, Data analysis, Results, Resources.