Leading with teacher emotions: Establishing a school well-being cascade

As one of the crucial essences of teacher wellbeing, teacher emotions have been strongly advocated to school leaders by Leithwood and Beatty (2008) back 12 years ago. However, it has not been given sufficient attention until the last recent couple of years. It is welldocumented that teaching is a high-risk profession worldwide (Capone and Petrillo, 2020). Emotions hover like a shadow over the lives and work of teachers which inevitably destruct their well-being, teaching quality and effectiveness (Chen, 2020a). At other times, teacher emotions are highly restrained and influenced by collegial competition, standardised performativity, increasing accountability, and instant appraisal (Acton and Glasgow, 2015). For example, Naring, Vlerick, and Van de Ven (2011) warned that "the work of teachers is being evaluated in more and more detail and this has also led to an increase in the emotional demands of teaching" (p. 12). Whilst in the 'undeniable chaos' defined by Hargreaves and Fullan (2020), the pandemic of COVID-19 has dramatically changed and disrupted teacher professional life, such as dealing with new teaching mode, new technologies, unpredicted uncertainties, and new demands in isolation (Hattie, 2020). Copyright © 2021 Australian Council for Educational Leaders.