It’s all show? Lesson profiles In experienced and displayed teacher enthusiasm

During the last decade, teacher enthusiasm has re-emerged in educational research, albeit with two conceptualizations now being considered: Experienced enthusiasm as teaching-related enjoyment, and displayed enthusiasm as enthusiastic teaching behavior. Both conceptualizations are not integrated, yet could potentially complement each other. Coming from a largely exploratory angle and utilizing a diary approach, the present study aimed to identify lesson profiles of these two enthusiasm components, and investigates whether differences in students’ outcomes (interest, boredom, attention, and loss of control) are due to lesson profiles. Findings imply that the two enthusiasm components, although moderately related on the lesson level (r = .29), do not always co-occur. Four lesson profiles in teacher enthusiasm were identified with the most prominent (in about 60% of all lessons) being the one where enjoyment and enthusiastic teaching behavior coincide. This profile was found to be superior with regards to students’ learning experiences when compared to the lesson profiles where teachers exhibit high levels of enjoyment but are not perceived as enthusiastic, and the reverse when teachers are perceived as enthusiastic, but do not report high levels of enjoyment. Enjoyment as one enthusiasm component was found to be highly variable within teachers whereas enthusiastic teaching behavior was more stable for teachers. Lesson profiles in teacher enthusiasm exhibited a pattern congruent to both variability and stability within teachers: Some profiles appeared to be more teacher specific, yet in an overall of 39% of all lessons, changes in profiles occurred. The major finding of the present study being that the two enthusiasm components do not always co-occur allows to tackle mechanisms in teacher enthusiasm more specifically in future research which could aim to identify teacher- and situation-specific factors that enable or hinder teachers in transferring their enjoyment into observable behaviors.