To reveal the cultural effect in the job demands-resources model, this study examined how Confucian familism, emotional labor, and work-family conflict (WFC) explain the variance in teachers’ emotional exhaustion, with a focus on the mediating roles of emotional labor and WFC. With a sample of 3,312 teachers in China, the results of this study revealed that surface acting and expression of naturally felt emotion (ENFE) and WFC mediated the relationship between familism and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, familism positively predicted deep acting, ENFE, WFC, and emotional exhaustion, while negatively predicted surface acting. These findings suggest that Confucian familism may play the dual role of motivator and stressor for Chinese teachers’ emotional labor and well-being. This study contributes to the job demands-resources theory by revealing the important role of cultural traditions and provides valuable information for interventions to sustain teacher well-being.

Teaching is an emotion-laden process during which teachers are inevitably confronted with emotional disturbance. This study examines how Chinese EFL teachers transform emotional disturbance into well-being through interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). Previous research has examined teacher emotion regulation at an individual level, yet the interpersonal perspective has not been sufficiently adopted. In order to have an in-depth investigation of teachers’ IER, three Chinese EFL teachers were selected; qualitative data were collected from narrative reflections, interviews, class observation, and field notes. The findings reveal that (1) EFL teachers’ trajectory of IER moves from deconstruction of emotional blocks in companionship and re-construction of emotional strength through trust to co-construction of emotional pedagogy with dialogues; (2) Intrinsic IER of teachers’ own emotion and extrinsic IER of students’ emotion were not separate but dynamically interacted; (3) Effective IER entails the interplay between teachers’ readiness for reflective inquiry and learning peers’ capacity for emotional support; (4) Teachers’ IER is interwoven with ethical development. The study also suggests that effective teacher IER contributes to their professional learning in terms of triggering the revisitation of teaching conceptions and educational beliefs to better serve students’ learning. This study sheds light on the construction of a social support system for the sustainability of teachers’ emotional well-being as well as their professional development.

Despite the clear worldwide school inclusion initiative, translating the widely embraced notions of inclusive education into differentiated teaching practice has been recognized as a common difficulty. Based on replies from 780 educators in inclusive schools in Beijing, China, this study explored how distributed leadership contributes to teachers’ use of differentiated teaching, the mediation role of teacher leadership for inclusion, and teachers’ professional competencies of inclusive education. The results suggest that principals’ distributed leadership directly influences teachers’ employment of differentiated instruction. Teacher leadership for inclusion and professional competencies of inclusive education play a serial mediating role in the relationship between distributed principalship and teachers’ use of differentiated instruction. Implications for implementing inclusive practices were further discussed.

Because the current literature on teachers’ emotion labor (EL) mainly focuses on strategies and how EL correlates with relevant factors in the educational context, EL is generally treated as static and synchronic. The purpose of this study is to explore two veteran English lecturers’ dynamic and diachronic EL development over the span of nearly two decades of their professional careers in China. Based on qualitative data that included multiple interviews, class observations, teacher reflective notes, student feedback, and institutional documents, the 18-month longitudinal study found that (1) veteran college English lecturers have mixed emotions and pervasive EL throughout their professional development experience, (2) the teachers’ EL habitus has been shaped and reshaped by their life history in personal, relational, institutional, and sociohistorical contexts, and (3) their previous EL experiences have influenced their present EL practice, which in turn tends to predict their future EL preferences. In addition, our findings revealed that effective EL effort, especially in the form of actions combined with deep acting and genuine expression, is critical to the virtuous circle of EL and sustainable professional development of college English teachers. By contrast, ineffective EL effort, particularly the long-term surface acting of depressing negative emotions without eradicating the root causes or changing the unfavorable conditions, can impede the long-term sustainability of teacher development. Based on these findings, we conceptualize teachers’ EL as a contextual and dynamic process that takes the form of spiral circles that teachers encounter throughout their professional life. These spiral circles, we add, can be virtuous or vicious in nature, and can thus either facilitate or undermine, respectively, the sustainability of their professional development. Research implications, limitations, and future directions are also discussed.

In response to the need for facilitating the sustainable development of inclusive education, this study conducts a pioneering attempt to analyze the relationship between two types of school leadership, organizational (i.e., distributed leadership, DL) and individual (i.e., teacher leadership, TL), and teacher self-efficacy among inclusive education teachers in Mainland China. A total of 893 teachers from primary inclusive education schools in Beijing and Shenzhen, China, participated in this study. Structural equation modeling examining the direct and mediating effects was conducted on collected data. The findings imply that principal-distributed leadership and inclusive education teacher leadership both positively predicted teacher self-efficacy. Additionally, inclusive education teacher leadership and its two dimensions, namely advocating inclusive values and liaising with an external support system, significantly mediated the influences of distributed leadership on inclusive education teacher self-efficacy. The implications of facilitating inclusive education in Chinese schools and other similar contexts are discussed.

Learning to be a teacher through teaching practicum is viewed as a highly complex process in which multiple dilemmas and tensions emerge. These tensions may influence student teachers’ motivation for teaching. However, previous studies on teacher motivation have mainly focused on social status and welfare, seldom taking their emotion regulation into account. Sampling 752 student teachers from 15 teacher education institutes in China, this study examined the relationships between student teachers’ emotional labor strategies, professional identity tensions, and motivation for teaching during their practicum. The results indicated that emotional labor strategies were found to be important resources for student teachers to cope with the challenges brought by the tensions of professional identities in teaching practicum. In particular, deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotions enhanced student teachers’ intrinsic motivation to become a teacher. The results indicated that student teachers should perform emotional labor strategically, which may motivate them to be a teacher intrinsically.