This study examines how novice teachers engage with the emotion of anger in their professional work. We generated 155 Chinese teachers’ written reflections on how they felt, expressed, and regulated anger. The study revealed three findings: 1) the primary sources of the teachers’ anger were related to students; 2) the majority of teachers tended to express anger destructively; 3) some teachers lacked emotional competence to regulate anger. The intensifying emotional labour in the teaching profession, the professional prematurity of novice teachers, and the stringent emotional rules in Chinese schools jointly contributed to the identified patterns. This study generates new insights into novice teachers’ anger-related experiences, highlights the socio-cultural dimension of teacher anger, and suggests practical implications for supporting teachers in making sense of and acting on anger more consciously and effectively.

The social and emotional competence of adolescents serves as the cornerstone for their success and future development. This study aims to explore the impact of distributed leadership on the social and emotional competence of adolescents, examining the mediating roles of student-centered teaching practices and teacher self-efficacy. Utilizing survey data from 7246 Chinese adolescents in the SESS project, the study employs a multi-level structural equation modeling approach for data analysis. The results indicate that distributed leadership positively predicts the social and emotional competence of adolescents. Furthermore, distributed leadership exerts indirect effects on adolescents’ social and emotional competence through the independent mediating roles of student-centered teaching practices and teacher self-efficacy, as well as a sequential mediation process involving student-centered teaching practices leading to teacher self-efficacy. This study elucidates how distributed leadership facilitates the development of adolescents’ social and emotional competence, confirming the supportive factors influencing these crucial capacities. Simultaneously, it provides valuable insights into the daily practices of teachers, principals, and administrators.

This brief report describes an investigation into the motivational changes of two school counselling teachers in two rural schools in the Chinese context. The findings revealed the mixed motivations of the participants in joining school counselling and how their motivations transformed through their professional engagement and social interactions in specific institutional and socio-cultural settings. The study concludes with some implications for teacher development and points out directions for continuing research.

Employing ‘identity’ as an analytical lens, this study examined a group of novice school counselling teachers’ (SCTs) professional identities in the Chinese context. Informed by a multiple, integrated theoretical perspective focusing on the cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of teacher identities, the findings reveal five types of metaphors (i.e. cognitive, social, cognitive-emotional, social-emotional and cognitive-social-emotional) that reflect the novice SCTs’ most prominent identities in their embedded institutional and social contexts. The study contributes to our understanding of SCTs’ professional experiences and identity construction mediated by a range of personal (e.g. limited professional competence) and contextual factors (e.g. a lack of school support and social bias against psychological counselling). It also provides useful implications on how to promote and sustain new teachers’ continuing identity development in complex school settings.