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Sociocognitive and neurophysiological contributors to effective secondary teaching

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Sociocognitive and neurophysiological contributors to effective secondary teaching

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Content Copyright 2021 Christina R. Kundrak

SOCIOCOGNITIVE AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTORS TO EFFECTIVE
SECONDARY TEACHING

by

Christina R. Kundrak

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(URBAN EDUCATION POLICY)

AUGUST 2021

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Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, whose expertise
and guidance has been invaluable in molding me as a scholar and thinker. Her bold, visionary
perspective on education and passion for this work inspires me and I admire her fearlessness in
embracing the inherent messiness of interdisciplinary research. For her continued mentorship, I
am immensely grateful.
I would like to thank Dr. Xiao-Fei Yang for her guidance, tremendous patience, and
support. It is rare to find a mentor whose brilliance is only matched by their kindness. I am
indebted to her for the technical skills she taught me, along with her continual reassurance and
optimism.
I am thankful for the support and feedback from my committee members, Drs. Erika
Patall and John Monterosso, who with Dr. Immordino-Yang have provided keen insights to
iteratively improve this dissertation work. I deeply appreciate the faculty and staff within Rossier
and USC who have taught and supported me throughout this program. I consider myself
extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to learn alongside a fantastic cohort of scholars,
who are doing incredible work to transform education.
It is with deep gratitude that I thank my team members, past and present, at the Center for
Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE)—Dr. Rebecca
Gotlieb, Dr. Erik Jahner, Dr. Rodrigo Riveros Miranda, Dakarai McCoy, Ellyn Pueschel, Dr.
Pauline Baniqued, Katrina Hilliard, and Marta Wallien. I am fortunate to have had such a
supportive community of colleagues, scholars, and friends during this Ph.D. journey. They have
contributed to this dissertation in many ways from data collection, qualitative coding, analytical
advising, and manuscript review. Sincere thanks to collaborators Doug Knecht and Jeffrey
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Garrett for their contributions in the development and execution of the broader study and to
Emily Candaux, whose theoretical contributions were integral to the qualitative analysis
presented in this dissertation. I am also thankful for the important work of the CANDLE high
school, undergraduate, and postgraduate research assistants over the years. My work in this
program has been made possible by several grants to Dr. Immordino-Yang and CANDLE so I
am very thankful for the financial support in making this work come to fruition.
The early mentorship and encouragement from my undergraduate professors—Drs. Steve
Rouse, Khanh Bui, Michael Folkerts, and Lisa Bauer—laid the initial groundwork for my
academic journey. Equally formative was my time in the classroom as a high school science
teacher. To my former colleagues and students at Uplift Summit International Preparatory and
support network at Teach for America Dallas-Fort Worth, thank you for sharing the classroom
experiences that shaped my understanding of what adolescents’ deep learning looks like and
sparked my curiosity in the different facets of teaching.
Lastly, I would like to thank my family, and dear friends who are like family, for their
love and unwavering belief in me. Thank you to my parents, who instilled in me a love of
learning and fostered my intellectual tenacity from a young age, and to my stepdad who has been
a model of generosity and wisdom. Many thanks to my brother, Steven, for all the times he
graciously let me play “teacher” growing up. I am incredibly thankful for close friends who have
cheered me on from the sidelines every step of this journey and have reminded me to always
celebrate professional and personal victories. To my husband, Justin, words cannot express how
appreciative I am for your unconditional love, inspiration, and encouragement. You have taught
me to have the courage and confidence necessary to make this accomplishment possible. I am
profoundly grateful to have you on my team and in my corner. As I reflect on this journey, I am
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filled with gratitude to all who have invested in me and believe that together we can build
educational systems that nurture students’ learning, growth, and development.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... ii
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... vii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ viii
Dissertation Abstract ................................................................................................................... ix
General Introduction: Sociocognitive and neurophysiological contributors to effective
secondary teaching ....................................................................................................................... 1

Paper 1: Teachers develop pedagogical orientations that tie their professional vision to
pedagogical practices

Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 10
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 11
Methods ............................................................................................................................ 20
Results .............................................................................................................................. 25
Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 32
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 37

Paper 2: Secondary teachers engage social-affective regions when grading their own
students’ work

Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 38
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 39
Methods ............................................................................................................................ 46
Results .............................................................................................................................. 52
Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 55
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 57

Paper 3: Secondary teachers’ pedagogical practices and teaching-specific heart rate
variability dynamics additively contribute to students’ perceptions of academic support

Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 59
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 60
Methods ............................................................................................................................ 61
Results .............................................................................................................................. 75
Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 78
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 83

General Concluding Remarks ................................................................................................... 84
vi

References ................................................................................................................................... 88
Appendix: Excerpt of interview response and pedagogical orientation analytic memo ...... 127

vii

List of Tables
Table 2-1. Brain regions whose BOLD activity differed significantly between the student and
control conditions ......................................................................................................................... 54
Table 3-1. Fit indices for alternative factor models of student perceptions of academic support
based on modified version of Tripod survey ................................................................................. 71
Table 3-2. Rotated factor loadings of one-factor model of Tripod scale of student perceptions of
academic support after item reduction .......................................................................................... 72
Table 3-3. Regression coefficients from a series of linear multiple regressions modeling student
perceptions of academic support with and without low-frequency (LF) and change in high-
frequency (HF) heart rate variability (HRV) ................................................................................ 77
Table 3-4. Linear multiple regression model of student perceptions of academic support including
heart rate variability (HRV) predictors with 5,000 bootstrapped samples .................................... 78

viii

List of Figures
Figure 1-1. Indirect effect of professional vision on pedagogical practices via pedagogical
orientations ................................................................................................................................... 32
Figure 2-1. The fMRI task design ............................................................................................... 49
Figure 2-2. Brain regions with greater BOLD activity when grading own students’ answers
versus answers not from own students ......................................................................................... 53
Figure 3-1. Scree plot of Eigenvalues of 29-item Tripod survey of student perceptions of
academic support ......................................................................................................................... 70

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Dissertation Abstract
Teaching is deeply social and emotional work that requires teachers to adeptly navigate the
social-emotional landscape of the classroom to promote their students’ deep engagement with
academic material. The skill of teaching is supported by teachers’ internal mental and
physiological processes, yet there is limited knowledge of how teachers engage these underlying
processes to facilitate their students’ learning and growth. I employ an interdisciplinary
biopsychosocial perspective to investigate the sociocognitive and neurophysiological factors
contributing to effective secondary teaching. I utilize data from a currently in-progress mixed-
methods project led by Dr. Immordino-Yang. I contributed significantly to the design and
collection of data. Participants were recruited from Southern California secondary schools that
primarily support low-income youth of color and have been recognized for their commitment to
social-emotional learning. A preliminary sample consisted of 22 teachers identified by their
school leaders as having strong relationships with students and providing social-emotional
support. Teachers were observed while they taught a classroom lesson, engaged in teaching-
related interviews and tasks, and underwent neuroimaging and physiological monitoring. I show
that teachers’ pedagogical orientations (i.e., their teaching-related intentions based on their
identity-based beliefs and values) vary in social-cognitive complexity. These pedagogical
orientations were found to link teachers’ professional vision (i.e., what teachers notice, reason,
and interpret in the classroom) with their observed pedagogical practices (Paper 1). Further
investigating teachers’ mental processes and relations with their neurophysiology, teachers
showed increased activation in brain regions associated with social-affective processing and
attentional regulation when they are grading academic work from their own students in
comparison to equivalent work not from their students (Paper 2). Bridging teachers’ physiology
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with students’ experiences, I found that teachers’ physiological regulatory capacity and
pedagogical practices both uniquely predicted their students’ perceptions of academic support,
when controlling for age (Paper 3). Collectively, these findings offer a preliminary
demonstration of the sociocognitive and neurophysiological processes undergirding teaching.
This dissertation speaks to the essential social-emotional complexity in teachers’ processing and
the explanatory potential of neurophysiological measures in uncovering hidden insights in
students’ and teachers’ experiences in the classroom. Please note: the samples included in these
studies are half of the originally planned size due to disruption in data collection during the
Covid-19 pandemic. Findings should be treated as provisional; the remainder of the data are
planned to be collected in the 2021-2022 school year.

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General Introduction: Sociocognitive and Neurophysiological Contributors to Effective
Secondary Teaching

Across numerous studies of student achievement, teachers have been shown to play a
pivotal role in supporting students’ positive academic and social outcomes (Barnett, 2003;
Darling-Hammond, 2000; Kunter et al., 2013; Rivkin et al., 2005; Sanders & Rivers, 1996). As
the long-lasting impact of secondary educators on their students’ trajectories is well-documented
(Chetty et al., 2014; Clotfelter et al., 2010; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006; National Commission on
Teaching & America’s Future, 1996; Rockoff, 2004), it is imperative that researchers,
practitioners, and policymakers better understand the components of high-quality teaching in
order to identify and support its development. Yet, what counts as high-quality teaching has been
the subject of debate. Is the primary objective for teachers to instruct towards specific content
learning outcomes? Or to socially engage with students and build relationships? Given the
intertwined nature of emotion and cognition (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007), it can be
argued that high-quality teaching is marked by building emotional feeling-states in students
through engaging in deep academic thinking and meaning-making. Understanding the nuances of
the profoundly social and emotional work of teaching can provide insights into how to best
support the process of learning in students.
As noted by Ball and Cohen (1999), teaching occurs in particulars and teachers must be
able to adapt to the ever-shifting student needs, ideas, and dynamics in their classroom. The
classroom’s constant nature of flux highlights the importance of teachers’ social, cultural,
relational, and emotional knowledge, skills, and dispositions that equip them to skillfully adapt to
the particulars of teaching. It is oft ignored that these knowledge-sets, skills, and dispositions are
embedded within sociocultural systems and undergirded by neurobiological mechanisms. The

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processing of affect and emotion within social contexts required for skillful teaching is supported
by internal biological and mental processes. An investigation of these biological corollaries has
the capability to reveal patterns of processing consistent across the most effective teachers.
Students’ social-emotional development has long been a key focus of early childhood and
elementary schooling and thus, teachers’ own social-emotional development of relevant
processing is relatively more integrated into preservice and ongoing trainings for early childhood
and elementary educators. More recently, there has been a renewed focus on adolescence as an
important period of social-emotional growth and development (Immordino-Yang et al., 2019;
Jones & Kahn, 2017). As preparation programs for secondary teachers integrate new advances in
knowledge of adolescents’ social-emotional trajectories, it is essential that they also support
secondary teachers in developing their own social-emotional knowledge and skills. Secondary
teachers are a particularly relevant population of interest given that their professional
development of social, affective, and emotional processing is less well-documented and
adolescence has emerged as a pivotal stage in social-emotional growth.
With the development of social-emotional skills, knowledge, and dispositions as an
emerging focus of teacher preparation programs and on-going professional coaching (Altan &
Lane, 2018; Darling-Hammond & Oakes, 2019; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2017; Villegas, 2007),
this dissertation aims to bridge the basic biological science with pedagogical practices and
students’ perceptions of the learning environment. Integrating qualitative measures of teachers’
pedagogical beliefs with quantitative measures of their observed behaviors, neural activity, and
biological regulation can create a more holistic view of the factors that shape excellent teachers’
capacity to support meaningful learning experiences for students.
How the Neurobiological Science Can Further Our Understanding of Teaching

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It is known that neural processing and developmental experiences shape people’s
capacities to engage (Chan et al., 2018; Diamond, 2010; Farah, 2017; Immordino-Yang, 2015;
Noble et al., 2015). Humans are both incredibly sensitive to social intentions and have an
exquisite sense of others’ physiological capacities, which contribute to the ways they react and
interact (Helm et al., 2014; Lunkenheimer et al., 2015; Saxbe & Repetti, 2009; Swain et al.,
2017). Shifting how they feel and ultimately learn, adolescents are particularly sensitive to these
social cues and they are becoming increasingly attuned to their embodied feeling-states (Li et al.,
2017; Rudolph et al., 2020). At this critical developmental juncture, it is expected that teachers’
own neurobiological capacities and co-regulation impact their support of students’ deep thinking.
Teachers’ beliefs and feelings about education, including their beliefs about their identity,
role as an educator, students, learning, and the educational system as a whole, impact their
decision-making, behaviors, and relationships in the classroom (Devine et al., 2013; Poulou,
2017; Reio, 2005; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966; Stuhlman & Pianta, 2002). Yet, ways of
thinking are not always congruent with one’s ways of acting. It is necessary not only to identify
optimal mindsets or dispositions that support best practices in the classroom, but also to
understand the implicit processes undergirding them. The use of neurobiological measures can
potentially reveal these implicit processes invoked during teaching and teaching-related
behaviors that may be useful in linking teachers’ beliefs and feelings with behaviors. Immordino-
Yang and Gotlieb (2017) note the dynamic interactions of the functioning of the body, embodied
brain, social mind, and the culturally situated process of meaning-making. Disciplinary research
typically focuses on only one of these four levels at a time and in order to build more complete
models of human functioning and understanding of how individuals co-regulate and influence
others’ biopsychosocial development, an interdisciplinary approach is needed.

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The psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying social, affective, and
emotional processing have been extensively investigated in more controlled laboratory
environments and have been related to specific habits or patterns of engagement. By identifying
psychological and neurobiological patterns that are evident during optimal teaching or
educational behaviors using more naturalistic methods, researchers can compare these to known
systematic patterns elicited in more controlled settings. In identifying which patterns seem to be
most crucial for teaching and learning through more naturalistic methods, researchers will gain a
better idea of the types of contexts and engagement that can support their development. Situating
the neuroscience ecologically within the dynamic, context-laden environment of the classroom
reflects how the brain and body support and constrain the beliefs, values, and feelings
contributing to the social-emotional component of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
Research Questions
This dissertation bridges classroom experiences with the insights from the controlled
laboratory environment. It is expected that teachers have different levels of skill in noticing,
reasoning, and interpreting classroom situations (i.e., professional vision) and their identity-
informed teaching approaches and intentions vary in their complexity (i.e., pedagogical
orientation), impacting their classroom practices. Therefore, this dissertation first investigates
how teachers’ professional vision and pedagogical orientations relate to their pedagogical
practices. These sociocognitive factors were hypothesized to be directly related to the teachers’
observed classroom behaviors.
When teachers engage with students’ academic ideas and provide feedback, there is often
a perceived tension between maintaining objectivity when evaluating and attending to the social,
emotional, and relational context of students’ answers. The second investigation of this

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dissertation examined whether the contextualized social relationships with students influence
teachers’ engagement with content-specific material. Neural activation in particular brain
regions of interest related to social-affective processing was predicted to differ when teachers
engaged with their own students’ academic work versus equivalent control answers with which
they did not have a social connection.
Teachers’ relational dynamics with their students influence how students feel supported
and challenged in the classroom and thus, how teachers’ practices effectively translate into
students’ learning and development. As teachers’ physiological regulation is essential to their
social-emotional functioning, their ability to flexibly adapt can be a tool for responding to and
supporting students’ feelings of efficacy, agency, and belonging. The third paper of this
dissertation addresses how teachers’ physiological regulation contributes to students’ feelings of
academic support. In addition to supportive pedagogical practices, the same fundamental
physiological regulatory mechanisms undergirding teachers’ social-emotional wellness and
functioning were predicted to influence students’ perceptions.
Ultimately, these implicit social and emotional patterns of processing may allow the
behaviors, biases, and intentions supporting or hindering the facilitation of the learning process
to be more fully teased apart. High-quality teaching that supports students in agentic deep
thinking can be obvious when done well, but there is value in building a deeper understanding
through parsing its components so teachers can be systematically trained in developing this skill.
Methodology and Design
This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods design utilizing
observational and survey data, neurophysiological data, and qualitative interview data. As part of
a larger research investigation funded by Dr. Immordino-Yang’s Templeton Foundation grant

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(Award #010464-00001), my colleagues and I collected data in both laboratory and classroom
settings to explore the psychosocial and neurophysiological processes undergirding effective
teaching and supporting students’ deep, meaningful learning. Given the disruption to in-person
learning during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a
partial sample of 22 participants was able to be collected for use in this dissertation.
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Participating teachers who were identified by their school administrators as highly effective in
engaging socially with their students were monitored physiologically as they partook in a 45-
minute classroom teaching observation and accompanying on-site pre-briefing and debriefing.
Following the observed lesson, participating teachers engaged in teaching-related interviews and
tasks, neuroimaging, cognitive testing, and physiological monitoring in the laboratory. I
contributed substantially to the design and collection of data.
These diverse methods together characterize the socioemotional, cognitive, and
biological capacities that support teachers in their facilitation of students’ learning. While
classroom practices and pedagogical moves promoting students’ deep thinking have been well-
documented within the educational literature, additional research is necessary to understand the
biopsychosocial mechanisms undergirding these behaviors in order to further support teachers’
development and growth. To do so, this dissertation qualitatively examines teachers’ espoused
pedagogical beliefs and values, quantitatively investigates biophysiological indices related to
social-emotional regulation and processing, and integrates sociocognitive and neurophysiological
factors of teachers’ support of students’ learning.
Overview of Papers

1
Findings in this dissertation should be treated as provisional; the remainder of the data are planned to be collected
in the 2021-2022 school year.

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This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated studies utilizing data from the same
participants, written in the form of separate articles for which I am the lead author. Each paper,
when prepared for publication, will be co-authored with Drs. Xiao-Fei Yang and Mary Helen
Immordino-Yang. The first paper qualitatively develops profiles of teachers’ pedagogical
orientations comprised of their identity-related beliefs, values, and intentions. The social-
cognitive complexity in teachers’ pedagogical orientations was related to both their professional
vision and pedagogical practices, while the two were not found to be directly related to each
other. These pedagogical orientations were found to link teachers’ professional vision—their
pattern of reasoning useful for analyzing and adapting practices in the classroom—with their
pedagogical practices.
The second paper explores the neural mechanisms underlying teachers’ social-affective
processing during the evaluation of students’ academic work. Specifically, the analysis of
teachers’ neural activation when engaging in an authentic grading task facilitates a preliminary
understanding that brain regions involved in social-affective processing are recruited when
teachers evaluate academic work from their own students.
Teachers’ physiology related to social-emotional functioning is further investigated in the
third paper, which explores how patterns of adaptive physiological regulation impact students’
perceptions of support. Teachers’ measures of heart rate variability in teaching-related contexts
were found to relate to students’ perceived academic support, independent of teachers’ observed
pedagogical practices. These findings provide foundational evidence of how teachers’ underlying
neurophysiology can reveal their capacities for supporting students’ deep learning and
developmental growth.
Significance of this Dissertation

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A strength of the proposed studies is the ability to characterize individual psychosocial
and neurophysiological differences in social-emotional processing when engaging in teaching-
related behaviors, including engaging in classroom instruction, analyzing general teaching
practices, discussing their own teaching philosophy, and providing feedback on their own
students’ authentic work. This naturalistic design directly connects implicit processes to
experiences related to the observed classroom lessons. Given the small sample size and targeted
recruitment from schools focused on social-emotional development, generalizability is limited;
however, broad generalizations and group-level comparisons are not the chief aims of the present
studies. The principal focus of this dissertation is to identify patterns of social-emotional
functioning and mechanisms of neurophysiological regulation that correspond to student
perceptions of academic support and the observed ways in which teachers engage in classroom
interactions and behaviors. The development of dispositional profiles of teachers’ social-
emotional functioning can serve as psychological and neurobiological case studies of teaching.
Ultimately, the characterization of these patterns has the potential to support the development of
preservice teaching preparation programs, professional developments, mentorships, and coaching
opportunities for teachers that leverage and cultivate teachers’ social-emotional knowledge.
In order to foster students’ holistic social, emotional, and academic development,
practitioners, researchers, and policymakers must take a similar lens to the development of
teachers’ knowledge and skills. Teachers skillfully employ contextualized knowledge of content,
pedagogy, and curriculum to address their goals and social-emotional and academic needs of
their students. A social, cultural, relational, and emotional understanding of one’s own identity as
a teacher, the students, and the sociopolitical context of the educational system provides a lens
through which to promote students’ investigation of academic material. An explicit emphasis in

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preservice teacher preparation programs and ongoing professional development on the
development of habits of mind and prosocial regulatory capacities that are central to social-
emotional processing can reorient educational systems to recognize, appreciate, and support the
inherently social, emotional, cultural, and relational nature of the craft of teaching. This
dissertation strives to further elucidate the characteristics of effective teachers with the
overarching goal to create useable knowledge about the psychological and neurophysiological
underpinnings of how teachers think, act, and feel. Through understanding teachers’ biological
and mental processes as well as describing their interaction, schools can more deeply understand
the social-emotional components of teaching that contribute to adolescents’ meaningful learning
and development.

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Paper 1: Teachers Develop Pedagogical Orientations that Tie Their Professional Vision to
Pedagogical Practices

Abstract
Students’ learning and development is supported through the pedagogical practices that teachers
enact in the classroom. In order to flexibly respond and adapt to their students’ learning needs,
teachers develop professional vision—the ability to skillfully notice and interpret salient aspects
of the classroom. However, the process through which professional vision translates into actual
pedagogical practices is unclear. We interviewed 22 secondary teachers, who were selected for
their strong relationships with students and support of social-emotional learning, about their
teaching philosophy. Four pedagogical orientations, ranging in social-cognitive complexity,
emerged from the qualitative analysis: (1) Gatekeeping, (2) Transactional, (3) Responsive, (4)
Transformative. We found that teachers’ professional vision indirectly predicted their
pedagogical practices via their pedagogical orientation. These findings suggest that teachers’
pedagogical orientations form a link that translates teachers’ skillful interpretations of classroom
situations into their enacted practices, with implications for the design of teacher education
programs.

Keywords: pedagogical orientation; professional vision; pedagogical practices; secondary
teachers; mixed-methods; dynamic skills theory

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Teachers Develop Pedagogical Orientations that Tie Their Professional Vision to
Pedagogical Practices
Within the domain of teaching, teachers acquire a set of pedagogical moves, or a capacity
for enacting specific teaching practices and approaches, that can be strategically employed to
foster students’ learning (Grossman et al., 2009). Teachers employ a constellation of pedagogical
practices that support learning in an emotionally safe space and contribute to the collaborative
construction of knowledge in the classroom. The development of these pedagogical moves is not
simply a checklist of routine behaviors, but requires appropriately assessing when, where, and
with whom each pedagogical move from the repertoire would be most effective. Teachers
acquire skill in dynamically assessing the appropriateness of pedagogical moves, given learning
aims, student progress, and the nature of interpersonal relationships (Clark & Lampert, 1986;
Freeman, 1991; Westerman, 1991). Through “learning to notice” relevant happenings in the
classroom context and students’ thought processes in relation to content objectives, teachers
develop a capacity for professional vision, a knowledge-set and pattern of reasoning that is
useful for analyzing and adapting practices in the classroom (Sherin & van Es, 2009). However,
while both the skilled interpretation of classroom interactions and a repertoire of pedagogical
practices are essential for promoting students’ learning, how do teachers translate professional
vision into decisions about what to do? To link what they are capable of noticing and interpreting
with the behaviors they are capable of enacting, teachers may rely on internal meaning-making
processes.
Abundant research demonstrates that teachers’ effectiveness is not simply a matter of
deploying a repertoire of practices, since the social-emotional, cultural and cognitive dynamics
of students’ learning and development, and relationships to each other and the teacher, are

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complex. This means that teachers must build their strategies around broader beliefs and
narratives about who they are in the classroom, how students learn and develop, and what the
teacher’s role is in promoting student growth (Fang, 1996; McAllister & Irvine, 2002; Polly et
al., 2013). Teachers’ narratives, which also encompass professional identities, have been
recognized as having a multitude of purposes, including expanding teachers’ ideas about
themselves and the profession, developing teachers’ motivation and purpose, and as a socializing
factor within the workplace, among others (see Alsup, 2006; Danielewicz, 2001; Flores & Day,
2006; Freese, 2006). The narratives that teachers tell themselves, and that have implications for
their pedagogical decisions, are conceptualizations that combine what they value and believe
with teaching-related intentions and goals, and in so doing orient teachers towards certain ways
of thinking and acting. Put simply, to help teachers translate their professional vision into
meaningful and strategic action, teachers develop pedagogical orientations. These are comprised
of the goals and purposes that direct teachers’ instructional approaches, and are supported by the
values and beliefs held about their students, school, education, and themselves. Teachers’
pedagogical orientations serve to integrate their professional identity with their understanding of
the purpose of their work, creating an actionable, intention-driven professional role.
Though it is clear that how teachers think about themselves and their teaching matters to
their students’ success, research has focused on the development of professional identity through
reflection and discourse (Freese, 2006; Maclean & White, 2007), without examining in a targeted
way the translation of vision into practice. Some discussion has advocated for the need to move
beyond documenting teachers’ existing knowledge about pedagogical practices and content to
increase the focus on professional identity and agency (Fairbanks et al., 2010), and underscored
the importance of empirically linking teachers’ identity with their pedagogical practices. To

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complement prior qualitative educational research using observational studies to provide rich
descriptions of what teachers (and students) do in the classroom (Raphael et al., 2008; Ratcliff et
al., 2017), the present study uses an interview to dive deeply into a cohort of successful
secondary teachers’ pedagogical orientations. Employing an additional interview featuring a
standard set of videotaped classroom vignettes, it explores the same teachers’ perceptions and
reasoning about classroom situations, i.e., their professional vision. By combining these findings
with observational data documenting the participating teachers’ own practices in their classroom,
this study ultimately explores how teachers’ professional vision is related to their pedagogical
decisions, and the potential role of teachers’ pedagogical orientations in translating their vision
into teaching practices.
Learning to Notice: Teachers’ Development of Professional Vision
Classrooms are complex, dynamic spaces (Ball & Forzani, 2009) that require teachers to
learn not only what to do in a given scenario, but also how to interpret classroom interactions and
students’ thinking. That is, effectively managing and directing students’ work under the dynamic
conditions of the classroom calls for a developed professional vision (Sherin & van Es, 2009).
Past research demonstrates that teachers develop professional vision across three veins:
attention, connection, and interpretation (Meschede et al., 2017; Seidel & Stürmer, 2014; van Es
& Sherin, 2002). When teachers are adept at calling out what is most relevant in the classroom in
a given moment, they are able to notice and give attention to what is most important within a
complex teaching situation to guide their next pedagogical move. Selective attention allows
skilled teachers to avoid getting caught up in distracting or tangential aspects of the classroom
and to instead focus on what is most important to leverage at that given time to continue working
towards the learning goals (Copur-Gencturk & Rodrigues, 2021). In addition to learning to

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attend, as teachers develop their professional vision, they move from literal descriptions of
classroom events to connecting these events to general principles of teaching and learning.
Teachers at this stage start to integrate their concrete perceptions of the classroom into more
abstract and complex conceptualizations of the learning and development happening in their
students. Through connecting, teachers use their professional vision to think more broadly and
flexibly about teaching and learning, situating current happenings into a student trajectory of
intellectual development. Doing so recruits teachers’ skill in understanding the intentions and
implications of pedagogical decisions.
Finally, developing vision involves teachers becoming deeply acquainted with the social,
cultural and intellectual context of their classroom, familiar with students’ sociocultural and
personal backgrounds and with the academic content. This multifaceted familiarity enables
teachers to gain proficiency at interpreting classroom interactions, so that they can make sense of
how the events they perceive in the classroom are embedded within multilayered contexts. When
interpreting is engaged iteratively with effective attention and connecting, professional vision is
fully realized, with all the cognitive, affective and social-cultural work that entails.
The meaning-making involved in a teacher’s professional vision is socially and culturally
influenced, and cultivated over time. Undergirding this professional vision are the deeply held
beliefs and assumptions a teacher has about the social world and what it means to learn
effectively. Vision is the springboard for effective teachers to develop their instructional
approach with a particular group of students. Translating vision into a practice requires teachers
to draw on their knowledge of pedagogy and relevant academic content, but also to grapple with
personal values, beliefs, and experiences, in light of the current socio-cultural and developmental
context (Rosebery & Puttick, 1998). Integrating personal and socio-cultural factors in a

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purposeful way that a teacher believes supports students’ effective learning is the essence of
developing a pedagogical orientation.
Teachers’ Pedagogical Orientations Reflect Identity and Guide Decision-Making
Teachers are highly attuned to make quick judgments of their students’ needs based on
sociocultural norms, such as whether students are making eye contact or seem on task, and based
on whether students are conforming to the teacher’s own expectations and stereotypes (Haataja
et al., 2021; Jussim et al., 1996). These judgments, in turn, influence teachers’ behavioral
decisions of how to provide further support, and become part of their professional identity
narrative. Societal norms, traditions, and customs influence teachers’ situational judgments, as
do their understandings of their professional role, their relationships with and expectations for
their students, and their understanding of the aims of school (Daniels et al., 2013; Tyler et al.,
2006). These situational judgments reflect the various social roles teachers hold and are
constructed from teachers’ own experiences and the feeling of agency they bring to classroom.
Teachers’ judgments and reflections over time evolve into a narrative of who they are as a
teacher, their professional identity, and how they think about their role in promoting students’
learning (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999).
In building a professional identity, the feelings and emotional experiences teachers have
about their own efficacy, the capacities of their students, and the objectives of the educational
system, all contribute to how they develop their positionality as a teacher (González-Calvo &
Arais-Carballal, 2017). The development of professional identity is often explicitly integrated
into teacher education programs for this reason (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). Teachers form an
“orientation toward teaching” (Voet & De Wever, 2019) that is grounded in their narrative of
identity and that steers their instructional decision-making. This orientation toward teaching,

16

called pedagogical orientation in this paper, captures the confluence of fundamental teaching-
related beliefs guiding teachers’ thinking, decision-making, and behavior in the classroom, as
well as their identity.
Previous literature on teacher pedagogy has noted the value of examining how teachers’
professional identity, beliefs, and practices align or conflict to illustrate the complexities of
effective teaching (Berger & Lê Van, 2019; Copur-Gencturk et al., 2020; Enyedy et al., 2006;
McAllister & Irvine, 2002). Additionally, educational psychology research has documented
teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their connection to self-regulated learning and teaching
competence (Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008; Muis, 2007; Sosu & Gray, 2012). While teachers’
general beliefs about the nature of knowledge, students, teachers’ own self-efficacy, and the
educational system have been studied individually (Ben‐Yehuda et al., 2010; Gregory & Roberts,
2017; Hattie, 2008; Jordan & Stanovich, 2003; Matheis et al., 2017; Pudelko & Boon, 2014;
Redding, 2019), there would be benefit to defining descriptive pedagogical orientations that seek
to combine these various domains of beliefs. How do these beliefs integrate, and how does this
integrated construction relate to vision and to practice? Much of the existing literature on
teaching beliefs has charted the change or development of specific teaching-related beliefs
without regard to practice, and mainly in novice teachers (Brownlee, 2004; Cheng et al., 2009;
Matheis et al., 2017; Minor et al., 2002; Wall, 2016). Another well-documented challenge in the
existing literature is that teachers’ beliefs are often conflated with or inferred from their
observable behaviors (Burant et al., 2007). Recent qualitative work on teachers’ beliefs has
developed conceptual frameworks integrating educational theories, habits of mind, and behaviors
in order to help ascertain whether pre-service teachers are developing certain dispositional
teaching beliefs based on their observed behaviors (Altan et al., 2019). To complement this

17

research, here we disentangle the study of teachers’ beliefs and practices and attempt to build a
more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ orientations by examining their own rich,
descriptive narratives about their teaching philosophy.
Social-Cognitive Complexity in the Domain of Teaching
From what is known about teachers’ behaviors, there are hints that their pedagogical
orientations vary in their complexity, and that this variance may underlie their efficacy in
translating vision into practice. For example, teachers with complex beliefs about the
construction of knowledge would likely employ lines of questioning that promote students’
meaningful reflection on the broader connections between course material (Chin, 2006; Morge,
2005; Smart & Marshall, 2013) and their own biases and habits of mind (Hooks, 1994; Mezirow,
1997). Productively embedding social-emotional learning objectives within the classroom
activities and flexibly implementing a range of instructional strategies in response to students’
questions and behaviors would suggest a nuanced belief system about the role of the teacher in
facilitating students’ holistic development.
By contrast, teachers with an abundance of prescribed routines and teacher-centered
directives would likely believe that knowledge passes unidirectionally from the teacher to
students. These teachers rely on lecturing and heavily guided opportunities for problem-solving,
and may believe classroom interactions reflect a basic cause-and-effect model: specific teacher
inputs lead to predictable student performance outputs. Such a transmissive style of teaching is
suboptimal for students’ development and learning (Wong & Day, 2009), likely because the
mental model on which it is based is not sufficiently complex; this model focuses entirely on the
teacher’s role without adequately integrating considerations of students’ perspectives and
autonomy development (Patall & Hooper, 2018)—essential pieces of students’ scholarly

18

development over the longer term. Importantly, because such teachers’ practices are generated
from an insufficiently complex mental model, to support these teachers’ improvement would
require probing and then addressing their orientation. Simply instructing them in new practices is
unlikely to be effective.
As these examples illustrate, exposing the complexity of a teacher’s understanding of the
various factors influencing their work is likely to provide critical insights into the sources of their
decisions. Yet, there has generally not been an explicit delineation between teachers’ intentions
and enacted behaviors in educational research. Teachers’ intentions are often assumed from their
observed pedagogy; alternatively, teachers’ behaviors can be assumed based on their stated
vision. The study of the social-cognitive complexity of teachers’ pedagogical orientations
complements this work and fills a critical gap. While research insights about teachers’ classroom
actions and vision are useful, they do not directly address the mental models that allow teachers
to be flexible and adaptive in their instruction. The quality of a teacher’s pedagogical orientation
relies on teachers’ skill in bring together and interrelating different factors and perspectives,
reconciling values that may be inconsistent or in conflict, and bringing together ideas that may be
mutually supportive or aligned.
In defining teachers’ pedagogical orientations separately from their observed behaviors,
we aim to capture this social-cognitive complexity of teachers’ intentions—the value-driven
thought processes behind their understanding of what they should do and why, based on their
understanding of the goals of the class in addition to their own positionality. As for any domain-
specific skill, the ability to integrate pieces of information, and to flexibly deconstruct and
reconstruct understanding as new information becomes available or the context changes, is the
basis for positive development. As individuals are able to identify and accommodate new

19

situations and contexts, they build skill in flexibly adjusting their thinking and behavior on the
fly. Thus, skill level within a domain advances with increasing complexity (Fischer, 1980, 2008;
Fischer et al., 2003; Fischer & Bidell, 2006). For the skill of teaching, a social-cognitive
complexity approach reveals a teacher’s cognitive skill in comprehending the multifaceted web
of their teaching-related social beliefs, such as students’ needs in relation to their abilities,
sociocultural assets, and inclinations, and flexibly integrating this information into their mental
model of teaching in relation to their academic and personal goals for students. Ultimately, we
seek to understand how teachers build a pedagogical orientation that flexibly integrates all of the
relevant considerations to construct a purposeful, complex conceptualization that is actionable.
The Present Study
By working with a sample of teachers recognized by their administrators for their skill at
relationship building and socially supporting their students, we aimed to characterize
pedagogical orientations that are relatively well integrated, socially oriented and stable, and then
to empirically relate these orientations to teachers’ vision and practice. While supporting
students’ social-emotional development through deep intellectual engagement can be done in a
variety of ways, we seek to identify patterns in teachers’ goals and intentions. As noted by
Maxwell (2013), qualitative research strategies are particularly well-suited to understanding the
perspectives and meaning participants make of their experiences.
To more fully characterize teachers’ pedagogical orientation and its relationship with
their professional vision and pedagogical practices, a mixed-methods approach was employed.
First, a qualitative modified grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was
implemented, aiming to build a theoretical model of teachers’ pedagogical orientations from the
systematic analysis of interview data through the inductive development of codes, categories,

20

and themes. Transcripts of semi-structured, open-ended interviews about each teacher’s own
teaching philosophy were used to develop a continuum of pedagogical orientation profiles, in
accordance with their social-cognitive complexity. Along with these pedagogical orientations,
ratings from observed classroom lessons paired with coded transcripts of open-ended responses
to standardized videos of others’ teaching practices were then analyzed to build an operational
model of how teachers’ pedagogical orientations, professional vision, and pedagogical practices
relate. We hypothesized that teachers’ professional vision would be positively associated with
their ratings of their observed pedagogical practices (H1) and greater social-cognitive complexity
in their pedagogical orientations (H2). We also hypothesized that teachers’ professional vision
would predict their pedagogical practices at least partially via their pedagogical orientations
(H3).
Methods
Participants
Research participants were 22 secondary teachers, 11 males and 11 females, who were
identified by their school leaders as excellent at supporting students’ social-emotional
development. School sites in Southern California serving majority low-SES students of color
were selected to participate in the study due to their explicit schoolwide focus on social-
emotional learning. Participants were between the ages of 28 and 57. One participant did not
identify with any ethnicity, two identified as Latinx or Hispanic American, one as Black, Afro-
Caribbean, or African American, one as East Asian or Asian American, and the remainder as
Non-Hispanic White, Caucasian, or Euro-American. One participant identified with both Latinx
and White ethnicities. Participants had an average of 10.4 years of teaching experience, ranging
from 1 to 32 years, and had been at their current school for an average of 5.7 years. All

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participants taught adolescents with 7 teaching middle school (grades 6-8), 10 teaching high
school (grades 9-12), and 5 teaching both middle and high school aged students. The range of
course subjects taught by participants included Humanities, STEM, Performing and Visual Arts,
and Physical Education. All participants gave written, informed consent and study procedures
were approved by the University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board.
Procedures & Measures
Each of the 22 teachers participated in a 45-minute classroom teaching observation and a
subsequent laboratory visit in which teachers engaged in teaching-related interviews and tasks.
The present study was part of a larger mixed-methods investigation of the social-emotional
components of teachers’ support of adolescents’ deep, meaningful learning; as such, participants
engaged in additional research activities not relevant here, including neuroimaging,
psychophysiological recording, cognitive testing, and additional open-ended interviews.
Classroom Data Collection
For the classroom observation, two trained expert observers recorded low-inference notes
using an observation tool based on the Teaching Robust Understanding (TRU) framework
(Schoenfeld, 2013). The TRU framework was designed to address “the attributes of equitable
and robust learning environments—environments in which all students are supported in
becoming knowledgeable, flexible, and resourceful disciplinary thinkers” (Schoenfeld & the
Teaching for Robust Understanding Project, 2016) and is organized into distinct dimensions that
can each serve as a focus for teachers’ ongoing development. Based on the extensive teaching
and learning literature, the TRU framework highlights five dimensions influencing the quality of
the learning environment: (a) content; (b) cognitive demand; (c) equitable access to content; (d)
student agency, ownership, and identity; and (e) formative assessment. The TRU framework is

22

not prescriptive, as instruction can look different across contexts, but the TRU framework aims
to measure the extent to which teachers’ actions and structural supports provide opportunities for
all students to develop scholarly identities and habits of mind, engage in productive struggle, and
deepen their understandings.
The trained observers developed and used a 5-point rubric based on the TRU framework
to rate the extent to which teachers’ practices supported the tenets of each domain during the
observed lesson. For each teacher, the observer ratings across the five domains were averaged to
obtain an overall rating of pedagogical practices.
Laboratory Interview Data Collection
Professional Vision. During one portion of the semi-structured, in-depth, open-ended
laboratory interview, participants were presented with short standardized videos of teaching
vignettes that highlighted actual secondary teachers demonstrating and explaining a particular
pedagogical strategy. The protocol was adapted from previously developed methods aimed at
inducing social-emotional feelings (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009). Furthermore, video-based
reflection has been previously employed in teacher preparation and professional development
programs to support novice teachers’ developing ability to notice and interpret classroom
dynamics (Blomberg et al., 2014; Sherin & van Es, 2009).
In a one-hour private video-taped interview, an experimenter shared 16 teaching vignettes
and accompanying one-minute video clips about secondary teachers across the country. The
teaching vignettes were designed to highlight real teachers’ classrooms and present a variety of
real-life pedagogical strategies focused on classroom management and supporting students’
deep, meaningful learning. After each vignette, the experimenter shared a quote from the teacher
describing the value they saw in the strategy and then asked the participants to describe how well

23

they thought the pedagogical strategy displayed by the teacher in the vignette promoted students’
learning.
Participants’ open-ended responses were qualitatively coded for professional vision as
measured by the integration of concrete descriptions with abstract cognitions about teaching and
learning. As professional vision involves both what teachers notice and how they reason about it,
the coding scheme, adapted from Gotlieb et al. (In Preparation, B), identified participants’
spontaneous propensity for concrete and abstract thinking. Patterns of abstract meaning-making
has been found to be associated with eye gaze, activation of neural networks associated with
deep reflection, identity development, and long-term memory (Gotlieb et al., 2021; Gotlieb et al.,
In Preparation, A; Gotlieb et al., Under Review; Yang et al., 2018).
Based on the dimensions of abstract and concrete thinking outlined by Gotlieb et al. (In
Preparation, B), professional vision was quantified on a 7-point scale, ranging from solely
concrete descriptions to fully integrated transcendent abstractions. Participants’ responses to
each vignette were rated and then averaged across the 16 vignettes to obtain one overall
professional vision score.
Pedagogical Orientation. In a separate portion of the laboratory interview, participants
were asked to describe their overarching vision for learning in their classroom in regards to each
of the five dimensions of the TRU framework. Participants were video- and audio-recorded for
the duration of the interview and the recordings were later transcribed verbatim. As the primary
objective was to identify how teachers understood the relationships amongst teacher, students,
and academic content undergirding engagement, the interview questions focused on teachers’
goals and overarching vision for learning in their classroom.

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The analysis employed a categorizing strategy to inductively “fracture” (Strauss &
Corbin, 2014) the data to capture insights when rearranging the data in a new way. The team-
based open coding strategy (MacQueen et al., 1998), based on the tenets of grounded theory
(Glaser & Strauss, 1967), facilitated the development of coding categories that were emergent
from the data. The content of the participating teachers’ responses to the interview questions
about their teaching philosophy and goals in their classroom in regards to the five TRU
dimensions were sorted into organizational categories. Coders iteratively added and condensed
codes as they each reviewed the entire dataset and cooperatively normed. Analytic memos were
written to describe emergent themes and were discussed between coders. The final
organizational categories sorted how teachers describe (a) the academic content, (b) expectations
for students, (c) derivation of standards, (d) who is centered in learning process, (e) the focus of
learning, (f) social-emotion learning components, (g) characteristics of students, (h)
characteristics of teachers, (i) cognitive distance between students and content, and (j) quality of
reflection.
Through group discussions and analytical memos (for an example, see Appendix), coders
identified themes across organizational categories to form interrelated substantive categories
(Maxwell, 2013), reflecting independent pedagogical orientations. The codes and categories
were sorted and compared until no more codes emerged and all data were accounted for,
resulting in saturation (Creswell, 2012). The resulting categories represented a ranked continuum
of pedagogical orientations ranging in social-cognitive complexity. These pedagogical
orientations are reported in the qualitative findings section below.
After the theoretical categories were developed, coders blindly reviewed participants’
individual responses to each of the five TRU dimensions to independently assign a rating of

25

social-cognitive complexity along a 4-point scale, corresponding to the four emergent
pedagogical orientations. After individual responses were rated, coders reviewed the aggregated
responses by participant to confirm the ratings of pedagogical orientation. For each participant,
the mean rating across the five responses was calculated.
Quantitative Modeling
To investigate the relationships between teachers’ pedagogical orientations and their
professional vision and pedagogical practices, a series of regression models were tested. First, it
was tested whether teachers’ level of professional vision predicts their classroom observation
ratings (H1) using a univariate regression model. Subsequently, a separate univariate regression
model was used to test the relationship between professional vision and pedagogical orientation
(H2). To test whether professional vision would predict pedagogical practices at least partially
via pedagogical orientations (H3), an accepted bias-corrected bootstrapping procedure for
mediation was implemented in SPSS 27 (see Preacher & Hayes, 2008; PROCESS v2.16). Values
were randomly resampled with replacement to generate 5,000 bootstrapped samples of 22 values
each, corresponding to the number of participants in the experiment. A regression coefficient for
each bootstrapped sample was calculated, and from the distribution of coefficients a 95%
confidence interval was derived (Matlab version 2011b; MathWorks, Inc; see Yarkoni, 2009).
Results
Qualitative Findings: Establishing Teachers’ Pedagogical Orientations
Teachers’ conceptualizations of their own pedagogy varied in systematic patterns.
Analyses revealed that teachers’ beliefs, values, biases, and the interactions among these, could
be classified by their social-cognitive complexity along a continuum. Based on dynamic skills
theory (Fischer, 1980, 2008), teachers’ coordination of multiple perspectives on their own and

26

their students’ roles and relationships, such as coordinating their own professional identity with
students’ identities as learners, interacted to form their pedagogical orientation. The analyses
revealed that four emergent pedagogical orientations could be used to describe the data. These
were rank ordered in complexity according to a constructivist approach: (1) Gatekeeping, (2)
Transactional, (3) Responsive, and (4) Transformative. These pedagogical orientation profiles
build upon each other, becoming increasingly complex and supportive of students’ development.
(1) Gatekeeping
The Gatekeeping pedagogical orientation is the least complex, as the teacher frames the
teacher-student dynamic as being primarily unidirectional—from teacher to student. Teachers
with this orientation utilize a relatively simple abstract system in their pedagogical approach as
their abstractions are often limited to beliefs core to their own professional identity with students
represented statically and mostly as a monolith.
The Gatekeeping pedagogical orientation is characterized by a teacher-driven narrowing
of the scope of student actions, expectations, and/or academic content. This unidimensional view
of students and narrowing of scope is exemplified by the teacher who said:
And it's a little overwhelming to know [students are] in a low-income situation…The
amount of interaction that they can have with certain content is [just] so complicated…It
can't be this traditional middle-class way of having kids think about things.
2

This orientation centers the teacher and has a focus on teachers’ responsibility to an external
measure or a sense of where students should be. Students are described as static, passive actors
and teachers often feature a sense of being overwhelmed or not having enough time. The teacher
positions themselves between the students and the academic content—acting as a gatekeeper—

2
All quoted responses lightly edited for readability.

27

limiting the direct relationship students have with the academic content themselves and often
intentionally distancing students and academic content from each other. The reductional
transmission of academic content is unidirectional, from teacher “down” to student. This
orientation is characterized by externally-derived, fixed low expectations, such as state standards,
district benchmarks, or stereotypes based on students’ demographics. The social-emotional
relationship teachers have with students is valued, but often purposefully divorced from the
academic learning and content. The reflection on learning is very linear with a comparison to an
external goal and the teachers’ language often has a sense of finality and/or anxiousness.
(2) Transactional
The Transactional pedagogical orientation is a more complex approach in that the
teacher-student dynamic is described as bidirectional and contingent on the student offering
something back to the teacher in turn. The system of abstractions is more complex than the
Gatekeeping pedagogical orientation as teachers represent students as dynamic entities in the
classroom into their conceptualizations. However, teachers remain primarily focused on their
own professional identity and do not explicitly connect what students do in the classroom with
broader abstractions about who they are.
The Transactional pedagogical orientation is characterized by the substitution of
engagement or participation for actual academic learning. Teachers often do not make the
rationale behind their instructional decisions explicit, such as the teacher who said:
…I remind myself that [formative assessment] can be something as little as like a thumbs
up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down. So, I try to work in those [sorts] of really, really
informal ones into pretty much every lesson, just to kind of touch base with my students…

This orientation centers the teacher and focuses on managing students to be busy, but not
purposefully. Students’ thinking is heavily scaffolded and they are described as compliant.

28

Teachers demonstrate organization, rigidity, and often a sense of containment. The teacher
positions themselves between the students and the academic content, perhaps benevolently
gatekeeping. Descriptions of classroom vision can be void of content itself and solely focus on
strategies or activities for participation. This orientation has an externally-derived expectation for
high levels of engagement, specifically the performance of engagement. Leveraging the social-
emotional relationship teachers have with students is seen as a strategy to promote participation
or engagement in class. The reflection on learning is focused on effectiveness as measured by
performance and lacks reflection on motivations for actions.
(3) Responsive
The Responsive pedagogical orientation shares the bidirectionality expressed in the
Transactional pedagogical orientation, but is an approach that is more dynamically responsive to
the students’ needs, interests, emotional states, and situational factors. Teachers skillfully weave
together abstract systems about students’ identities as learners with their own professional
identity.
The Responsive pedagogical orientation is characterized by a clear purpose and
responsiveness to students’ interests and needs. This increased fluidity in the teacher’s approach
is demonstrated by the teacher who said:
…I want to make the content accessible…There [are] at least two ways of going about
that. One is taking content that I know, and turning it into something they can digest. And
the other is using content they know. I try to do both of those things…It's about being sort
of culturally responsive to what matters to our kids…

This orientation centers the students and focuses on growth and relevance of academic content to
students. Students carry the onus for their learning and teachers demonstrate flexibility and
openness to students’ experiences. The teacher positions themselves close to students and the

29

distance between students and the academic content is narrowing as the teacher brings students
and academic content together. This orientation has an internally-derived expectation that
students are driving the learning process, but usually still towards a singular answer. The social-
emotional relationship is defined by teachers’ acute awareness and reactivity to students’ social-
emotional experiences with academic content. The reflection on learning incorporates aspects
beyond just students’ classroom experiences with academic content, including humanity, life
outside of school, etc.
(4) Transformative
The Transformative pedagogical orientation situates the responsive approach within a
larger developmental trajectory of student growth. Teachers are attentive to students developing
dispositions of mind that set them up to be quality thinkers and learners outside of the school
context. Teachers with this orientation utilize the most complex systems of abstractions as they
are incorporating their own professional identity, students’ identity and developmental growth,
broader student goals beyond academic mastery, etc.
The Transformative pedagogical orientation is characterized by the collaboration of
multiple voices from teachers, students, other adults and multiple texts and subjects. The
honoring of many perspectives and connection beyond the classroom is shown by the teacher
who said:
…I wouldn’t want every student to respond in the same way. Their ownership [comes]
from finding themselves in the work that they're sharing—what we're sharing together.
And [that's] usually the goal [for] all of them [is] to find yourself in the mathematical
work, find yourself in the science, find yourself in [the] content that we're sharing and
bring that piece of you to the table.

This orientation centers the students and focuses on longitudinal growth with a lack of emphasis
on “sameness” or uniformity. Students are empowered and agentic while teachers often feature

30

explicit perspective-taking with less ego, need for control, or personal disapproval. The teacher,
students, and academic content are positioned very closely to each other. Descriptions of
classroom vision emphasize context and multi-/interdisciplinary thinking leading to students’
critical thought. This orientation has an internally-derived expectation that there are multiple
perspectives and answers with learning being understood as context-dependent. Descriptions of
the social-emotional component of learning illustrate that students’ feelings about the self and
academic content are intertwined. The reflection on learning is holistic, process-oriented, and
central to the teachers’ practice as intentional, often collaborative spaces are designated for on-
going reflection to occur.
Testing Quantitative Hypotheses: Professional Vision Indirectly Predicts Pedagogical
Practices via Pedagogical Orientation
Descriptive Statistics
The overall mean rating of pedagogical practices was 2.77 (SD = 0.96) and mean ratings
ranged from 1 to 4.6. Overall professional vision scores ranged from 2 to 4.875 with an overall
mean professional vision score of 3.11 (SD = 0.85). Pedagogical orientation scores ranged from
1.2 to 4 with a mean pedagogical orientation score of 2.52 (SD = 0.87).
Professional Vision Is Not Directly Related to Observational Ratings of Pedagogical Practices
(H1)
The hypothesis that teachers’ professional vision would directly predict the observational
ratings of pedagogical practices was not supported, p = .305.
Pedagogical Orientation Predicts Observational Ratings of Pedagogical Practices (H2)
Although professional vision was not significantly related to ratings of pedagogical
practices, pedagogical orientation strongly correlated with both professional vision, r(20) = .625,

31

p = .002, and observational ratings of pedagogical practices, r(20) = .635, p = .002. The
combined variance of pedagogical orientation explained by professional vision and observational
ratings of pedagogical practices was 61%.
Furthermore, teachers’ pedagogical orientations significantly predicted the observational
ratings of pedagogical practices, β = .353, t(20) = 3.68, p = .002. Pedagogical orientation also
explained a significant proportion of variance in observational ratings of pedagogical practices,
R
2
adj = .373, F(1, 20) = 13.51, p = .002. A multiple regression model was run to determine the
relationship between pedagogical orientation and observational ratings of pedagogical practices
whilst controlling for professional vision. The reported pattern between pedagogical orientation
and pedagogical practices held controlling for professional vision, β = .897, t(20) = 3.70, p =
.002.
Professional Vision Has an Indirect Effect on Observational Ratings of Pedagogical Practices
Via Pedagogical Orientation (H3)
Given pedagogical orientation’s observed relationship with both professional vision and
pedagogical practices but that the direct effect of professional vision on pedagogical practices
was not significant, an indirect effects model was explored. However, an indirect effects model
using 10,000 bootstrapped samples revealed that more developed professional vision predicted
higher observational ratings of pedagogical practices through its effects on pedagogical
orientation (see Figure 1-1). The indirect effect was 0.574 with standard error 0.265, 95% CI
[0.167, 1.191].

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Figure 1-1.

Indirect effect of professional vision on pedagogical practices via pedagogical orientations.

Note: Regression coefficients for each path and the bootstrapped indirect effect are depicted with
the standard errors in parentheses. ** p < 0.01

Discussion
This study captures the social-cognitive complexity of identity-related beliefs and values
undergirding the behaviors of teachers identified as supportive of students’ social-emotional
development. Although the educational literature has rich descriptions of teachers’ pedagogical
moves linked with student learning (Ellis et al., 2019; Glazewski & Hmelo-Silver, 2019; Reilly
et al., 2019; Reiser, 2004), the present study explores how pedagogical orientation—a measure
of how complexly teachers conceptualize their goals and intentions for their classroom and
students, in relation to their own professional identity and positionality—relates to teachers’
observed pedagogical practices. These beliefs and their impacts on teachers’ practices and
students’ learning experiences have been examined separately in prior research (Ben‐Yehuda et
al., 2010; Gregory & Roberts, 2017; Matheis et al., 2017; Pudelko & Boon, 2014; Redding,
2019), but the present findings extend prior knowledge to provide a synergistic framework of

33

pedagogical orientations that pulls these beliefs and values together. The study contributes to a
more holistic understanding of the mental processes teachers engage to make pedagogical
decisions, and demonstrates that these situated processes link teachers’ professional vision to
their pedagogical practices.
As hypothesized, we found that the teachers’ orientations toward the various personal,
student-level and situational factors influencing their practice varied in social-cognitive
complexity. At the low-complexity end of the scale, which we termed the “Gatekeeping”
orientation, teachers’ orientations were unidirectional—a model in which teachers aim to funnel
appropriately curated information and activities to students. Slightly more complex was the
“Transactional” orientation, in which teachers view their actions as contingent on students’
responses in a bidirectional manner. More complex still was the “Responsive” orientation, in
which the bidirectional relationship between teacher and students is increasingly dynamic as
teachers are highly sensitive to students’ needs, interests, and emotional states. At the highest
level of the scale, teachers with “Transformative” orientations situate their intentions within the
broader context of students’ developmental trajectory and incorporate students’ identity
development and scholarly goals with their understanding of their own positionality. The
complexity of teachers’ professional identity narratives represented in their pedagogical
orientations presents a useful metric in distinguishing between seemingly similar teaching
intentions.
Teachers’ professional vision indirectly predicted their pedagogical practices, but only
through teachers’ pedagogical orientations, suggests that teachers’ intentions are an important
link between their skilled interpretations of classroom situations and actions in their own
classroom. The lack of a direct relationship between teachers’ professional vision and

34

pedagogical practices implies that while the development of teachers’ professional vision
certainly contributes to their general teaching expertise, there are additional, essential processes
involved in the translation of this skillfulness in interpretation into supportive pedagogical
moves. While teachers may have developed a strong professional vision through training and
experience, it is teachers’ personal pedagogical intentions that ultimately facilitate the translation
of professional vision into supportive pedagogical practices in their own classroom. Through
skillfulness in reasoning and interpreting classroom events, strong professional vision contributes
to the development of complex teaching-related beliefs and values related to how teachers
personally define their role in the classroom. In turn, the social-cognitive complexity of teachers’
pedagogical intentions translated into pedagogical practices that are cognizant of students’
broader learning and developmental needs, and thus more supportive of their growth. The
connections among professional vision, pedagogical orientation, and practice underscore the
importance of teachers’ identity-related beliefs and values driving their pedagogical decision-
making.
Since all participating teachers were noted for having strong relationships with students
and providing social-emotional support, the findings underscore the notions that there is not a
singular shared orientation across teachers toward supporting students’ social-emotional
development, and that some social-emotional orientations are more effective at promoting
student learning than others. While it was clear that all teachers in our sample cared strongly for
their students, the range of emergent orientations and pedagogical practices suggest that the
teachers’ identity-related beliefs had the potential to bolster, or even undermine, the effectiveness
of their classroom actions. For example, some “Gatekeeping” teachers leaned heavily on a “no-
excuses” model (Golann, 2015) that purposefully ignores the complexities of students’ situations

35

in pedagogical decision-making (Immordino-Yang, 2016). By contrast, “Transformative”
teachers described taking into account their students’ personal histories and goals when making
pedagogical decisions, and integrated considerations of students’ future trajectories as scholars
and adults into the supports they provided.
Although this study did not directly address culturally responsive pedagogy or anti-
racism teaching practices, the findings here suggest that teachers’ constructed beliefs and
understandings related to race and culture may vary in complexity in ways that could have
implications for students’ learning. It is important to acknowledge the limits to the
characterization of social-cognitive complexity related to race and equity in the presented
pedagogical orientations, as our sample of 22 teachers—all serving populations predominantly
composed of students of color—only included 4 participants who personally identified with a
non-White race or ethnicity. Previous work has shown that teachers’ complex knowledge and
critical consciousness of their own positionality, structural and historical racism in educational
systems, and experiences of their students is essential for their implementation of pedagogical
practices that support students’ feelings of scholarly belonging (Maloney & Matthews, 2020;
Matthews & López, 2019). Future studies should examine how teachers’ knowledge pertaining
to anti-racism, the classroom experiences of students of color, and social justice is integrated into
a pedagogical orientation that facilitates more anti-racist practices. Given the documented
influence of teachers’ implicit biases (Copur-Gencturk et al., 2020; Glock & Böhmer, 2018),
simply supplying teachers with toolkits of anti-racist practices is important, yet likely insufficient
without deconstructing and reconstructing teachers’ underlying orientations. Therefore, future
work should directly address race- and culture-related dimensions of pedagogical orientations.

36

The findings have important implications for professional development and teacher
support. The alignment between greater social-cognitive complexity in pedagogical orientations
and better pedagogical practices is consistent with prior literature on dispositions, habits of
minds, values, and behaviors (Day, 2017; Enyedy et al., 2006; Freeman, 1991; Warren, 2018),
but extends prior knowledge. Although many teaching education programs focus on the
development of professional vision to supplement a growing repertoire of pedagogical moves,
the present findings support the argument that attending to and developing teachers’ personal,
identity-driven pedagogical intentions should constitute another vital component of teacher
training. Much attention in educational circles is given to the philosophical differences between
commonly used pedagogical frameworks. Yet, there is likely significant overlap across
frameworks in terms of the pedagogical orientations that guide teachers’ pedagogical decision-
making. Future work should move beyond examining only philosophical frameworks to
empirically link teachers’ pedagogical orientations to students’ academic performance,
development of scholarly habits of mind, and social-emotional experiences in the classroom.
With the continued push towards holistic “whole child” models of education, the findings
suggest that schools and districts should not only provide trainings and interventions targeting
teachers’ professional vision and pedagogical practices, as is commonly done, but that training
must also target teachers’ pedagogical orientations if substantive change is the goal. Educational
research based on orientations can provide a new view into the complexity and constructed
nature of teachers’ approaches—how teachers make meaning of their own role in relation to
students’ socio-cultural positionality and learning.
Consistent with research on decision-making and how beliefs and values impact behavior
(Devine et al., 2013; Eggleston, 2018; Poulou, 2017; Schutz & Zembylas, 2009), we show in the

37

present study how teachers’ constructed identities and positionalities (i.e., their pedagogical
orientation) serve as a dynamic platform to translate their professional vision into practices. As
we are currently in an era when social justice and anti-racism is at the fore and innovations in
secondary teaching are promoting students’ autonomy, belonging, and critical thinking, our
findings are an important jumping-off point for the study of teachers. Further investigations of
how teachers’ pedagogical orientations facilitate effective instruction and application of this
work to teacher education and training can support teachers in being best prepared to flexibly
adapt to the dynamic needs to their students.

38

Paper 2: Secondary Teachers Engage Social-Affective Brain Networks When Grading their
Own Students’ Academic Work

Abstract
While there is increasing attention to secondary teachers’ need to skillfully attend to social,
emotional, and relational aspects of the classroom experience, there is also a seemingly
contradictory emphasis on teachers maintaining a sense of objectivity, void of any conceptions
about the students themselves, when engaging with students’ academic work. To explore
whether social-affective considerations are invoked during secondary teachers’ evaluations of
academic assignments, we investigated the neural mechanisms teachers engage when grading
their own students as compared to equivalent control answers. We found increased activation in
brain regions associated with social-affective processing and attention regulation when teachers
graded their own students’ answers. These provisional findings support the debated notion that
secondary teaching involves social and affective processing even when students are not
physically present, and present preliminary evidence for why teachers’ social connection with
students may impact how teachers understand their students’ comprehension of academic
material.

Keywords: social-affective processing; fMRI; secondary teachers; student-teacher relationships;
grading

39

Secondary Teachers Engage Social-Affective Brain Networks When Grading their Own
Students’ Academic Work
Within teaching, there have been ongoing conversations about how to create learning
environments that support the “whole child” and thus promote students’ learning (Cantor et al.,
2021; Diamond, 2010; Immordino-Yang et al., 2019; Immordino-Yang & Knecht, 2020). There
has been much focus on the influential role of student-teacher relationships in supporting
students’ well-being, safety, and sense of belonging at school. When adolescents experience
feeling cared for by their teacher, they have higher school attendance, report higher levels of
well-being, and feel a sense of belonging at school (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Juvonen, 2006;
Wentzel, 2009; Wilkins, 2008). In order to truly move students’ thinking forward, there is ample
evidence that being highly skilled in building interpersonal relationships with youths
strategically supports students’ development and intellectual growth within academic domains
(Cornelius-White, 2007; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Murray & Malmgren, 2005; Roorda et al., 2011;
Semeraro et al., 2020).
However, the act of evaluating the quality of students’ understanding and academic work
is often considered to be an objective process. Despite a growing movement toward explicitly
focusing on social-emotional learning in classrooms, the emotional and social aspects of
teachers’ engagement with their students are often viewed as separate from their support of their
students’ academic learning (Kochenderfer-Ladd & Ladd, 2016), for example, when evaluating
their students’ academic work. The debate is predicated on conflicting conceptualizations of the
teaching process: while many in education reform argue that teachers’ emotional and social
engagement with their students is paramount to effectively supporting their learning, others
maintain that attending to social-emotional aspects is beyond the scope of their role (Buchanan et

40

al., 2009; Collie et al., 2015). Which view is correct? The answer has important implications for
education theory and practical reforms in teacher professional development.
To weigh in on this debate, empirical research can target some of the questions most
relevant to understanding how teachers rely, or do not rely, on social and affective processing
when engaging in teaching behaviors. When teachers are actively engaging with students’ ideas
and evaluating their understandings, what are teachers thinking and feeling? Specifically, when
teachers are engaging with students’ answers, how much does it matter to them whose work they
are evaluating? While it is clear how teachers’ interpersonal dynamics in the classroom are
highly social and emotional, it remains unclear whether this matters for their other teaching-
related activities, such as grading students’ academic work. Do the ways teachers engage with
their students’ academic work reflect social-affective processing, even if the students are not
physically there? This study is a preliminary exploration of the social-affective component of
teaching that tests whether there is increased processing in the regions of the brain associated
with social emotions, perspective-taking, and emotional and physiological regulation when
teachers grade answers from their own students, in comparison to matched answers from
individuals they do not know.
Social-Affective Processing in Teaching
Social-affective processing refers to the psychological and neural processes that support
the encoding and representation of information that is socially and emotionally relevant, which
ultimately guides mental and behavioral responses (Ochsner, 2008). The nature of one’s social
interactions and context are very much intertwined with one’s emotional responses. The ways
that individuals are taught to experience and process these social and emotional inputs can
influence learning and development. For instance, teachers are constantly engaging in

41

sophisticated social interactions with students and other adults where they are required to quickly
assess others’ intentions and affective dispositions in order to adjust their own emotional
responses and behaviors. Teachers’ skillfulness and flexibility in forming and acting on these
social and emotional judgments can greatly affect their teaching practices and students’ learning.
Providing evaluative feedback to students is a particular context in which this social-
affective processing is potentially crucial. In the classroom, teachers need to quickly assess
students’ level of conceptual mastery in conjunction with their understanding of the student as
person—their personal strengths, educational and relational insecurities, trauma, developmental
trajectory—as they formulate the optimal message and mode of feedback. Grades are one of the
most widely used forms of evaluative feedback utilized by teachers and remain a primary
indicator of students’ academic performance. As most teachers have been found to use a
combination of cognitive and non-cognitive factors when assessing students’ work and
determining grades (Brookhart et al., 2016; Guskey & Link, 2019; Sun & Cheng, 2014), it is
expected that teachers may heavily rely on social-affective processing during the evaluation
process. Specifically, it is expected that teachers are reliant upon attentional cognitive processing
as well as social empathic processing when grading their students. These affective and cognitive
processes are supported in the brain by the default mode network, executive control network, and
salience network. This paper investigates how providing evaluative feedback to one’s own
students through grading may engage these neural networks differentially.
Brain Networks Involved in Social-Affective Processing
Social-affective processes that are involved when evaluating students’ work, such as
perspective-taking and regulating one’s emotions and attention, are facilitated by cooperation
between multiple brain networks. The brain is constantly processing information received from

42

the outside world in addition to the signals and cues from inside of the body. Due to limited
attentional resources, it is impossible to attend to all incoming information so the brain must
decide which information is currently the most relevant, timely, and important. Based on the
perceived emotional relevance and urgency, the salience network facilitates the switching
between brain networks responsible for primarily inwardly or outwardly focused processes, the
default mode network and the executive control network respectively (Goulden et al., 2014;
Menon & Uddin, 2010; Seeley et al., 2007). Anchored by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and
the anterior insular cortex, the salience network is sensitive to the subjective appraisal of
information. The anterior insular cortex plays a key role in integrating external sensory signals
with the internal cues received from the body (Seeley et al., 2007; Uddin, 2015) and perceptions
associated with bodily states (Craig, 2002; Zaki et al., 2012). This integration and perception are
crucial for appropriately and adaptively directing attention towards inward, internal states or the
external environment. When evaluating students’ work, teachers must adeptly integrate distinct
social-affective processes to generate productive feedback for students.
The executive control network, facilitates working memory, maintains externally focused
attention, and supports the cognitive regulation of emotion, behavior, and thought (Beaty et al.,
2016; Martin & Ochsner, 2016; Ochsner et al., 2012; Pan et al., 2018; Seeley et al., 2007). More
specifically, the executive control network is related to social-affective processing through self-
control (Turner et al., 2019), cognitive reappraisal (Picó-Pérez et al., 2019), and suppression of
intrusive thoughts (Gagnepain et al., 2017). When providing feedback to students, teachers
exercise attentional control as they consider the individual components of students’ work and
formulate evaluative judgments. As grading can elicit strong emotions from teachers, such as
exhaustion, confusion, or even boredom (Brackett et al., 2013; Myyry et al., 2020), teachers may

43

employ emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, to reframe their emotional
responses to students’ work as they are evaluating. Cognitive reappraisal has specifically been
found to be commonly used by teachers and is considered one of the more effective regulatory
strategies in the classroom (Donker et al., 2020; T. Zhang et al., 2019). Previous research has
found increased neural responses in brain areas associated with cognitive control during
cognitive reappraisal of emotions (Goldin et al., 2008). If an individual has experienced life
events such as trauma or maltreatment, emotional regulation of negative emotions is more
effortful as evidenced by increased recruitment of key hubs of the executive control network
during reappraisal (McLaughlin et al., 2015)
Providing meaningful evaluative feedback to students necessitates an introspection that
facilitates teachers in contextually processing new inputs while also integrating and forming
connections between sophisticated and complex ideas, such as students’ perspectives and the
academic concepts themselves. Together, teachers are supported in formulating productive
responses to encourage and guide students’ learning and engagement with academic content.
Deep, inward reflection, potentially critical to this type of evaluative feedback, has been found to
be associated with a network of distributed and interconnected brain regions called the default
mode network (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010; Greicius et al., 2003; Smallwood et al., 2003). The
default mode network is engaged not only when resting or daydreaming (Raichle et al., 2001),
but also when one is reflecting, imagining hypothetical or future scenarios (Immordino-Yang et
al., 2009; Singer, 2006; Spreng & Grady, 2010), and assessing abstract or moral values (Greene
et al., 2001; Kaplan et al., 2016). These constructive internal reflections are critical for mental
functioning that requires an individual to think deeply and inwardly, beyond specific task-
oriented actions (Immordino-Yang et al., 2012).

44

Reflective self and social processing is supported by the medial prefrontal cortex and
posterior cingulate cortex, two major nodes of the default mode network (Molnar-Szakacs &
Uddin, 2013; Moran et al., 2013; Northoff et al., 2006; Qin & Northoff, 2011). When individuals
are required to infer others’ intentions, internal thought processes, or theories of mind, such as
when they read fictional literature (Tamir et al., 2015), experience social emotions like
admiration or compassion (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009), or choose to engage in altruistic
behavior (Waytz et al., 2012), there is increased activation in brain regions associated with the
default mode network. As teachers assess their students’ responses, they often need to infer
students’ perspectives or state of mind to get a more complete picture of their skills and
academic understandings.
When generating new creative ideas or engaging in creative problem-solving, the
executive control and default mode networks are found to co-activate (Beaty et al., 2016; Gotlieb
et al., Under Review; Spreng et al., 2010). While the two networks typically do not co-activate
during attentionally demanding tasks, they have shown co-activation when engaging in tasks that
require thinking about the self. The type of flexible thinking necessary for creative,
autobiographical thought requires brainstorming or idea generation potentially influenced by the
default mode network paired with constraint, executive control, and regulation from the
executive control network. Evaluating students’ work in some ways requires similar creative
patterns of thought in generating specific and articulated feedback while still holding in mind
specific targets or goals corresponding to students’ academic mastery or growth.
The sociocultural context itself has been shown to influence neural activation in the
regions of the default mode and salience network when engaging in processing related to
identity, the self, and others (Barrett & Satpute, 2013; Chiao et al., 2010). For example, the

45

strength of the functional connectivity within the default mode network is related to features of
the social environment, such as perceived social support and changes in family income (Che et
al., 2014; Weissman et al., 2018). In a study of moral competence, individuals with a greater
ability to consistently and differentially apply certain moral orientations depending on the social
situations exhibited greater connectivity between the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex (Jung et al., 2016). These neural patterns of activation and functional connectivity within
the default mode network indicate that the embodied simulation of one’s own and other’s
physical and mental states enable one’s ability to infer the perspectives of others (Fingelkurts &
Fingelkurts, 2011; Molnar-Szakacs & Uddin, 2013).
The demands of the physical and social environment also shape connectivity patterns of
social-affective processing, which can potentially influence the evaluative feedback given when
grading. In a study of youths living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence, greater
functional connectivity within the executive control network eliminated the negative relationship
between neighborhood murder rate and individual cardiometabolic health (Miller et al., 2018).
The tighter connectivity of the executive control network presents a potential protective factor
that facilitates adaptive emotion regulation and resiliency through reappraising threats in the
environment and suppressing negative intrusive thoughts.
The implicit social-affective processing supported by the default mode, executive control,
and salience networks may potentially undergird the relationship between teachers’ feelings,
beliefs, and actions and thus be employed to a greater extent when teachers are engaging with
academic material from individuals with which they have existing relationships. We hypothesize
that there will be greater activation of brain regions associated with social-affective processing

46

when teachers grade their own students’ answers in the scanner in comparison to equivalent
answers not from their students.
Methods
The data for the current study were collected as part of a larger mixed-methods
investigation of the social-affective component of teachers’ support of adolescents’ learning. The
broader study included a 45-minute classroom teaching observation with accompanying pre-
briefing and debriefing on-site and a subsequent laboratory visit in which teachers engaged in
teaching-related interviews and tasks, neuroimaging, and physiological monitoring. Participants
in the present study are the same as participants in a complementary study that describes the
qualitative derivation of the pedagogical orientation measure used here (see Kundrak et al., In
Preparation, A) and a study examining the link between teachers’ neurophysiology and their
students’ perceptions (see Kundrak et al., In Preparation, B). Given the interruption to data
collection due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings presented in this study should be treated
as provisional. The remainder of the sample is planned to be collected in the 2021-2022 school
year.
Participants
Research participants were 22 secondary teachers, 11 males and 11 females, who were
identified by their school leaders as excellent at supporting students’ social-emotional
development. School sites in Southern California serving majority low-SES students of color
were selected to participate in the study due to their explicit schoolwide focus on social-
emotional learning. Participants were between the ages of 28 and 57. One participant did not
identify with any ethnicity, two identified as Latinx or Hispanic American, one as Black, Afro-
Caribbean, or African American, one as East Asian or Asian American, one as both Latinx and

47

White, and the remainder as Non-Hispanic White, Caucasian, or Euro-American. Participants
had an average of 10.4 years of teaching experience, ranging from 1 to 32 years, and had been at
their current school for an average of 5.7 years. All participants taught adolescents with 7
teaching middle school (grades 6-8), 10 teaching high school (grades 9-12), and 5 teaching both
middle and high school aged students. The range of course subjects taught by participants
included Humanities, STEM, Performing and Visual Arts, and Physical Education. All
participants gave written, informed consent and study procedures were approved by the
University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board.
Neuroimaging data was unable to be collected from two participants due to medical
conditions presenting health or safety risks to conduct magnetic resonance imaging. Functional
neuroimaging data was unavailable for one additional participant due to technical difficulties
during data collection. Of the 19 participants included in the subsequent neural analyses, one
participant was left-handed and 18 were right-handed.
Procedure
Prior to the laboratory visit, teachers generated and selected recent topics or questions
covered in their class that were populated into an online assignment for their students to
complete. Students were prompted to select two of the course concepts to explain in three to four
sentences. Student answers were sent directly to the research team and teachers did not see
student answers prior to the laboratory task. For each teacher, 10 student answers were selected
in order to have a range of complexity, accuracy, and length. To ensure answers could be read
during the allotted time and maintain consistency across participants, character and word
minimums and maximums of were imposed. Student answers were required to have between 250
to 500 characters for submission and selected answers had a word count ranging from 50-90

48

words. In some cases, a portion of a student’s answer was selected if the full answer exceeded
the maximum word count or both answers from a student were combined to reach the minimum
word count threshold. All edits for length maintained the integrity of the students’ original
answer. A matched control answer was created for each of the 10 selected student answers.
Control answers were matched in terms of spelling errors, grammar errors, length of response,
conceptual accuracy, and complexity of vocabulary. Control answers were labeled as being
obtained from the Internet.
During fMRI scanning, teachers were shown their students’ answers to the provided
prompts as well as control answers to the same prompts, each for only a brief amount of time.
Answers were projected one at a time and included the topic, answer, and either the student’s
name or the label “Internet”. For each trial, teachers were shown the stimulus for 20 seconds and
asked to evaluate the quality of the answer using an MRI-compatible four-button box held in the
right hand (index finger for A/exemplary; middle finger for B/good; ring finger for C/adequate;
pinky finger for D/poor). A warning cue of blinking red dots displayed for the final 2 seconds of
each stimulus to indicate that the stimulus would soon be removed and to remind participants to
provide their button-press response. A fixation cross appeared for 2 seconds to separate stimuli
(see Figure 2-1).

49

Figure 2-1.

The fMRI task design. During the 20-second stimulus presentation, the participant had to press a
button to assign a grade to the answer.

A block design was utilized to minimize the likelihood of the effect bleeding over by
avoiding teachers having to switch mindsets between each trial. The functional grading task was
implemented as an 8-minute run consisting of 4 interleaved task blocks (2 student; 2 control)
with 6 seconds of rest between each block, following a 12 second pre-stimulus period to allow
stabilization of the BOLD signal. Blocks alternated between student answers and Internet
(control) answers, always starting with student answers, with each task block presenting five
stimuli of the same condition sequentially. The stimulus paradigm was implemented using the
Presentation software package (Version 21.0, Neurobehavioral Systems Inc., Davis, CA, USA)
and stimuli were presented visually on an MR-compatible screen.
MRI Data Acquisition

50

Neuroimaging was performed using a 3T Siemens MAGNETON Trio System with a 20-
channel matrix head coil at the Dana and David Dornsife Neuroscience Institute at the University
of Southern California. Functional images were acquired using a gradient echo, echo-planar,
T2*-weighted pulse sequence (TR = 2000 ms, one shot per repetition, TE = 25 ms, flip angle =
90°). Slice acquisition was interleaved in ascending order with 239 functional volumes per run
with a slice thickness of 3mm and voxel resolution of 3 x 3 mm
2
. A T1-weighted high-resolution
image (TR = 1950 ms, TE = 2.26 ms, flip angle = 9°, acquisition matrix = 256 x 256) was
acquired with a voxel resolution of 1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 mm
3
. To be sent to a radiologist to rule out
incidental findings, a T2-weighted anatomical scan was acquired for all participants (TR =
10,000 ms, TE = 88 ms, flip angle = 120°, acquisition matrix = 256 x 256).
MRI Data Preprocessing
All MRI data were preprocessed using fMRIPrep 20.1.1 (Esteban et al., 2018, 2019;
RRID:SCR_016216).
Anatomical Data Preprocessing
T1-weighted (T1w) image was corrected for intensity non-uniformity (INU) with
N4BiasFieldCorrection (Tustison et al., 2010), distributed with ANTs 2.2.0 (Avants et al., 2008,
RRID:SCR_004757), and used as T1w-reference throughout the workflow. The T1w-reference
was then skull-stripped with a Nipype implementation of the antsBrainExtraction.sh workflow
(from ANTs), using OASIS30ANTs as target template. Volume-based spatial normalization to
standard space (FSL’s MNI ICBM 152 non-linear 6th Generation Asymmetric Average Brain
Stereotaxic Registration Model [MNI152NLin6Asym; Evans et al., 2012], RRID:SCR_002823; )
was performed through nonlinear registration with antsRegistration (ANTs 2.2.0), using brain-
extracted versions of both T1w reference and the T1w template.

51

Functional Data Preprocessing
First, a reference volume and its skull-stripped version were generated using a custom
methodology of fMRIPrep. BOLD runs were slice-time corrected using 3dTshift from AFNI
20160207 (Cox & Hyde, 1997, RRID:SCR_005927). Head-motion parameters with respect to
the BOLD reference (transformation matrices, and six corresponding rotation and translation
parameters) are estimated before any spatiotemporal filtering using mcflirt (FSL 5.0.9, Jenkinson
et al., 2002). The BOLD reference was then co-registered to the T1w reference using flirt
(FSL 5.0.9, Jenkinson & Smith, 2001) with the boundary-based registration (Greve & Fischl,
2009) cost-function. Co-registration was configured with nine degrees of freedom to account for
distortions remaining in the BOLD reference. The BOLD time-series were resampled into a
standard space (MNI152NLin6Asym), correspondingly generating a spatially-normalized,
preprocessed BOLD run. Automatic removal of motion artifacts using independent component
analysis (ICA-AROMA, Pruim et al., 2015) was performed on the preprocessed BOLD on MNI
space time-series after spatial smoothing with an isotropic, Gaussian kernel of 6mm FWHM
(full-width half-maximum). Corresponding “non-aggressively” denoised runs were produced
after such smoothing and were used in subsequent analyses.
fMRI Data Analysis
Statistical analysis was performed using SPM12 v.7771 (Wellcome Centre for Human
Neuroimaging, London, UK; RRID:SCR_007037) in MATLAB R2020a (The MathWorks, Inc.,
Natick, MA, USA). Student and control trials were modeled as separate conditions. Each trial
was modeled as a 20-second box-car function and convolved with the canonical hemodynamic
response function. Parameter estimates for the student and the control conditions were contrasted

52

at the individual level and then entered into a group level one-sample t-test to test for consistent
effects.
Whole brain results were thresholded using the topological false discovery rate
procedures implemented in SPM (Chumbley et al., 2010) to control cluster level false discovery
rate at less than 5%. Following recommendations in Eklund et al. (2016), a cluster-defining
threshold (CDT) of p < .001 was used and the corresponding cluster extent threshold was 67
voxels. Given the present study’s exploratory purposes, a more lenient CDT threshold of p <
.005 and corresponding cluster extent threshold of 97 voxels was used to allow clusters with in
pre-hypothesized network hubs to emerge.
Results
Behavioral Grading Responses to Student vs Control Answers
First, the difference in teachers’ button-press grading responses across conditions was
tested. There was no significant difference in the average grade awarded to answers from
students (M = 3.073; SD = 0.087) as compared to the average grade awarded to control answers
(M = 3.018; SD = 0.077), t(21) = 0.537, p = .597. Similarly, the difference in reaction times
between conditions (M = 0.457; SD = 1.52) was not statistically significant, t(20) = 1.381, p =
.091.
Brain Activation when Grading Student vs Control Answers
When contrasting activation when teachers graded their own students’ answers compared
to answers not from their students, analysis revealed more activation in several brain regions (see
Table 2-1 and Figure 2-2). Selected emergent brain regions are canonical hubs of the networks of
interest: rostral anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral ventral anterior insula correspond with the
salience network; right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right anterior inferior parietal lobule, and

53

dorsal posterior cingulate cortex correspond with the executive control network; dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex and bilateral dorsal anterior insula correspond with the cingulo-opercular
network; and no canonical hubs of the default mode network emerged. No brain regions were
more active during grading of answers not from their students versus their own students’
answers.
Figure 2-2.

Brain regions with greater BOLD activity when grading own students’ answers versus answers
not from own students

54

Table 2-1.

Brain regions whose BOLD activity differed significantly between the student and control
conditions. Whole brain results were thresholded using two topological false discovery rate
(FDR) procedures that control cluster level FDR at less than 5%. Cluster-defining thresholds
(CDTs) used were p < .001 and p <.005, with the corresponding cluster extent thresholds of 69
and 97 voxels respectively. MNI coordinate for greatest local maximum and cluster size are
reported for each cluster that survived thresholding. For larger clusters that extend into multiple
anatomical regions, other notable local maxima are reported. Bolded coordinates represent
peaks that match known executive control network, salience network, cingulo-opercular network
hubs, used to construct network ROIs.

Region Coordinate z-score Cluster size
X Y Z CDT
p <
.005
CDT
p <
.001
Anterior cingulate cortex 2 14 46 5.02 1136 233
dorsal 6 28 32 4.81
rostral 6 40 10 4.27 165
4 46 10 4.16
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right) 30 58 20 4.35 470 n.s.
38 46 28 3.34
Anterior insula
dorsal (left) -34 28 -2 5.39 162 69
ventral (left) -44 12 -2 3.44 153 n.s.
-40 12 -12 3.27
dorsal (right) 40 22 4 4.64 539 218
ventral (right) 42 14 -14 3.04 n.s.
Anterior inferior parietal lobule
(right)
52 -32 50 3.77 240 n.s.
Dorsal posterior cingulate cortex 10 -30 42 3.73 175 n.s.
10 -42 48 3.37
Superior parietal lobule (right) 34 -44 60 3.51 97 n.s.
Lingual gyrus (left) -24 -66 -4 4.29 245 n.s.
Cerebellum (left and right) 6 -66 -12 4.04 979 n.s.
Inferior lateral occipital cortex (left) -36 -68 14 3.81 100 n.s.
Superior-posterior posteromedial
cortex
12 -70 46 3.15 139 n.s.

55

Discussion
The increased activation across the brain when teachers are evaluating their students’
answers in comparison to equivalent answers not from their students suggests that reading their
own students’ answers requires teachers to engage in additional processing. Notably, we found
no regions that were more active when teachers evaluated work from an individual they did not
know. As no brain regions were more active when grading the equivalent control answers as
compared to the students’ answers, it further supports that the social component of knowing the
respondent requires further processing beyond the assessment of accuracy.
Specifically, the increased activation for teachers’ grading of their own students fell in
the canonical hubs of the networks of interest—the executive control and salience networks.
Given that the executive control and salience networks are typically involved with the regulation
of affect and emotion, the findings reaffirm the role of social-affective processing as teachers
evaluate their students’ work. The emergence of key hubs of the cingulo-opercular network
suggests an increased alertness and greater engagement of cognitive control mechanisms when
grading their own students (Cocchi et al., 2013; Sadaghiani & D’Esposito, 2015). Because
grading the matched pairs of answers should be equivalent except for the social context, the
findings suggest that teachers engage additional processing beyond what is required to simply
evaluate the content of students’ answers.
We had hypothesized key hubs of the default mode network would be differentially
activated by the task. This lack of differential activation may indicate that teachers are not deeply
engaging in self-oriented reflective processing during the evaluation of students’ work as
potentially expected. The neuroimaging task design requiring teachers to evaluate the correctness
of an answer may not have evoked the processing that would engage this network. Future work

56

could implement similar naturalistic teaching tasks that are more open-ended, such as a
formative or summative feedback on students’ overall progress, which would be well-suited for
functional connectivity analyses. Functional connectivity analyses have the potential to reveal
the coordination within and between brain networks during teaching processes. Through
investigating the functional connectivity between networks of interest supporting social-affective
processes while grading, a deeper understanding of the complex process of student evaluation
and feedback can be built.
These findings also underscore teachers’ inherently social orientations and have
implications for their construction of a culture of belonging and learning in the classroom. These
data speak to the importance of understanding the social nature of classrooms and social
processing involved in secondary teaching. Previous work has found that teachers’ beliefs and
stereotypes about students systematically shape teachers’ assessment of their students’ learning
and growth (R. F. Ferguson, 2003; Rangvid, 2019; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007). The tension
between knowing and understanding students as people through meaningful relationships and
tailoring feedback on students’ work to support their growth and development is complex.
Specifically, the complex social-affective processing during evaluation may be critical to
understanding how teachers are able to do this well. The knowledge teachers have about their
students can serve as the backdrop against which they view and interpret their students’
academic work, either by situating the work in a broader familiarity with that student’s trajectory
and situation (H. C. Hill et al., 2008; E. M. S. Johnson & Larsen, 2012) or invoking implicit
biases and stereotypes (Copur-Gencturk et al., 2020; Jacoby-Senghor et al., 2016; Quinn, 2020;
Rangvid, 2019). Teacher preparation programs and on-going training and professional
development should seek to build teachers’ nuanced understanding of the social nature of

57

teaching and reduce their implicit biases through critical reflection and interventions (Gaias et
al., 2020; McCarthy, 2018; Milner, 2003; Whitford & Emerson, 2019).
Our experimental design does not allow us to tease apart the possible sources of social-
affective processing differences we found. For example, individual differences could be due to
memories of or affect toward the student. Furthermore, these sources may vary across teachers as
teachers may invoke different social orientations toward grading. Future research can explore
how individual differences in engaging in more social-affective processing when grading relates
to other psychological and behavioral correlates of teaching. For instance, teachers with
increased engagement of these brain regions associated with social-affective processing may also
hold more supportive orientations towards teaching, or enact more socially-conscious behaviors
in the classroom.
One strength of the study is that it was designed to specifically understand how teachers
engage with their own students. The principal focus of this study was to identify patterns of
neural activity corresponding to social-affective processing relevant to authentic teaching
behaviors. Akin to other studies using personalized stimuli to show differential activation
patterns (Saxbe et al., 2015), customized stimuli have the potential to more effectively elicit
social responses from teachers that more closely mirror their naturalistic responses in the
classroom. However, this does invoke methodological considerations as teachers are not seeing
the same standardized stimuli. While the findings were robust in this sample, they should be
replicated with a larger sample.
In summary, our study presents a first demonstration that effective secondary teachers
engage social-affective neural processing when evaluating their students’ academic work, even
when their students are not present. The associated brain regions have been found to be integral

58

to the construction of social reactions and emotions, which suggests their potential involvement
in teachers’ broader social and emotional processing, such as when building scholarly
relationships and fostering a productive social climate in the classroom. While much more work
in this vein is needed, these preliminary results speak to open debates about the nature of
teaching that have implications for professional development. Future neuroimaging studies can
investigate more nuanced questions that may reveal differences in how teachers think about their
students’ work and be used to inform teacher professional development and training.

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Paper 3. Secondary Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Teaching-Specific Heart Rate
Variability Dynamics Additively Contribute to Students’ Perceptions of Academic Support

Abstract
Teachers’ physiological regulatory capacity is the psychobiological core of their social-
emotional functioning and emotional wellbeing, but little is known about how this prosocial
regulatory capacity impacts social dynamics in the classroom. Integrating measures from both
naturalistic and laboratory settings, we observed teachers’ classroom instruction and measured
their cardiac functioning in teaching-related contexts. To analyze the impact of teachers’
pedagogical practices and physiological regulatory capacity on their students’ perceptions of
academic support, we collected a standardized survey measure of perceived academic support
from students in the observed class of each participating teacher. Controlling for age, measures
of teachers’ heart rate variability and teachers’ pedagogical practices uniquely predicted
students’ perceptions of academic support. These provisional findings suggest that teachers’
adaptive physiological regulatory patterns positively contribute to students’ feelings of academic
support and demonstrate the value in developing psychophysiological frameworks of teaching.

Keywords: pedagogical practices; secondary teachers; social-emotional functioning; emotional
wellbeing; heart rate variability; regulatory capacity; academic support

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Secondary Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Teaching-Specific Heart Rate Variability
Dynamics Additively Contribute to Students’ Perceptions of Academic Support
Adolescents’ learning outcomes are tightly tied to their perceived experiences in the
classroom (Reyes et al., 2012; Wang & Holcombe, 2010). Teachers play a leading role in
creating a classroom climate conducive to students’ learning and growth. The pedagogical
practices that teachers enact can support students in building feelings of efficacy, autonomy, and
belonging (L. S. Johnson, 2009; Patall & Zambrano, 2019; Regier & Savic, 2020; Walker, 2003),
and challenge them to grow intellectually. However, effectively engaging students and
supporting their personal and intellectual development is difficult work that is deeply socially
contextualized (Deci & Ryan, 1987; Vygotsky, 1962), especially when teaching adolescents,
who are developmentally hypersensitive to social cues, relationship dynamics, and emotion
(Blakemore & Mills, 2014). Teachers must develop capacities to effectively and appropriately
interact with students and to regulate themselves in a complex social environment, in order to
build a classroom culture that feels supportive and safe to students to stretch themselves in
positive ways. In addition to what teachers say and do, adolescents are attuned to subtle cues
about how teachers engage with them and their ideas. These cues critically shape students’
experiences of school, and in turn their ability to learn.
Secondary teachers’ physiological regulation, the psychobiological core of their social-
emotional functioning and emotional wellbeing, may be an important contributor to how students
perceive the classroom dynamics, especially given adolescents’ heightened social-emotional
sensitivity. Teachers’ ability to adapt and pro-socially regulate themselves and co-regulate others
in the classroom can be used as a tool to help students feel agency and emotional connection as
they learn, but the physiological capacities on which this rests have not been investigated to our

61

knowledge. Particularly because physiological capacities for beneficial regulation reflect
emotional health and can be cultivated, identifying factors that are related to student experience
would be important for supporting teachers and for professional development. The present study
investigates how teachers’ patterns of physiological regulation may contribute to students’
experiences of the classroom, even beyond the impact of teachers’ pedagogical practices.
The Impact of Teachers’ Prosocial Regulatory Capacities in the Classroom
Understanding the social-emotional and regulatory capacities that undergird effective
secondary teaching is a matter of pressing importance and practical concern for teacher training
and evaluation. Clearly, teachers must have a toolkit of practices that they can utilize
strategically to promote skill growth in their students. Instructional moves that build equitable
and robust learning environments, such as those that elicit students’ thinking, respond to student
ideas, or pose problems for reflection and discussion have been shown to support secondary
students’ deep thinking and learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2008; Grossman et al., 2009;
Muijs & Reynolds, 2018). Yet, increasing evidence also points to the importance of teachers’
abilities to support relationship-building, classroom culture, and social-emotional wellness for
students’ wellbeing and academic success. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that such supports
delivered in stand-alone lessons, while valuable in some ways, are insufficient to improve
adolescents’ experiences of academic learning (Yeager et al., 2018). Discussion around the need
to infuse social-emotional supports throughout the classroom experience, including through
academic learning activities and work, is a major focus of current policy discussions (Darling-
Hammond et al., 2019; Immordino-Yang et al., 2018; Jones & Kahn, 2017).
Hinting at the importance of teachers’ psychophysiological regulatory capacities and
functioning, there is increasing evidence that teachers’ own social-emotional wellness is essential

62

to their ability to be successful in the classroom and to avoid burnout (Brackett et al., 2010;
Ghanizadeh & Royaei, 2015; Jennings, 2011; Schonert-Reichl, 2017). Regulatory capacity has
been shown to be a core component of social-emotional wellbeing and mitigates burnout in a
range of demanding and interpersonally complex work environments (Gagnon et al., 2016;
Jackson-Koku & Grime, 2019; A. D. Johnson et al., 2021; McNeill et al., 2018). Given the
relevance of regulatory capacity to the social-emotional classroom experiences of both students
and teachers, the present study explores beneficial patterns of regulation in teaching-specific
contexts to better understand how context-specific regulatory capacities factor into the dynamics
of teaching and student experience.
Teachers’ Physiological Regulation and Social-Emotional Functioning
The autonomic nervous system is essential for regulating bodily functioning, including
during emotion and interpersonal interactions (Kreibig, 2010). Regulatory capacity, supported by
the autonomic nervous system, changes across the lifespan (Parashar et al., 2016) and can be
cultivated with mental and behavioral supports (Bornemann et al., 2016; Kok et al., 2013;
McCraty, 2017). The autonomic nervous system has two major branches, sympathetic and
parasympathetic. A widely used index of autonomic regulatory functioning is heart rate
variability, which measures the rhythmic fluctuations between heartbeats and reflects the
complex coordination of both parasympathetic and sympathetic influences. Variability in heart
rate supports individuals in flexibly adapting to and recovering from the demands of situations
that require arousal or calmness.
Cardiac vagal functioning, which represents the parasympathetic influence on the heart,
is widely utilized as a physiological index of self-regulation that is associated with social and
emotional behavior (Porges, 2007). The vagal influence serves as a physiological “brake” that

63

can quickly adjust heart rate in order to regulate physiological states. This influence can be
measured by quantifying high-frequency heart rate variability, which refers to the rhythmic
fluctuations between heartbeats. Baseline measures of this construct reveal the capacity of this
vagal brake—capturing how much vagal influence is exerted while at rest.
In addition to reflecting greater cardiovascular fitness (De Meersman, 1993), research has
shown that cardiac vagal functioning at rest is also associated with social functioning (Fabes &
Eisenberg, 1997; Geisler et al., 2013) and resilience to stress (An et al., 2020; Dong et al., 2018).
Individuals with greater vagal regulatory control are likely to have better executive functioning
and health (Williams & Thayer, 2009), more subjective experiences and behavioral expressions
of compassion (Stellar et al., 2015), and less reported stress in their social lives (Lischke et al.,
2018). With a better ability to down-regulate negative affect and stress, individuals with higher
baseline cardiac vagal functioning can exhibit more flexible emotional responding. In addition to
the down-regulation of negative emotions, cardiac vagal functioning is also related to up-
regulation of positive emotions, such as joy and compassion. For example, higher baseline
cardiac vagal functioning is associated with positive social well-being and more perceived social
support and connectedness (Geisler et al., 2013; Schwerdtfeger & Schlagert, 2011). Studies also
demonstrate the malleability of cardiac vagal functioning. Increases in baseline vagal functioning
over time predict improvement in social well-being, which in turn leads to even higher vagal
tone (Kok et al., 2013; Kok & Fredrickson, 2010). Further, the extent to which an individual can
up-regulate their cardiac vagal functioning during a biofeedback task predicts their altruistic
behavior (Bornemann et al., 2016).
When vagal influence is momentarily lessened, known as vagal withdrawal or removal of
the vagal brake, heart rate immediately increases. A response pattern of vagal withdrawal,

64

indicated by a reduction in high-frequency power heart rate variability, is viewed as an adaptive
mechanism for low-stakes, everyday scenarios requiring a short-term and energetic response
(Porges, 1995), such as occurs frequently in the classroom. The capacity for vagal withdrawal is
associated with baseline vagal capacity, and is associated with adaptive social functioning in
children (Graziano & Derefinko, 2013; Porges et al., 1996) and adults (Balzarotti et al., 2017;
Egizio et al., 2008; Muhtadie et al., 2015). Evidence suggests that by flexibly modulating the
vagal brake, individuals can more adaptively engage in prosocial and empathic behaviors, and
better regulate their emotions (for a review, see Balzarotti et al., 2017).
In addition to the high-frequency power measures of heart rate variability discussed
above, low-frequency power is believed to be connected to sympathetic modulation of the heart
(Acharya et al., 2006). Sympathetic modulation impacts cardiac regulation through triggering the
fight-or-flight response, increasing heart rate. In comparison to vagal withdrawal, sympathetic
activation is slower-acting and more metabolically costly. As more resources are recruited to
activate this pathway, rapid engagement and disengagement is not possible to the same extent as
for vagal withdrawal. Sympathetic activation is adaptive and necessary in survival contexts.
However, it can also be related to psychological stress in non-survival situations (Delaney &
Brodie, 2000; Schubert et al., 2009) or even to greater health vulnerabilities when under chronic
stress (da Estrela et al., 2021) with implications for social behavior.
Teachers’ autonomic regulation through coordinated sympathetic and parasympathetic
activity likely contributes to teachers’ social-emotional functioning and wellbeing in the
classroom. Given the link between physiological regulatory capacity and positive social
functioning, teachers with more adaptive regulatory patterns may be more well-equipped to
support students in feeling efficacious, a sense of belonging, and productive struggle. For

65

students to feel cared for, supported, and challenged in the classroom, it is important to take into
consideration how additional factors beyond what teachers say and do impact students’
perceptions and experiences.
The Present Study
To begin to explore the correspondences between teachers’ physiological regulatory
capacities and functioning, and students’ experiences of academic support, we conducted a
coordinated field and laboratory study of effective secondary teachers’ practices,
psychophysiological functioning, and students’ experiences. Participating teachers were recruited
from public secondary schools serving urban communities with high proportions of students of
color and of immigrant backgrounds. Participating teachers were identified by their
administrators as highly effective in engaging socially with their students. We hypothesized that
teachers’ adaptive patterns of prosocial physiological regulation would contribute to explaining
students’ perceptions of academic challenge in the teacher’s class, beyond what is explained by
the teacher’s pedagogical practices alone. Specifically, we hypothesized that students would
report stronger feelings of academic support when their teachers: (H1) utilize more effective
pedagogical strategies, as observed in their classroom; (H2) show less low-frequency power
heart-rate variability in the moments before class begins; (H3) show greater vagal withdrawal,
indicated by a greater reduction in high-frequency power heart rate variability, when discussing
their own teaching philosophy and perceived professional role in a subsequent interview.
Methods
Participants
Research participants were 22 secondary teachers, 11 males and 11 females, who were
identified by their school leaders as excellent at supporting students’ social-emotional

66

development. School sites in Southern California serving majority low-income students of color
were selected to participate in the study due to their explicit schoolwide focus on social-
emotional learning. Participants were between the ages of 28 and 57. One participant did not
identify with any ethnicity, two identified as Latinx or Hispanic American, one as Black, Afro-
Caribbean, or African American, one as East Asian or Asian American, one as both Latinx and
White, and the remainder as Non-Hispanic White, Caucasian, or Euro-American. Participants
had an average of 10.4 years of teaching experience, ranging from 1 to 32 years, and had been at
their current school for an average of 5.7 years. All participants taught adolescents with 7
teaching middle school (grades 6-8), 10 teaching high school (grades 9-12), and 5 teaching both
middle and high school aged students. The range of course subjects taught by participants
included Humanities, STEM, Performing and Visual Arts, and Physical Education. All
participants gave written, informed consent and study procedures were approved by the
University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board.
Of the 22 participants, one participant reported a pre-existing heart condition.
Physiological data in the field were collected for 17 participants, while laboratory physiological
data, observational ratings, and student perception scores were collected for all participants.
Given the interruption to data collection due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings presented
in this study should be treated as provisional. The remainder of the sample is planned to be
collected in the 2021-2022 school year.
Procedure
Each of the 22 teachers participated in a 45-minute classroom teaching observation and a
subsequent laboratory visit in which teachers engaged in teaching-related interviews and tasks.
The present study was part of a larger mixed-methods investigation of the social-emotional

67

components of teachers’ support of adolescents’ deep, meaningful learning; as such, participants
engaged in additional research activities not relevant here, including neuroimaging, additional
psychophysiological recording, cognitive testing, and open-ended interviews.
Classroom Data Collection
Prior to a pre-observation interview and the observed classroom lesson, blood volume
pulse data were acquired using an E4 Empatica wristband (Empatica Inc., Boston, MA, USA).
Participants were seated comfortably and instructed to relax for the duration of the 5-minute
baseline in order to capture their heart rate variability prior to teaching. During the
approximately 45-minute classroom observation, two trained expert observers recorded low-
inference notes on teachers’ pedagogical practices and student behaviors using an observation
tool. Participants were video- and audio-recorded for the duration of the observation and the
recordings were later transcribed verbatim. Following the observed lesson and prior to the
laboratory visit, the students in the observed class were administered an adapted secondary
version of the Tripod student perception survey (R. Ferguson, 2010) using an online Qualtrics
survey. All surveys were administered in the second half of a semester as to not capture students’
initial impressions of their teacher, but instead their perceptions after substantial experiences in
their teacher’s class.
Laboratory Data Collection
Prior to starting the laboratory interview, participants underwent baseline recording using
BIOPAC MP160 Recording System and AcqKnowledge 5.0 software (BIOPAC Systems Inc.).
During baseline, participants were seated comfortably and instructed to relax for a period of five
minutes. For all sessions, physiological data, including three-lead ECG, were collected. During
the laboratory interview, participants were asked to describe their overarching vision for learning

68

in their classroom in regards to each of the five dimensions of the TRU framework. Participants
were video- and audio-recorded for the duration of the interview and the recordings were later
transcribed verbatim.
Measures
Supportive Pedagogical Practices
The TRU framework highlights five dimensions of teaching and learning influencing the
quality of the learning environment: (a) content; (b) cognitive demand; (c) equitable access to
content; (d) student agency, ownership, and identity; and (e) formative assessment (Schoenfeld,
2013; Schoenfeld & the Teaching for Robust Understanding Project, 2016). These five
dimensions serve as guidelines for the learning environment and do not prescribe a certain way
of teaching. The trained observers developed and used a 5-point rubric based on the TRU
framework to rate the extent to which teachers displayed the tenets of each domain during the
observed lesson. For each teacher, the observer ratings across the five TRU domains were
averaged to obtain an overall rating of pedagogical practices contributing to a supportive
classroom learning environment.
Student Perceptions of Academic Support
The Tripod student perception survey is organized around seven theoretical domains of
classroom instruction. The measure has become one of the most extensively used surveys of
student perceptions and has been incorporated in many teacher evaluation systems nationwide
(Measures of Effective Teaching Project, 2012). Previous research has not found evidence that
the seven domains are not theoretically distinct, but instead found a two-dimensional structure,
representing classroom management and academic support (Kuhfeld, 2017; Wallace et al.,
2016). As academic support has particular relevance to student perceptions of their teacher and

69

the present research questions, the questions administered from the Tripod student perception
survey were from the six domains found in previous studies to be related to academic support.
These domains include care (e.g., “My teacher in this class makes me feel that s/he really cares
about me”), confer (e.g., “My teacher wants us to share our thoughts”), captivate (e.g., “My
teacher makes lessons interesting”), clarify (e.g., “If you don’t understand something, my teacher
explains it another way”), consolidate (e.g., “The comments that I get on my work in this class
help me understand how to improve”), and challenge (e.g., “My teacher doesn’t let people give
up when the work gets hard”). Using an online survey, students reported to what extent they feel
like the statements about their teacher are true using a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from totally
untrue (1) to totally true (5).
A total of 382 student responses to the modified online Tripod survey were collected via
Qualtrics. To minimize the effect of artificial non-differentiation in ratings and respondents’ lack
of attention, responses were excluded based on a combination of factors, including total response
time, missing data for majority of items, and non-differentiation of ratings for reverse-coded
items. After applying exclusion criteria, 358 student responses were retained for analysis.
To determine the interrelatedness and the underlying factor structure of the survey’s
posited dimensions, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted. As all the dimensions were
expected to be subsets of the larger construct of academic support and therefore correlate with
each other, an oblique rotation was applied. Based on the eigenvalues and scree plot (Figure 3-1),
both one and two factors were suggested for future analysis. The fit and residual variance of the
single-factor and two-factor models to the data were evaluated using the Chi-square likelihood
ratio test (χ
2
), comparative fit index (CFI), the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), root mean square error
of approximation (RMSEA), standardized root mean residual (SRMR), and the Akaike

70

information criterion (AIC). Given the sensitivity of Chi-square to sample size and variables that
do not have a multivariate normal distribution, a more holistic evaluation including residual
variances, fit indices, and parsimony was used (Kline, 2005; West et al., 2012). As seen in Table
3-1, the two-factor model demonstrated relatively equivalent fit indices to the single-factor
model. Based on Hu and Bentler’s (1999) recommended ranges for fit indices, fit was marginal
for both models. Given the relative similarities across fit indices and theoretical motivation for a
singular construct of perceived academic support (Kuhfeld, 2017; Wallace et al., 2016), the
single-factor model was selected.
Figure 3-1.

Scree Plot of Eigenvalues of 29-Item Tripod Survey of Student Perceptions of Academic Support

-1
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Eignevalues
Number

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Table 3-1.

Fit Indices for Alternative Factor Models of Student Perceptions of Academic Support Based on
Modified Version of Tripod Survey

Models χ
2
df p CFI TLI RMSEA SRMR AIC
1 factor 1387.99 377 <.001 .81 .80 .089 .059 21023.66
2 factors 1260.89 376 <.001 .84 .82 .084 .059 20898.56

Note. χ
2
= Chi-square goodness of fit statistic; df = degrees of freedom; p = p-value; CFI =
Comparative Fit Index; TLI = Tucker Lewis Index; RMSEA = Root-Mean-Square Error of
Approximation; SRMR = Standardized Square Root Mean Residual; AIC = Akaike Information
Criterion.

The reliability of the modified Tripod survey was determined using Cronbach’s alpha.
The full-scale reliability was strong (α = .950). Three items were suggested for removal based on
the Cronbach alpha values. Two reverse worded items were removed given the potential for
careless responding (Woods, 2006) and the possible effect of reverse worded items on factor
structure (X. Zhang et al., 2016). A third item with less theoretical alignment with the rest of the
scale (i.e., “Students get to decide how activities are done in this class.”) was removed as the
item was more related to perceptions of what students do in the class than perceptions of the
teacher. After removing the three identified items, the full-scale had 26 items and the reliability
was α = .953. As seen in Table 3-2, the final 26-item one-factor model had factor loadings
greater than 0.55 for all items. The final model (CFI = .83, TLI = .81, RMSEA = .093 [90% CI =
.088, .099], SRMR = .057, AIC = 18190.23) had a Chi-square value of 1176.69 and 299 degrees
of freedom (p < .001).

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Table 3-2.

Rotated Factor Loadings of One-Factor Model of Tripod Scale of Student Perceptions of
Academic Support After Item Reduction

Item
Factor
Loading
My teacher in this class makes me feel that s/he really cares about me. 0.7523
My teacher makes lessons interesting. 0.7505
The comments that I get on my work in this class help me understand how to
improve.
0.7495
My teacher really tries to understand how students feel about things. 0.7477
My teacher makes learning enjoyable. 0.7423
I like the ways we learn in this class. 0.7154
My teacher checks to make sure we understand what s/he is teaching us. 0.7120
My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class. 0.7103
We get helpful comments to let us know what we did wrong on assignments. 0.6969
If you don't understand something, my teacher explains it another way. 0.6947
In this class, we learn a lot almost every day. 0.6913
My teacher respects my ideas and suggestions. 0.6880
My teacher explains difficult things clearly. 0.6825
My teacher doesn't let people give up when the work gets hard. 0.6811
My teacher knows when the class understands, and when we do not. 0.6612
My teacher asks questions to be sure we are following along when s/he is teaching. 0.6515
In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes. 0.6373
My teacher gives us time to explain our ideas. 0.6350
My teacher makes us explain my answers – why I think what I think. 0.6109
My teacher seems to know if something is bothering me. 0.6049
My teacher wants us to use our thinking skills, not just memorize things. 0.6007
In this class, my teacher accepts nothing less than our full effort. 0.5988
My teacher asks students to explain more about answers they give. 0.5940
My teacher takes the time to summarize what we learn each day. 0.5826
My teacher wants us to share our thoughts. 0.5821
Students speak up and share their ideas about class work. 0.5580
Notes. Extraction method; principal-factor; Rotation method; Promax.

The 26 retained items were used in calculating a mean perceived academic support score
for each student. The average of student scores was calculated to obtain a mean perceived
academic support score for each teacher.

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Heart Rate Variability Analysis
Measures of heart rate variability captured the beat-by-beat variability in heart rhythm
(Task Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing
and Electrophysiology, 1996). Heart rate variability underwent pre-processing, correction, and
transformations according to previously established protocols (see Yang & Immordino-Yang,
2017). Data from field collection and laboratory ECG were imported into Kubios HRV Premium
v.3.4.3 and underwent peak detection. Automatic beat correction method with acceptance
threshold of 5% was applied to correct for artifacts, such as abnormal heart rhythms in cases of
arrhythmic events or motion (Lipponen & Tarvainen, 2019). All data were visually inspected and
no irregular findings were detected after correction. RR interval series were uniformly re-
sampled at 4 Hz using cubic spline interpolation, detrended using smooth priors (Tarvainen et
al., 2002), subjected to fast Fourier transformation, and log transformed to improve the statistical
distribution (Lewis et al., 2012).
Frequency bands were defined based on recommendations by the Task Force of the
European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing and
Electrophysiology (1996). The low-frequency band of heart rate variability was defined as 0.04-
0.15 Hz and the high-frequency band was 0.15-0.4 Hz. Frequency within each band was summed
together for the absolute power.
Given the potential sympathetic influence on heart rate variability in the low-frequency
band, low-frequency power heart rate variability was used as an indicator of sympathetic
contributions. The average low-frequency power heart rate variability during the prebrief
interview baseline was calculated to determine teachers’ levels of sympathetic influence on heart
rate variability immediately prior to the observed lesson. The change in high-frequency power

74

heart rate variability was used to determine teachers’ vagal withdrawal when engaging in a
teaching-related task. Changes in this frequency band of heart rate variability are considered to
be primarily due to the vagus nerve and is therefore used as an index of parasympathetic control.
The difference in average high-frequency power heart rate variability at baseline and during the
teaching interview task was calculated.
Modeling the Effects of Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Regulatory Patterns on
Student Perceptions of Academic Support
To investigate the relationships of teachers’ pedagogical practices and heart rate
variability with student perceptions of support, a series of regression models were tested. First, a
univariate regression model was used to test if teachers’ pedagogical practices predict their
students’ perceptions of academic support. Two variables of heart rate variability involved in
different autonomic pathways of regulation were added to the initial regression model to test the
added explanatory power of teachers’ physiological regulation in understanding students’
perceptions of academic support. As age has been found to be related to individual differences in
heart rate variability (J. Zhang, 2007) as well as to teaching experience, the multivariate
regression model controlled for age to mitigate the potential confounding effect. The multivariate
regression model used is:
𝑌𝑌 𝑖𝑖 = β
0
+ 𝜷𝜷 𝟏𝟏 𝑷𝑷 𝒊𝒊 + 𝜷𝜷 𝟐𝟐 𝑳𝑳𝑳𝑳
𝒊𝒊 + 𝜷𝜷 𝟑𝟑 𝑯𝑯 𝑳𝑳 𝒊𝒊 + 𝜷𝜷 𝟒𝟒 𝑿𝑿 𝒊𝒊 + 𝜖𝜖 𝑖𝑖 (1)
Where 𝑌𝑌 𝑖𝑖 is a continuous variable of students’ perceptions of academic support, 𝑃𝑃 𝑖𝑖 is a
continuous variable of effectiveness of pedagogical practices, 𝐿𝐿𝐿𝐿
𝑖𝑖 is a continuous variable of
low-frequency power heart rate variability prior to instruction, 𝐻𝐻 𝐿𝐿 𝑖𝑖 is a continuous variable of the
difference in high-frequency power heart rate variability when discussing teaching, and 𝑋𝑋 𝑖𝑖 is a
covariate of age.

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Given the small sample size, analyses were bootstrapped to test the robustness of the
findings. Values were randomly resampled with replacement to generate 5,000 bootstrapped
samples of 17 values each, corresponding to the number of participants in the experiment.
Regression coefficients for each bootstrapped sample were calculated and from the distribution
of coefficients, 95% confidence intervals were derived.
Results
Descriptive Statistics
In this sample, the five domains of the TRU framework (Content; Cognitive Demand;
Equitable Access to Content; Student Agency, Ownership, and Identity; and Formative
Assessment) were all highly correlated with each other (r > .4), with the exception of Formative
Assessment and Student Agency, Ownership, and Identity which were not significantly related (r
= .26, p = .243). The overall mean rating of pedagogical practices was 2.77 (SD = 0.96) and
mean ratings ranged from 1 to 4.6, with a highest possible score of 5.
The average number of student scores of perceptions of academic support per teacher was
16.2 (SD = 5.79). The overall mean score of student perceptions of academic support across
teachers was 4.07 (SD = 0.266) and participants’ mean scores ranged from 3.47 to 4.42, with a
highest possible score of 5.
For the 17 participants with measures of low-frequency power heart rate variability prior
to instruction, the mean was 6.75 (SD = 1.05). While on average participants showed an increase
in high-frequency heart rate variability (M = 0.264, SD = 0.774), high-frequency heart rate
variability varied across participants with about 40% of participants showing a pattern of vagal
withdrawal (range: -0.903-2.070).
Regression Models of Perceived Academic Support

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After adding heart rate variability variables to the regression model and controlling for
age, pedagogical practices, low-frequency power heart rate variability prior to instruction, and
the difference in high-frequency power heart rate variability when discussing their own teaching
philosophy were all significant predictors of students’ perceptions of academic support.
Accounting for teaching-specific heart rate variability and age, teachers’ pedagogical practices
were positively associated with their students’ perceptions, β = .223, t(16) = 3.42, p = .005,
providing support for H1. However, in the univariate model in the series of linear regressions
that did not include heart rate variability or age, teachers’ pedagogical practices did not
independently predict student perceptions of academic support, p = .223 (see Table 3-3). Given
the lack of relationship of the overall TRU ratings with perceived academic support in the
univariate model, the correlations of perceived academic support with the individual five
domains was explored. Student perceptions of academic support were not significantly correlated
with any of the domains of the TRU framework, except Formative Assessment (r = .429, p =
.046).
Teachers’ heart rate variability predicted unique variance in students’ perceptions beyond
what could be explained by teachers’ observed pedagogical practices. Both low-frequency power
heart rate variability ( β = -.135, t(16) = -2.46, p = .030) and high-frequency power heart rate
variability ( β = -.174, t(16) = -2.48, p = .029) were inversely related to student perceptions when
controlling for age, supporting H2 and H3. The overall model with pedagogical practices and
heart rate variability predictors was significant and explained approximately 47% of the variance
in student perceptions of academic support, R
2
adj = .467, F(4, 12) = 4.50, p = .019. As seen in
Table 3-3, the amount of variance in perceived academic support that was explained by the
model improved by 44% with the addition of heart rate variability measures.

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Table 3-3.

Regression Coefficients from a Series of Linear Multiple Regressions Modeling Student
Perceptions of Academic Support With and Without Low-Frequency (LF) and Change in High-
Frequency (HF) Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
Predictors of Student Perceptions of Academic Support
Without
HRV
Including
HRV
Pedagogical practices .075 .223**
(.06) (.065)
LF power HRV prior to instruction -.135*
(.055)
Change in HF power HRV when discussing teaching philosophy -.174*
(.07)
Age -.009
(.006)
Constant 3.858*** 4.66***
(.174) (.472)
Observations 22 17
R-squared .073 .6
Adjusted R-squared .027 .467
Standard errors are in parentheses
*** p<.001, ** p<.01, * p<.05

To test the robustness of the findings, given the small sample, bootstrapping was applied
to the multivariate linear regression model. Using 5,000 bootstrapped samples, the overall model
predicting student perceptions of academic support remained statistically significant, χ
2
= 10.09,
p = 0.039 (see Table 3-4). When modeled with heart rate variability predictors and age, teachers’
pedagogical practices held as a significant predictor of their students’ perceptions of academic
support (p = .003, 95% CI [0.073, 0.372]). Both heart rate variability predictors in the model,
low-frequency power heart rate variability prior to instruction (p = .058, 95% CI [-0.275, 0.005])
and change in high-frequency power heart rate variability when discussing their own teaching
philosophy (p = .055, 95% CI [-0.351, 0.004]), were trending towards significance in the
bootstrapped analysis.

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Table 3-4.

Linear Multiple Regression Model of Student Perceptions of Academic Support Including Heart
Rate Variability (HRV) Predictors with 5,000 Bootstrapped Samples
Bootstrapped Model of Perceived Academic Support
Linear regression Number of obs = 17
Replications = 5,000
Wald chi2(4) = 10.09
Prob > chi2 = 0.0389
R-squared = 0.6001
Adj R-squared = 0.4668
Root MSE = 0.2071

Observed Bootstrap Normal-based
Perceived Academic Support Coef. Std.Err. z P>z [95%Conf. Interval]
Pedagogical practices 0.223 0.078 2.920 0.003 0.073 0.372
LF power HRV prior to
instruction
-0.135 0.075 -1.890 0.058 -0.275 0.005
Change in HF power HRV when
discussing teaching philosophy
-0.174 0.093 -1.920 0.055 -0.351 0.004
Age -0.009 0.007 -1.190 0.233 -0.023 0.006
Constant 4.660 0.575 8.450 0.000 3.579 5.786

Discussion
Previous research has advocated for the addition of physiological measures of emotion
regulation to gain further insights into the processes undergirding teachers’ regulatory capacities
(Donker et al., 2020). The relevance of heart rate variability as a regulatory marker of adaptive
social-emotional functioning is particularly applicable as teachers are required to direct and
quickly adapt to the shifting classroom dynamics. The present findings suggest that accounting

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for both teachers’ pedagogical practices and physiological measures related to their regulatory
capacity in models of students’ perceptions of academic support allows us to uncover hidden
mechanisms that are not directly observable in understanding the teacher-level factors that
contribute to students’ experiences in their classroom.
More specifically, a particular pattern of adaptive regulation in teaching-related contexts
is related to greater perceptions of academic support amongst students. While the process of
physiologically ramping up for engagement in a task could be dominated by vagal withdrawal or
sympathetic activation, greater relative reliance on vagal withdrawal during physiological
activation is seen as more adaptive. The pattern shown in the present dataset is consistent with an
adaptive pattern that is more reliant on vagal withdrawal; both greater changes in high-frequency
power heart rate variability when discussing one’s own teaching practices and lower low-
frequency power heart rate variability immediately prior to teaching are independently associated
with more perceived academic support. Interestingly, parasympathetic vagal functioning is
known to be related to social skill, prosociality and emotional wellbeing (Fabes & Eisenberg,
1997; Geisler et al., 2013; Kok & Fredrickson, 2010), and to be less metabolically costly than the
sympathetic pathway to regulation.
Teachers’ physiological regulation may influence their students’ perceptions of academic
support through a variety of likely interrelated processes. For instance, given that better
emotional wellbeing and lower stress is associated with adaptive physiological regulatory
patterns, better regulated teachers with higher levels of emotional wellbeing and less stress may
be able to better connect with their students. Teachers need to be well themselves to be effective
in the classroom and avoid burnout (Brouwers & Tomic, 2000; Jennings, 2011). This supports
the implementation of mindfulness-based interventions for teachers, which have been shown to

80

improve their social-emotional wellness and alleviate stress and burnout (Benn et al., 2012;
Crain et al., 2017; Hwang et al., 2017; Roeser et al., 2013). Our findings underscore the need for
teachers to feel supported in their work and be in conditions that are conducive to their own
emotional wellbeing.
Another possibility is that teachers with more adaptive regulatory patterns could be more
effective communicators through engaging in subtle nonverbal and verbal messaging that
reassures students, builds trust, and supports shared learning goals. Biophysiological markers,
such as eye gaze, facial expressions, and vocal tension are known indicators of emotional states
that can be perceived by others (Jospe et al., 2020; Mosconi et al., 2005; Scherer, 1986;
Zuckerman et al., 1979). These nuances of teachers’ interactions have the potential to convey
additional contextual and emotional information to students, such as reassurance or implicit bias,
beyond the words that are said. This is relevant as it has been shown that when students detect
bias from their teacher, they are less likely to build trust with that teacher (Yeager et al., 2017).
With better regulation, teachers may have more skillful control over these physiological cues to
supportively signal their expectations and encouragement to students.
Additionally, teachers with better physiological regulation may empathically assist their
students in becoming better physiologically regulated themselves and thus lead to their students
feeling more academically supported by their teacher. Research on emotional contagion,
especially during infancy and childhood, demonstrates physiological and affective synchrony
between individuals through co-regulation (Davis et al., 2018; Feldman, 2007; Shih et al., 2019).
Synchrony in heart rate variability has been found to be related to group coherence, prosociality,
and improved communications (McCraty, 2017). More specifically in schools, teachers’ stress
and burnout levels have been found to be associated with physiological markers of stress in their

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students (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, 2016). Empathic teachers may effectively model social-
emotional states conducive to learning and support students in coregulation so that their students
feel better, and ultimately more supported, when in their teacher’s presence.
The surprising lack of a direct relationship between teachers’ observed pedagogical
practices and their students’ perceptions of academic support when not accounting for teachers’
physiological regulation further supports that students’ broader experiences in the classroom are
impacted by more than what can be captured solely in a single observation. While it has been
shown that short observations of teaching can be highly representative of teachers’ general
practices (Mashburn et al., 2014), this suggests what experienced pedagogical experts have long
surmised: subtle nuances and patterns that adolescents pick up on over time contribute to their
feelings of support that trained observers may not be able to reliably detect in only a snapshot of
the class. The physiological regulation underpinning the social component of teaching may
convey teachers’ genuineness and authenticity to students or facilitate students building trust
with their teacher. Future work should attempt to differentiate the kinds of cues that teachers are
giving and that students are noticing, which are enabled by teachers’ physiological capacities.
Once these have been identified, future research can focus on building teachers’ capacities in
these areas. Furthermore, as Formative Assessment was the only one of the five individual TRU
framework domains that showed a direct relationship with student perceptions of academic
support, it could be that students’ experiences of support are most tightly tied to how their
teachers respond to their ideas, build upon existing knowledge, and address misunderstandings.
Overall, these findings indicate that the relationship between student perceptions of academic
support and teachers’ pedagogical practices is complex and additional factors contribute to how
students perceive their teacher’s support beyond what teachers say and do.

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It is important to note that the findings in this study pertain to teachers’ capacities in
teaching-specific contexts—not their baseline levels of functioning in an idealized laboratory
environment, but to the ways that they modulated their functioning to engage in teaching-related
activities. This underscores the relevance of disentangling domain-specific regulatory patterns
from a general regulatory capacity in order to better understand the social dynamics in a
particular context. Parallel studies of students’ context-specific physiology and co-regulation
with teachers would give insights into the dynamic regulatory processes in the classroom. Future
directions could also include mapping a more detailed profile of teachers’ physiological
responding by creating an index of teaching-specific regulatory capacity from multiple
physiological data sources, including metrics such as vagal functioning, cardiac output, and
vocal tension. This index would give more insight into the nature of how these physiological
processes are interrelated and facilitate teachers’ and students’ engagement in the classroom.
While heart rate variability may be an insightful metric in understanding teachers’
underlying physiological regulation in the classroom, additional research is needed to understand
how this physiology interacts with broader social-emotional and cultural contexts. Prior research
has shown that culture and other social factors, such as stereotype threat and discrimination,
impact individuals’ experiences of stress and regulation strategies in relation to heart rate
variability. For example, the link between perceived institutional racism and discrimination and
psychological distress in African American men is weaker for men with higher baseline cardiac
vagal functioning (Utsey & Hook, 2007). At the same time, in a subsequent study of young
African Americans, more instances of racial discrimination, harassment, and assault across the
lifetime were associated with lower baseline cardiac vagal functioning (L. K. Hill et al., 2017).
These findings imply that while cardiac vagal functioning may buffer the relationship between

83

discrimination and stress, the long-term social, emotional, and physical effects of discrimination
can lead to a decrease in emotional regulatory capacity over time. Thus, it must be considered
how the brain, body, mind, and context are all shaped by and shape one another (Immordino-
Yang & Gotlieb, 2017) when investigating the impact of psychophysiological functioning on
teachers’ regulatory capacity and well-being and students’ development, academic learning, and
feelings of support (Levy et al., 2016).
Though more work is needed, our findings suggest that effective teachers adapt
prosocially within their professional role. While the benefits of these capacities likely transfer to
other contexts, our findings underscore the health-related social-emotional dispositions that
effective teachers develop in their work. Future research and policy-making should focus on
identifying and building the conditions that support teachers in developing these dispositions,
which this early work suggests would have beneficial effects on youth as well.
In conclusion, these psychophysiological regulatory processes captured by heart rate
variability can provide insights beyond the traditional domain of educational research. Since
pedagogical practices and both measures of heart rate variability explain unique variance in
students’ perceptions of academic support, it demonstrates that teachers’ physiological patterns
give additional understandings into how their students perceive them beyond what can be
ascertained from their practices alone. The findings support that increased reliance on the vagal
withdrawal mechanism when ramping up engagement is an adaptive regulatory pattern that is
more supportive of students. As cardiac vagal functioning can be cultivated, targeted attention to
the development of teachers’ physiological regulatory capacities has the potential to result in
teachers’ improved prosocial functioning and ultimately better learning outcomes for students.

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General Concluding Remarks
Teachers have a profound impact on their students’ social-emotional and academic
trajectories. Effective teachers facilitate students’ meaningful engagement with academic content
and support their social-emotional development. How do teachers adapt to the ever-shifting
classroom dynamics and stay attuned to the interpersonal social relationships and emotional
states, while simultaneously keeping broader learning goals for students in mind? To answer this
question, this dissertation investigated the sociocognitive and neurophysiological factors
contributing to teaching.
This dissertation qualitatively described the complexity in teachers’ pedagogical
orientations and quantitatively examined its link to teachers’ professional vision and practices,
explored how teachers engaged brain regions associated with social-affective processing and
attentional regulation during an authentic teaching task, and considered how teachers’
physiological regulatory capacity impacts their students’ perceptions of academic support.
Overall, findings suggest that teachers’ mental processing and prosocial regulation influence
their teaching-related behaviors and students’ experiences. Teachers’ pedagogical orientations
appear to be integral in translating their professional vision into practices. These practices, along
with teachers’ cardiac functioning, were found to explain their students’ perceptions of academic
support. While preliminary, neural results indicate increased activation in key hubs of the
executive control, salience, and cingulo-opercular networks of the brain when teachers were
grading their own students’ work, suggesting that the importance of social-affective processing
and attentional regulation to the specific teaching behavior of evaluation.
A major conceptual contribution of this dissertation is a more developed framework for
incorporating biological factors influencing teaching and learning. Evidence presented here

85

suggests that teachers’ social-emotional processing is tied to their neurophysiology.
Complementary to biopsychosocial frameworks of adolescent health and wellbeing (Dodge &
Pettit, 2003; Rith-Najarian et al., 2014), similarly integrative models of teaching and learning can
lend insights into the physiological and social co-regulation occurring within the classroom that
supports or hinders students’ development. Furthermore, this dissertation provided a novel
integration of developmental theory with education theory to examine teachers’ orientations. The
application of dynamic skills theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer et al., 2003; Fischer & Bidell, 2006)
introduces social-cognitive complexity as useful way to conceptualize the integration of
teachers’ identity-related beliefs and values.
Methodologically, this dissertation incorporates a qualitative analysis of the variability in
teachers’ sociocognitive conceptualizations (i.e., professional vision and pedagogical
orientations) with quantitative investigations of students’ perceptions and teachers’ behaviors
and underlying neurophysiology. This integrative approach models the utility of mixed-methods
research and pioneers the use of an authentic, naturalistic fMRI task in the study of teaching and
learning. The results related to teachers’ physiology demonstrate how capturing hidden
mechanisms that are not directly observable can build a deeper understanding of how internal
processes impact observed interpersonal dynamics and reported experiences. Additionally, this
dissertation combines both laboratory and field measures to support meaningful and
contextualized interpretations of the findings. This dissertation aimed to identify psychological
and neurobiological patterns evident during teaching or educational behaviors using more
naturalistic methods, so that they can be compared to known systematic patterns elicited in more
controlled settings. The methods employed here also support a contextualized approach to
identify patterns seemingly crucial for teaching and learning through more naturalistic methods

86

in order for researchers to gain a better idea of the types of contexts and engagement that support
the development of these patterns. Situating the neuroscience ecologically within the dynamic,
context-laden environment of the classroom reflects how the brain and body support and
constrain the beliefs, values, feelings, and behaviors contributing to teachers’ and students’
social-emotional experiences.
This dissertation is relevant to current trends in education related to social-emotional
learning and “whole child” approaches. A major implication of this work is that teachers’
physiological regulatory capacities, previously found to be related to their emotional wellbeing,
is an important contributor to students feeling academically supported by their teacher. This
reiterates what research on teacher mindfulness and burnout has advocated (Brackett et al., 2010;
Jennings, 2011; A. D. Johnson et al., 2021): teachers’ must be cared for and emotionally well so
they can best support their students. In order to foster students’ holistic social, emotional, and
academic development, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers must take a similar lens to
the development of teachers’ social-emotional processing and physiological regulatory capacity.
Social-emotional processing equips teachers to skillfully enact their knowledge of their content,
pedagogy, and interpersonal relationships to address their goals and needs of their students. An
explicit emphasis on teaching’s sociocognitive and neurophysiological influences in preservice
teacher preparation programs and ongoing professional development can reorient educational
systems to recognize, appreciate, and support the inherently social, emotional, cultural, and
relational nature of the craft of teaching.
The research presented in this dissertation has a few limitations. Given the disruption to
data collection due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sample used in this dissertation constitutes
only half of the targeted sample size. To account for the limited sample, bootstrapping was used

87

in appropriate quantitative analyses to test model robustness. The combination of both qualitative
and quantitative analytic methods pairs rich insights into teachers’ conceptualizations of their
teaching with statistical models of teachers’ mental, physiological, and behavioral processes, and
students’ perceptions. In comparison to a purely qualitative approach, there is less sensitivity to
the nuances in teachers’ representations of their teaching-related intentions and interpretations.
Furthermore, a purely quantitative approach could provide more precision when investigating the
relationships between constructs. Given the limited sample size, the mixed-methods approach
was well-suited for the findings in this dissertation to be hypothesis-generating for future
analyses.
Building upon this dissertation’s results, future work might examine: the interplay and
synchrony between teachers’ and students’ neurophysiology in learning contexts, how changes in
teachers’ pedagogy over time, facilitated by critical reflection, relate to neural network activation
and connectivity patterns, and how standardized neurophysiological measures mediate the
relationship between teachers’ pedagogical orientations and observed practices. Research in
these areas can add the influence of the neurophysiological component to existing frameworks of
teaching and learning and can help inform interventions to support teachers in developing the
habits of mind that facilitate students’ deep learning.
In conclusion, this dissertation integrates interdisciplinary knowledge and methods to
build a deeper understanding of the social and emotional nature of teaching. Ultimately, the
characterization of these patterns has the potential to support the development of preservice
teaching preparation programs, professional developments, mentorships, and coaching
opportunities for secondary teachers that leverage and cultivate teachers’ skills in fostering
adolescents’ growth and development.

88

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Appendix
Excerpt of participant response from in-depth interview about teaching philosophy and example
of accompanying analytic memo.

In response to the interviewer’s question, “How do you think about your vision for
opportunities for all of the students in your class to engage meaningfully in the intellectual
work?”, this teacher focuses on how they aim for all students to be active and busy. The teacher
defines engagement as what students are doing—"listening to an audio of a book”—as opposed
to how they are thinking about class concepts. The teacher’s repeated use of action-oriented
language—"get them to stand up”, “interacting”, or “get them involved”—puts the focus on
participation without making any specific learning targets explicit.
The strategies listed by the teacher are somewhat universal in nature, such as the example
of how to accommodate “audio learners” or use of “sentence frames”; these strategies could be
applied across subject areas. Since the subject area of instruction is not apparent from the
teacher’s response, it suggests that the teacher is not thinking about how these strategies work in
service of building content-specific knowledge or skills. The absence of the content area from
the teacher’s narrative demonstrates how far away the teacher views the content in their class
from students’ class engagement. Instead of describing how students engage with subject area
ideas, the teacher talks about how students engage with “activities” and “supplemental
materials”. Furthermore, there is not discussion of how the teacher wants students to engage with
each other in their class, which implies that the teacher’s conceptualization of their class has
distance between not only students and content, but also from each other. In comparison, the
cognitive distance between the teacher and students is closer as there is a feedback loop between
Interviewer:
“How do you think about your vision for opportunities for all of the students in your
class to engage meaningfully in the intellectual work?”
Teacher:
“So, in order to get them to be engaged, I'm constantly thinking about all the different
learners. So, I do my very best within that class period to hit the audio learners so
there's always something to listen to whether it's me speaking at them; or they're
listening to an audio of a book, or an article or whatnot. And then at the same time,
visually: whether they’re reading the article while listening to it, reading the novel while
listening to it, whether I have a video clip on with the closed captioning on. So, just
really trying to hit all of them doing hands-on activities, getting them to stand up, act out
the play so I'm constantly thinking about ways to hit every single type of learner as I'm
doing my lesson plans. I cover all of them and then, of course, then you go into the
language learners and how do I get them involved and interacting as well? Giving them
extra materials—like supplemental materials, either prior to that lesson or right when
they come in—so it kind of helps them—sentence frames, things like that—to kind of help
get them involved as well.”

Note: Excerpt lightly edited for readability.

128

the teacher giving students activities and students demonstrating engagement through
participation.
The teacher centers themselves in the narrative through the use of many “I” statements
and reflects on examples of how the teacher actively manages students to behave in a certain way
(i.e., participate). The teacher implies that they are successful at having all students engage
meaningfully in the work if they “hit every type of learner” and their reflection on this
performance is on whether or not the teacher “covers all of [the types of learners]”. This type of
reflection is very linear and based on behaviors and actions, without meaningful reflection on the
reasons or motivations supporting these actions. There is no mention of what the teacher’s goals
for the students are beyond basic participation nor what informs the teacher’s expectations.
Despite all of the different modalities the teacher lists for students to engage with, the
students do not have much agency in this narrative—the activities are chosen and prescribed by
the teacher. There is an implied sense of an expectation of student compliance in participating in
the myriad of activities dictated by the teacher without requiring students to adopt any
responsibility for their learning.
There is also a sense of containment in the list of the ways the teacher has students
engage that does not give much space for exploration. This theme of rigidity is consistent with
each strategy serving the specific goal of participation. As an example, the teacher simply
describes the use of sentence frames to “help get [students] involved” as opposed to a richer
description of how sentence frames can be a tool to break down the language barrier to getting
important ideas across or factor into students’ burdensome social-emotional experiences of
articulating complex ideas in their non-native language, for instance. While the teacher shows an
awareness of “all the different learners”, their definition is quite simplistic as it is constrained to
“learning types” and “language learners”, as opposed to a more complex understanding of the
different affordances and contributions individual students bring to the classroom.
In focusing on getting students “interacting” and “involved”, the teacher shows a basic
awareness of the social and emotional aspects of students’ engagement. Yet, they do not
explicitly discuss students’ social-emotional development or how learning itself is social and
emotional.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kundrak, Christina Rachel (author)

Core Title Sociocognitive and neurophysiological contributors to effective secondary teaching

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Education Policy

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/19/2021

Defense Date 06/10/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag academic support,dynamic skills theory,fMRI,mixed-methods,OAI-PMH Harvest,pedagogical orientation,pedagogical practices,regulatory capacity,secondary teachers,social-affective processing

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