Temperament and Narratives Lab

Teacher Stories is the product of a budding collaboration within the College of Education at the University of Maryland, between Dr. Teglasi’s research team in School Psychology and instructors from the Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership program. The partnership aims to explore and understand the experience of undergraduate student teachers during their final semesters, when they are immersed in their school placement. Because teaching is a profession that is simultaneously challenging and fulfilling, the goal of the current study is to use narratives and stories to explore how student teachers understand, experience, and respond to the challenges and successes of teaching at the earliest point in their career. These narratives are explored alongside more traditional measures that gauge individual differences in temperament, coping, self-efficacy, and responsibility with the goal to gain insight on individual differences in responses to stress in the classroom, what it means to “cope” as a new teacher, and the ways in which each construct and each method of measurement can inform our understanding of teacher experience.