Lived experiences of teacher stress and perceived teaching success from four dance educators

PURPOSE: To understand the ways in which teachers describe moments of stress and their perceived success as a dance educator in the secondary level; to analyze participants’ descriptions of teacher stress and success in an effort to identify common themes, ideas, and experiences; and to create/develop interventions that may decrease dance educator stress in the secondary level in relationship to the analysis of the interviews.

RESEARCH QUESTION: How do secondary dance educators describe moments of stress when teaching in the dance classroom in relationship to their perception of personal teaching success?

METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES: This qualitative research took a grounded theory approach, employing open-ended interviews as the primary method of data collection. Since this study sought to understand participant descriptions of teacher stress in relation to their perceived success in the classroom, a phenomenological point of view– a focus on the study of direct experience, was important. I employed ideas from Gallagher (2012) and Craswell and Poth’s (2018) on phenomenology in 5 regards to attempting to separate one’s implicit bias from the research while allowing the voice of the participants to be the core of this study.