HAPPINESS IN TEACHING: POSITIVE EMOTIONS FOR EVALUATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLE AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROFESSOR IN THE CLASSROOM

Despite the recent progress at universities oriented towards relevant methodological changes to be applied in classrooms, it is still common to find teaching styles in which the professor decides the syllabus and how to teach the contents to the students. Professors recognize this situation but they do not always apply positive emotions in order to develop empowerment and happiness in the learning process of the students.

Very often, the way that professors teach their subjects in the classroom comes from their academic practice and not from research. However, further and better insights grounded in empirical findings are essential in order to alert universities on the necessity to be open minded when dealing with the needs and opinions of students. Regarding this argument, it is important to develop conceptual frameworks describing happiness in teaching and learning based on the existing pedagogical literature.

Several authors have explored different leadership styles and performance of the professor in the classroom. Instrument development is an iterative process that requires continued efforts to ensure the psychometric soundness of the instrument when applied to various populations and settings. Hence, the re-evaluation of existing instruments is common.

The intention in this research is to provide relatively simple frameworks, drawing as far as possible on concepts couched in educational language. The conceptualization developed here is related to approaches to teaching, but so far draws mainly on the literature of what has come to be called student learning research. Based on theories put forth by Seligman (2009 and 2011), the objective of this work has two foundations.

It concerns:
(1) to design scales related to a transformational leadership style and performance of the professor in the classroom as well as
(2) to evaluate the relationship between these constructs.

Under a focus on happiness and well-being, this paper offers a tool to evaluate the implementation of a transformational teaching style and performance of the professor in the classroom. The total number of students in this research was 543 and it involved institutions from three countries: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC), Mexico; Instituto de Artes Visuais, Design e Marketing (IADE), Portugal; and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV), Chile.

The outline of this paper is the following. First, a review of the literature on approaches to teaching, leadership styles and performance of the professor in the classroom is conducted. Second, a simple, systematic instrument to describe the behavior of the professor and a methodological procedure of research are presented. Third, an overall analysis of the results is carried out. Fourth, the last section is devoted to the discussions and conclusions.