Abstract:

In the last decade, the progress in teaching at universities has been oriented towards self-directed learning of the students. However, it is still very common to find teaching styles in which the professor has the primary responsibility in his or her class, i.e. the professor prepares the syllabus and decides how to teach the contents to the students, the type of activities to conduct in class and the student assignments, playing an active role in front of the students.

Similar to the research on learning of the students, in studies on teaching there are interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on how professors act and perceive what they do in the classroom. In this sense, recently the discipline of Positive Psychology point out that evaluations of life satisfaction are linked to happiness and relevant studies have addressed overall satisfaction with life in certain domains, including learning and teaching in virtual and face-to-face learning.

In educational literature, it is important to characterize and evaluate the most influential factors in virtual learning environments due to the impact of these factors is relevant in order to improve the student satisfaction and happiness in the classroom. As a consequence, the knowledge of the different didactic techniques is essential for planning the academic curriculum of the students, and it could be of interest to heads of educational institutions and professors for the analysis of their own educational outcomes.

The conceptualization that we have developed is related to approaches to teaching. This research is aimed at understanding and describing the conditions of didactic techniques and experiences of the professor in order to improve the satisfaction and the happiness in the classroom of the students. Also, in this paper attributions consistent with the findings of Positive Psychology were analyzed and a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature has been conducted at universities in Mexico, Portugal and Spain between May and September 2017, within the framework of an international research of teaching innovation.

In particular, this research is aimed to assess the impact of different leadership styles of the professor on happiness in the classroom, considering some personal characteristics of the students. For this reason, this study was experimental, transversal, cross-cultural, and quantitative in nature, and the sample included Business and Marketing students in those countries.

This paper describes the objectives, contents, and achievements of this research project during the 2017 academic year. The outline of this paper is the following. First, a review of the literature on approaches to positive emotions, leadership styles and happiness in the classroom in virtual contexts is conducted. Second, a simple, systematic instrument to measure these constructs is presented. Third, an overall analysis of the results is carried out. Fourth, the last section is devoted to the discussions, conclusions, implications and further research.

Keywords:

Teaching, emotions, happiness, classroom, Higher Education.