A well-slept teacher is a better teacher: A Multi-respondent experience sampling study

Abstract

Does sleep affect how well a teacher teaches? Adequate sleep can act as a buffer between stress and negative affect (Blaxton et al., 2017). Teacher emotions were found to influence students’ motivation in classrooms (Kunter et al., 2008). However, no study has explored how teachers’ sleep might impact students’ outcomes. We present a pilot experience sampling study that investigated the relationship between teachers’ sleep, stress, affect, as well as students’ affect, motivation and class satisfaction. We hypothesized that teachers’ sleep duration and quality are associated with their stress and affect, which in turn are associated with student motivation and classroom satisfaction. Eighteen teachers (27.8% female, 72.2% at or below 40 years old) and 437 students (54.8% female, mean age = 14.5 years, SD = 1.6) completed a two-week diary on the above variables. Results from multilevel modeling of 169 teacher diary entries revealed that shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep quality were associated with higher teachers’ stress, and that teachers’ stress was associated with teachers’ irritation and nervousness in class. Further multilevel modeling of 2661 post-class evaluations showed that teachers’ rating of nervousness was significantly associated with students’ in-class irritation and nervousness, and these students’ affects were significantly associated with their motivation and class satisfaction. The findings shed light on the potential impact of teachers’ sleep on both their and their students’ affect, and subsequently on students’ learning motivation and class satisfaction.