The goal of this research was to examine individual teachers’ beliefs about their experiences, abilities, students, and academic tasks through two concepts evolving out of positive psychology - flow and academic optimism. Researchers have theorized and found correlational support for the idea that flow is an optimal psychological state underlying peak performance. This study examined two competing models of flow. Jackson (1998) defined flow as a holistic, subjective experience encompassing all nine of Csikszentmihalyi’s original elements. Quinn (2006) conceived of flow as a causal model, with antecedents and consequences defining flow as the merging of awareness and application. The results from CFA and SEM of 260 elementary school teachers, demonstrated that Jackson’s model provided a better explanation of flow for teachers. For teachers, flow is a holistic and integrated concept with nine aspects.
Hoy and colleagues (2006) theorized that collective teacher efficacy, faculty-trust
in students and parents, and academic emphasis are dimensions of a single latent trait of
schools called academic optimism. The (Hoy, et. al., 2007) model of individual academic optimism was well supported. Teacher academic optimism is a second-order factor comprised of three first order factors: sense of teacher efficacy, teacher trust in parents and students and individual teacher academic emphasis. In this analysis, the measures of
individual academic optimism were refined.
The construct of general life optimism describes an individual’s positive expectation about the future. Enabling structure describes the extent to which the structure of a school supports teachers’ work. The correlational results yielded that a teacher sense of flow and academic optimism were positively related. General life optimism was positively correlated with academic optimism. Enabling school structure was positively correlated with academic optimism but the relation with flow was not supported. Finally, the results from exploratory analysis of multiple predictors for teacher sense of academic optimism showed that general life optimism, flow and teacher perception of enabling school structure all made significant contribution to the explanation of teacher’s sense of academic optimism, while academic optimism and general life optimism made significant contributions to the explanation of teacher’s sense of flow.