Teachers’ opinions toward implementing affect-focused mathematics teaching in real and virtual classrooms

This study aims to understand teachers’ opinions toward a framework of affect-focused mathematics teaching and its use in real and virtual classrooms. The participants were 11 school teachers from diverse backgrounds (mostly teaching mathematics). Before the interview, the teachers viewed an introduction to the framework and the teaching materials of the PowerPoint version for real classrooms, and that of the application version (with more interactive games and real-time process data) for virtual classrooms. With qualitative methodologies and the bio-eco-tech model as an analytical model, the analysis results show that teachers perceive that affect is sense-making in the bioecosystem. In the microsystem, students experience the pedagogy of the framework, ICT facilities, and teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge. In the mesosystem, the family environment determines the use of extension to outside school settings. The exosystem needs teacher education and advanced ICT development. In the macrosystem, fully implementing the framework has cultural constraints from direct teaching, textbooks, and abundant teaching content—the pandemic and the fast-developing ICT impact the chronosystem. This study contributes to a refined bio-eco-tech model linking real and virtual classrooms, which suggests ways to improve ICT, pedagogical, and teacher program designs for educational practices.