Unpacking the role of school climate factors in fostering teacher enjoyment and self-efficacy in higher education

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329001 August 13, 2025 12 / 17 navigate challenges and grow in their roles. In such a school environment, it is essential for teachers to be inspired to be innovative in instruction. Teachers should be granted the freedom and autonomy by school leaders to make decisions regarding their classrooms and teaching methods. Empowering them to experiment with new teaching methods, curricu- lum design, and assessment strategies, allows for creativity and innovation. Workshops, seminars, and courses focused on instructional strategies can be arranged to assist teachers in recognizing and appreciating their achievements, thereby enhancing their self-efficacy and sense of competence. Moreover, ample resources are essential for increasing teacher enjoyment. Schools should ensure teachers have access to comprehensive curriculum resources, necessary materials and supplies, technology infrastructure, and educational technology tools. Administrators should also grant teachers appropriate decision-making rights. Establishing regular platforms for communication and feedback enables teachers to express their needs and concerns. Additionally, professional development workshops can incorporate mindfulness inter- ventions and emotion regulation techniques [128,129] to support teachers in cultivating positive emotions and equip them with practical strategies to handle challenges and setbacks and further strengthen their sense of efficacy. Limitations

To start, this study used self-reported questionnaire data to test the proposed model, a method commonly used to eval- uate teachers’ emotional experiences [130]. Nevertheless, it is vital to acknowledge that this approach may have poten- tially strengthened the relationships among the variables under investigation. As noted by Winograd, teachers may be inclined to overstate their enjoyment when reflecting on their emotional experiences in the classroom, possibly due to societal expectations that teachers should always find joy in their work [131]. Additionally, the quantitative design of the study limited the opportunity to capture participants’ personal voices and unique experiences. Therefore, further research employing mixed-methods approaches and incorporating data from multiple sources such as students, classroom observ- ers, and administrators is necessary to triangulate data and deepen our understanding of the connections between the key variables in this research. Second, while snowball sampling enabled efficient recruitment of teachers, its self-selection nature may bias the sample toward individuals with stronger social connections or shared perspectives. Future studies could benefit from adopting hybrid sampling strategies to ensure more diverse representations and enhance the validity of the findings. Third, given that this study was carried out on Chinese college teachers whose experiences and workplace environments may be different from those of teachers in other contexts and cultural backgrounds, it is essential for future

research to include a broader range of samples to ensure the generalizability of the findings. For example, studies could examine teachers across different educational levels (e.g., elementary or secondary school), or in non-Asian cultural con- texts to assess whether the observed relationships hold across diverse educational settings. Finally, in this study, factors like teachers’ career stages or age groups were not taken into account in the model. As the career stage has been shown to influence teachers’ psychological experiences [18,132], future studies are recommended to explore how career stages influence the relationships among the main variables in this study. Supporting information S1 Data. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29371211.v1. (XLSX) Author contributions Conceptualization: Xiaoyi Bing, Jianqiao Cai. Data curation: Xiaoyi Bing. Formal analysis: Xiaoyi Bing. Funding acquisition: Jianqiao Cai.