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The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.

Although the emotion work of teaching has been part of the conversation for more than 30 years, it remains a side conversation, as sort of an afterthought to academics and the accepted mainstream point of teaching and learning. In this chapter, we reflect on what has occurred in the field in the decade since our book Emotion in school: Understanding how the hidden curriculum influences relationships, leadership, teaching and learning was published. We approach the topic through a lens of tensions that we perceive occurring in the field. Emotions in schools, for the most part, remain the hidden curriculum in that in many ways emotions are still downplayed in the classroom and have no space in teacher preparation programs. Teachers, students, administrators, and teacher educators alike are left to deal with the tensions that confront them that educational researchers have yet to resolve – tensions related to measurement (what are we measuring and why), related to how we define emotion and tensions related to practice. In this short chapter we do not have the space to address all tensions that might arise; we have chosen a few to provoke conversation and thoughts about where the field may go from here. Suggestions for beginning teachers and research for teacher preparation are offered.

In this chapter, we develop an argument in support of comparative framing in teacher education research with the purpose of strengthening the education profession and particularly the professional field of teaching and teacher education. There is little agreement in the field on the required knowledge needed to become a highly effective teacher and on how to know that teachers know enough of a subject to teach it. We argue that comparative and collaborative cross-national studies serve as ideal catalytic forces to develop much-needed ontologies to develop definitions and realize contrasts, possibilities, and limitations. The construction of ontologies supports the epistemological bases of the profession. Comparative studies help to understand what others with similar goals such as the education and support of teachers have been able to achieve under what conditions, resources, and contexts.