Recognizing that students benefit when they receive autonomy-supportive teaching, the current study tested the parallel hypothesis that teachers themselves would benefit from giving autonomy support. Twenty-seven elementary, middle, and high school physical education teachers (20 males, 7 females) were randomly assigned either to participate in an autonomy-supportive intervention program (experimental group) or to teach their physical education course with their existing style (control group) within a three-wave longitudinal research design. Manipulation checks showed that the intervention was successful, as students perceived and raters scored teachers in the experimental group as displaying a more autonomy-supportive and less controlling motivating style. In the main analyses, ANCOVA-based repeated-measures analyses showed large and consistent benefits for teachers in the experimental group, including greater teaching motivation (psychological need satisfaction, autonomous motivation, and intrinsic goals), teaching skill (teaching efficacy), and teaching well-being (vitality, job satisfaction, and lesser emotional and physical exhaustion). These findings show that giving autonomy support benefits teachers in much the same way that receiving it benefits their students.

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We used the dual-process model within the self-determination theory explanatory framework to explain how physical education (PE) teachers' motivating styles and students' psychological needs explain longitudinal changes in the prosocial and antisocial behavior PE students direct at their classmates. Using a longitudinal research design, 1,006 middle and high school students (55% female) from 32 different secondary school classrooms completed the same questionnaire at the beginning, middle, and end of a semester. Multilevel structural equation modeling analyses showed that early-semester perceived autonomy support predicted a midsemester increase in need satisfaction, which predicted a late-semester increase in prosocial behavior, and also that early-semester perceived teacher control predicted a midsemester increase in need frustration, which predicted a latesemester increase in antisocial behavior (i.e., dual-process effects). In addition, students' early-semester high prosocial behavior and low antisocial behavior both predicted a midsemester increase in perceived teacher-provided autonomy support (i.e., reciprocal effects). Overall, these findings highlight the important longitudinal interdependencies among perceived PE teacher autonomy support, need satisfaction, and prosocial behavior as well as the important longitudinal interdependencies among perceived PE teacher control, need frustration, and antisocial behavior.