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.

In the face of everyday classroom challenges, students display resilience by responding with increased agentic engagement. We hypothesized that this tendency toward greater initiative and lesser passivity was both an outcome of autonomy need satisfaction and autonomy-supportive teaching and a predictor of students’ future capacity to experience autonomy satisfaction and to recruit autonomy support. Twenty-two physical education (PE) teachers and their 1,422 Korean students (648 females, 773 males; 929 middle schoolers, 493 high schoolers) were randomly assigned to participate in an autonomy-supportive intervention program (ASIP), and we assessed their students’ autonomy satisfaction, autonomy dissatisfaction, agentic engagement, and agentic disengagement at the beginning, middle, and end of an academic year. By midyear, a multilevel structural equation modeling analysis showed that students of teachers who participated in the ASIP reported greater autonomy satisfaction and agentic engagement and lesser autonomy dissatisfaction and agentic disengagement and also that these gains in agentic engagement and declines in agentic disengagement then predicted those students who were able at year-end to self-generate autonomy need satisfaction and recruit teacher-provided autonomy support.

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