Abstract:

Educator spirit serves as a spiritual guide for teacher workforce development in the new era, emphasizing macro-level guidance for professional ideals. By contrast, the spiritual portrait of outstanding teachers highlights teachers’ spiritual qualities in concrete educational practice and focuses on the micro-level dimension of professional practice. The transformation from ideals to practice requires specific references, and the spiritual portrait of outstanding teachers can serve as an intermediary link, providing frontline teachers with more actionable practical references within the macro framework of educator spirit. Situated in basic education settings, this study selects special-grade teachers as research participants and adopts behavioral event interviews and grounded theory to examine the spiritual qualities of outstanding teachers. Through three-stage coding, it constructs a theoretical model of the spiritual portrait of outstanding teachers. The model includes three first-level indicators, namely the concept of the “self,” commitment to the “greater self,” and the realm of “selflessness”; eight second-level indicators, namely willpower, thinking structure, developmental aspiration, educational philosophy, educational wisdom, mission of master teachers, social responsibility, and international commitment; and 27 third-level indicators.

Key words: outstanding teachers, spiritual portrait, educator spirit, grounded theory