Abstract: Rural teachers’ social-emotional competence refers to their capacity to regulate personal emotions in rural contexts and to exhibit socially expected behaviors through social interactions. It is a dynamically evolving construct shaped by the interplay between external environments and individual actions. This competence is of great significance for narrowing the urban-rural educational gap and unleashing the endogenous vitality of rural schools. Based on an analysis grounded in Giddens’ structuration theory, the development of this competence faces such predicaments as rule alienation, resource scarcity, temporal-spatial fragmentation, and habitus conflict. The underlying cause lies in the structural contradiction between the modern educational system and the emotional ecology of rural society under the urban-rural dual structure. To resolve these dilemmas, a four-dimensional support system of “time-space, rules, resources, and agency” should be established: optimizing physical space and reconstructing social relations to reshape the temporal-spatial field, reconstructing the rule system through differentiated evaluation criteria, building a rural resource repository to enhance resource allocation efficiency, strengthening reflective practice to enhance teachers’ agency. This system aims to facilitate the transformation of rural teachers’ social-emotional competence from passive adaptation to active creation, achieving the coordinated development of individual professional growth and rural education development.