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Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) plays a crucial role in enabling dialogue sys- tems to effectively respond to user requests. The emotions in a conversation can be identi- fied by the representations from various modal- ities, such as audio, visual, and text. How- ever, due to the weak contribution of non-verbal modalities to recognize emotions, multimodal ERC has always been considered a challenging task. In this paper, we propose Teacher-leading Multimodal fusion network for ERC (TelME). TelME incorporates cross-modal knowledge distillation to transfer information from a lan- guage model acting as the teacher to the non- verbal students, thereby optimizing the efficacy of the weak modalities. We then combine multi- modal features using a shifting fusion approach in which student networks support the teacher. TelME achieves state-of-the-art performance in MELD, a multi-speaker conversation dataset for ERC. Finally, we demonstrate the effec- tiveness of our components through additional experiments.