Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology
Relationships Between Teachers and Children
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- Conceptual-Theoretical Issues in Research on Child-Teacher Relationships 211
- Information Exchange Processes: Feedback Loops Between Child and Teacher
- Teacher-Child Interactions
- Teachers’ Interactions With Other Students as Observed by Peers
- Conceptual-Theoretical Issues in Research on Child-Teacher Relationships 213
- Structural Aspects of the School Environment
- School Climate and Culture
210 Relationships Between Teachers and Children Other child characteristics that may be linked to the rela- tionship that children develop with teachers include their own social and academic competencies and problems (Ladd et al., 1999; Murray & Greenberg, 2000). In a large sample of ele- mentary school children, Murray and Greenberg reported that children’s own reports of feeling a close emotional bond with their teacher were related to their own and their teachers’ re- ports of problem behavior and competence in the classroom. Similarly, Pianta (1992) reported that teachers’ descriptions of their relationships with students in kindergarten were re- lated to their reports of the child’s classroom adjustment and, in turn, related to first-grade teacher reports. A cycle of child be- havior and interactions with the teacher appeared to influence (in part) the teachers’ relationship with the child, which in turn was independently related (along with reports of classroom be- havior) to teacher reports of classroom adjustment in the next grade. Ladd et al. (1999) suggested that relational style of the child is a prominent feature of classroom behavior. Also important to the formation of the child-teacher rela- tionship, though less visible to teachers, are the thoughts and feelings of their students, including their general feelings about the school environment and about using adults as a source of support. Third through fifth graders from urban, at-risk schools who reported the highest levels of dissatisfaction with the school environment reported less social support at school and a more negative classroom social environment than did their more satisfied peers (Baker, 1999). Similarly, elementary school children who report an emotionally close and warm re- lationship with their teacher view the school environment and climate more positively (Murray & Greenberg, 2000). Clearly, one issue in sorting out associations (or lack thereof) of children’s judgments of school climate and the quality of child-teacher relationships is the experiential source of these judgments. Given the much greater weight on classroom expe- rience in young children’s judgment of school climate, it is likely that these findings demonstrate the influence of child- teacher relationships on children’s judgments of climate and social support in the broader school environment. Whether and how this relation changes with development, such that school climate plays a relatively greater role in judgments of the rela- tional quality of classroom experiences over time, is at this time unknown. Just as teachers make judgments about when to invest or not invest in a relationship, children, especially as they grow older, calculate their relational investment based on the expected returns (Muller, Katz, & Dance, 1999). Urban youths (largely African American males) enrolled in two sup- plemental programs near Boston reported investing more with teachers who show that they care yet are also able to provide structure and have high expectations for students progress. Clearly, these child characteristics, behaviors, and per- ceptions are not independent of one another. As suggested earlier, boys tend to act out more in primary grades, and this behavior, rather than simply gender itself, may account for the conflict they have with teachers. Similarly, there is evidence linking child factors such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and disability classification, and the associations between these factors and the quality of the child-teacher relationship are likely to be complex. Nevertheless, what the child brings into the classroom each day is an important piece of the child-teacher relationship. Representational Models An individual’s representational model of relationships (Bowlby, 1969; Zeanah et al., 1993) is the set of feelings and beliefs that has been stored about a relationship that guides feelings, perceptions, and behavior in that relationship. These models are open systems: The information stored in them, while fairly stable, is open to change based on new experi- ence. Also, representational models reflect two sides of a relationship (Sroufe & Fleeson, 1988). A teacher’s represen- tational model of how children relate to teachers is both the teacher’s experience of being taught (and parented) and his or her own experience as a teacher. Representational models can have an effect on the forma- tion and quality of a relationship through brief, often subtle qualities of moment-to-moment interaction with children such as the adult’s tone of voice, eye contact, or emotional cues (Katz, Cohn, & Moore, 1996), and in terms of the toler- ances that individuals have for certain kinds of interac- tive behaviors. Therefore, adults with a history of avoidant attachment, who tend to dismiss or diminish the negative emotional aspects of interactions, will behave differently in a situation that calls for a response to an emotionally needy child than will adults whose history of secure attachment provides support for perceiving such needs as legitimate and responding to them sensitively. In Pedersen et al.’s (1978) case study, adults were asked to recall experiences with a particular teacher who had a reputation as exceptional. This was an attempt to examine (retrospectively) the features of experience associated with an influential teacher. These recollections describe the impact of a teacher who formed relationships with students that, according to their reports, made them feel worthwhile, sup- ported their independence, motivated them to achieve, and provided them with support to interpret and cope with envi- ronmental demands. Students’ representations of their rela- tionships with a specific teacher appeared to be a key feature of their experience in relationship with that teacher.
Conceptual-Theoretical Issues in Research on Child-Teacher Relationships 211 Teachers’ representations have been examined only re- cently. Based on interview techniques developed for assess- ment of child-parent relationships, Stuhlman and Pianta (in press) gathered information from 50 teachers of kindergarten and first-grade children. Teachers of first graders had rela- tively higher levels of negative emotion represented in rela- tionships with students than did the kindergarten teachers. For both groups of teachers, representations of negative emotion were related to their discipline and negative affect in interac- tions with the children about whom they were interviewed. Teachers’ representations were only somewhat related to the child’s competence in the classroom, and teachers’ represen- tations were related to their behavior with the child indepen- dent of the child’s competence. The Stuhlman and Pianta (in press) study suggests that teacher representations, while re- lated in predicted directions to their ratings of child compe- tence and to their behavior with the child, are not redundant with them, with indications that representations are unique features of the child-teacher relationship. Muller et al. (1999) argued that teachers’ expectations for students are essential components of the development of pos- itive or negative relationships with children. They suggested that teachers calculate expected payoffs from investing in their relationships with students. The authors provided an example of one teacher’s differential expectations for two students with very similar backgrounds. Both were Latino stu- dents with excellent elementary school records who were get- ting poor grades in middle school. Although both boys were involved with a peer group that encouraged cutting class, one student broke away from his friends to attend the teacher’s class. Interviews with the teacher suggested that she invested much more time and energy into this student, who she thought was less susceptible to peer pressure, because she believed she could have a greater influence on him than on the other. Further work on representational aspects of child-teacher relationships is needed to distinguish these processes from general expectations and beliefs held by the child or teacher. At present, there is sufficient evidence from research on child- parent relationships to posit that representational models, al- though assessed via individuals’ reports and behaviors, may in fact reflect properties of the relationship (Main, 1996) and therefore be better understood not as features of individuals but as relational entities at a different level of organization. Information Exchange Processes: Feedback Loops Between Child and Teacher Like any system, the components of the child-teacher rela- tionship system interact in reciprocal exchanges, or loops in which feedback is provided across components, allowing calibration and integration of component function by way of the information provided in these feedback loops. In one way, dyadic relationships can be characterized by these feedback processes. For example, the ways that mother and child negotiate anxiety and physical proximity under conditions of separation characterize the attachment qualities of that mother-child relationship (Ainsworth et al., 1978). As in the attachment assessment paradigm, feedback processes are most easily observed in interactive behaviors but also in- clude other means by which information is conveyed from one person to another. What people do with, say or gesture to, and perceive about one another can serve important roles in these feedback mechanisms. Furthermore, the qualities of information exchange, or how it is exchanged (e.g., tone of voice, posture and prox- imity, timing of behavior, contingency or reciprocity of be- havior), may be even more important than what is actually performed behaviorally, as it has been suggested that these qualities convey more information in the context of a rela- tionship that does actual behavioral content (Cohn, Campbell, Matias, & Hopkins, 1990; Greenspan, 1989).
Although there is a large literature on interactions between teachers and children (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1986; Zeichner, 1995), it is focused almost entirely on instruction. Recent work has integrated a social component to understanding instructional interactions (e.g., Rogoff, 1990), but in the majority of studies of teachers’ behaviors toward children in classrooms, the social, emotional, and relational quality of these interactions is almost always neglected. Teachers and children come together at the beginning of the year, each with their own personality and beliefs, and from the moment the children enter the classroom, they begin interacting with one another. It is through these daily interactions, from the teacher welcoming students in the morning to the moment the children run out the door to catch the bus, that relationships develop. Recently, investigators have gained a better understanding of the specific types of in- teractions that lead to the formation of relationships between students and teachers. As with studies on individual charac- teristics and perceptions, these relational interaction studies are imbedded within a much larger field of research on class- room interactions. It is not surprising that teachers’ interactions with children are related to characteristics of the children themselves. Peer- rejected children tend to be more frequent targets of correc- tive teacher feedback than nonrejected classmates (e.g., Dodge, Coie, & Brakke, 1982; Rubin & Clarke, 1983), and it
212 Relationships Between Teachers and Children has been repeatedly demonstrated that teachers direct more of their attention to children with behavior or learning prob- lems and to boys (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1974). Similarly, children rated as more competent in the classroom are more frequent recipients of sensitive child-teacher interactions and teachers’ positive affect (Pianta et al., 2002). Once again, when considering child-teacher interactions in the context of this dyadic relationship system, it is important to recognize that there are strong bidirectional relations between child characteristics and teacher behavior. Research on teacher-child interactions as they relate to student motivation provides some insight into associations between interactions and relationships. Skinner and Belmont (1993) suggested that although motivation is internal to a child, it requires the social surrounding of the classroom to flourish. They suggested three major components to this social environment: involvement, autonomy support, and structure. Involvement is defined as “the quality of inter- personal relationships with teachers and peers. . . . [T]eachers are involved to the extent that they take time for, express affection toward, enjoy interaction with, are attuned to, and dedicate resources to their students” (p. 573). This definition closely resembles definitions of a positive child-teacher relationship. Skinner and Belmont (1993) found that upper elementary teachers’ reports of greater involvement with students were the feature of the social environment most closely associated with children’s positive perceptions of the teacher. Further- more, they found a reciprocal association between teacher and student behavior such that teacher involvement facili- tated children’s classroom engagement and that this engage- ment, in turn, led teachers to become more involved. Students who are able to form strong relationships with teachers are at an advantage that may grow exponentially as the year progresses. Similar research conducted with adoles- cents suggests that student engagement with teachers is dependent not only on their feelings of personal competence and relevance of course material but also on students’ per- ceptions of feelings of safety and caring in the school envi- ronment (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000).
An interesting line of recent research has focused on teachers as social agents of information and the role that their interac- tions with a given student serve as sources of information about child-teacher relationships for the other students in the class- room (Hughes, Cavell, & Willson, in press; White & Kistner, 1992). Hughes et al. (in press) reported that classmates’ perceptions of the quality of the relationship between their teacher and a selected child in the classroom were related to their own perceptions of the quality of their relationship with the teacher. It is important to note that these relations were observed independent of the characteristics of the child, sug- gesting that this is a unique source of social information in the classroom setting that has consequences for the impressions that children form of their teacher (and vice versa), which in turn could relate to help seeking and other motivational and learning behaviors (Newman, 2000). In a related study, White and Kistner (1992) examined relations between teacher feed- back and children’s peer preferences in early elementary stu- dents, finding that teachers’ negatively toned feedback toward selected children was related negatively to classmates’ prefer- ences for these children. With regard to understanding the role that interactive be- haviors play in the context of the entire teacher-child rela- tionship, patterns of behavior appear to be more important indicators of the quality of a relationship than do single in- stances of behavior. It is not the single one-time instance of child defiance (or compliance) or adult rejection (or affec- tion) that defines a relationship. Rather, it is the pattern of child and adult responses to one another—and the quality of these responses. Pianta (1994) argued that these qualities can be captured in the combination of degree of interactive involvement between the adult and child and the emotional tone (positive or negative) of those interactions. Birch and Ladd (1996) pointed out that relationship patterns can be observed in global tendencies of the child in relation to the adult—a tendency to move toward, move away, or move against.
Also involved in the exchange of information between adult and child are processes related to communication, per- ception, and attention (Pianta, 1999). For example, how a child communicates about needs and desires (whiny and petulant or direct and calm), how the teacher selectively at- tends to different cues, or how these two individuals interpret one another’s behavior toward each other (e.g. “This child is needy and demanding” vs. “This child seems vulnerable and needs my support”) are all aspects of how information is shaped and exchanged between child and teacher. Percep- tions and selective attending (often related to the individuals’ representations of the relationship; see Zeanah et al., 1993) act as filters for information about the other’s behavior. These filters can place constraints on the nature and form of infor- mation present in feedback loops and can be influential in guiding interactive behavior because they tend to be self- fulfilling (Pianta, 1999). Over time, these feedback and in- formation exchange processes form a structure for the interactions between the adult and child.
Conceptual-Theoretical Issues in Research on Child-Teacher Relationships 213 In sum, processes involving transmission of information via behavioral, verbal, and nonverbal channels play a central role in the functioning of the dyadic system of the child- teacher relationship. For the most part, research has focused on descriptions of instructional behaviors of teachers, on teachers’ differential attentiveness to children, and on chil- dren’s engagement and attention in learning situations (see Brophy & Good, 1974). There is much less information available on social and affective dimensions of child-teacher interactions, nonverbal components of interaction, and the dy- namics of multiple components of interaction in classroom time or developmental time. Furthermore, how these interac- tive processes are shaped by and shape school- and system- level parameters (e.g. school climate, policies on productive use of instructional time) is even less well described. Nonethe- less the available data provide support for the developmental systems perspective of child-teacher relationships and the complex ways in which information is transmitted through multiple channels between child and teacher and the fact that this information plays an important role in children’s and teachers’ perceptions and representations of one another. External Influences Systems external to the child-teacher relationship also exert influence. Cultures can prescribe timetables for expectations about students’ performance or the organization of schools (Sameroff, 1995) that can shape how students and teacher relate to one another. What other external influences shape student-teacher relationships? State regulations mandate standards for student performance that affect what teachers must teach, and at times how they must teach it. School sys- tems have codes for discipline and behavior, sometimes man- dating how discipline will be conducted. States and localities prescribe policies and regulations regarding student-teacher ratios, the placement of children in classrooms, at what grade students move to middle school, or the number of teachers a child comes into contact with in a given day. Teachers also have a family and personal lives of their own. Structural Aspects of the School Environment Structural variables in classrooms and schools play an impor- tant role in constraining child-teacher relationships through direct effects on the nature of interaction and indirectly via at- tributes of the people involved. For example, observations of child-teacher interactions in kindergarten and first grade are observed to vary as a function of the ratio of children to adults in the room, the activity setting (small or large group), and the characteristics of the children in the classroom. In large samples of students in kindergarten (Pianta et al., 2002) and first grade (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network [ECCRN], 2001), children in classrooms with a low ratio of children to adults receive more frequent contacts with their teacher and contacts that are more positive emotionally. Teachers in these classrooms are observed to be more sensi- tive. Similarly, in both of these samples, when the activity setting was large-group or whole-class instruction, children had many fewer contacts with the teacher than when in small groups. In a sample of more than 900 first-grade classrooms, children, on average, were engaged in individual contact with their teachers on approximately 4 occasions during a 2-hr morning observation (NICHD ECCRN, 2001). It appears that attributes of the class as a whole are related to the quality of interactions that teachers have with an indi- vidual child (NICHD ECCRN, 2001). Therefore, when the classroom is composed of a higher percentage of African American children or children receiving free-reduced lunch, teachers were observed to show less emotional sensitivity and support and lower instructional quality in their intersec- tions with an individual (unselected) student. These findings suggest perhaps that the racial and poverty composition of the classroom may represent demand features of the children, which can result in a teacher’s behaving more negatively with children (with attendant consequences for their relationships) when high as a function of the concentration of children with these characteristics in classroom. This suggestion is sup- ported by survey data demonstrating that teachers with high concentrations of ethnic minority or poor children in their classrooms experience a greater degree of burden (Rimm- Kaufman, Pianta, Cox, & Early 1999). Finally, the level or organization of the school also affects how child and teacher relationships form and function. Eccles and Roeser (1998) summarized findings suggesting that as children move through elementary school and into middle school, there is an increasing mismatch between their continuing needs for emotional support and the school’s increasing departmentalization and impersonal climate.
How the school values and supports the emotional-social component of teacher-child interactions involves its view of the role and importance of child-teacher relationships (e.g., Battstich et al., 1997; Haynes, 1998). As noted earlier, it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which teacher-child rela- tionships and school climate influence one another and the extent to which the balance of influence shifts as children grow older and their experiences are more widely distributed within a school. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that |
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