Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology
Relationships Between Teachers and Children
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- Dyad-Focused Approaches
- Conclusions and Future Directions: Developmental Analysis of Child-Teacher Relationships 227
- CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS: DEVELOPMENTAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD-TEACHER RELATIONSHIPS
- References 229
226 Relationships Between Teachers and Children aggressive behavior in their classrooms. The authors con- cluded that perhaps the greatest effects of the PATHS curricu- lum are not linked to the number of discrete lessons that are presented didactically to children; rather, effects are linked to the degree to which teachers accept the PATHS model and gen- eralize it to the way that they run their classroom (CPPRG, 1999), consistent with the bidirectionality of relation between teachers’ beliefs and their behavior with children. McConaughy et al. (1999) found that Parent-Teacher Research Teams (P-TAR teams), in which parents and teacher communicated about elementary-aged children considered at risk for emotional disturbance to identify the child’s strengths and potential goals, were effective at preventing at-risk chil- dren from becoming identified with the label of “emotionally disturbed” over and above teachers teaching whole-group so- cial skills. The mechanism of this intervention may have been to change teacher attitudes and behavior toward children be- fore the children developed low self-esteem and poor social interactions that would lead them farther toward behavior problems, a process that altered perceptions of the child- teacher relationship. Shaftel and Fine (1997) emphasized the role that teachers’ subjective beliefs play in determining how child behaviors are interpreted and responded to by teachers. Shaftel and Fine tar- geted aspects of teaching style such as the amount of feedback children receive, how long teachers present material in a sin- gle modality and expect children to attend, or structural issues such as how seating is arranged. They also suggest that an- other important area to consider when planning interventions is whether teachers manage their classrooms in ways that deal appropriately with child behaviors and are perceived by the children as fair and reasonable. These ideas are applied within a consultation method that focuses on the classroom as a sys- tem, when designing interventions for problem behaviors.
Based on the success of fairly structured programs of parent consultation and training (see Barkley, 1987; Eyberg & Boggs, 1998), Pianta (1999) and Pianta and Hamre (2002) developed the Students, Teachers, and Relationship Support (STARS) system for consultation with teachers to enhance their relationship with a specific child (or children) with whom the teacher reports a problem in their relationship. STARS is a multifaceted program targeting a teacher’s repre- sentation of his or her relationship with a child and his or her interactive behavior toward the child in the context of a sup- portive relationship with a consultant. The specific technique directed at improving child-teacher interactions (and indirectly their beliefs about each other and their relationship) is Banking Time. In Banking Time (Pianta, 1999; Pianta & Hamre, 2002) the teacher works with a con- sultant and implements a regular regimen of between 5 and 15 min of individual time with a target child. The intervention is called Banking Time because of the metaphor of saving up positive experiences so that the relationship between teacher and child can withstand conflict, tension, and disagreement without deteriorating and returning to a negative state. The child and teacher can draw on their accrued relationship cap- ital and withdraw from the relationship resources that enable them to interact effectively in times of stress. The teacher’s behavior in these sessions is highly constrained in order to produce changes in interaction and beliefs. There is an emphasis in Banking Time sessions on the child’s choice of activities and the regular occurrence of sessions. Sessions are not contingent on the child’s good behavior and neutral verbalizations from the teacher that do not focus on the child’s performance of skills convey relational messages of safety, support for exploration, or predictability that help the child and teacher define their relationship. Behavioral standards are implemented consistent with class- room standards. These principles of Banking Time sessions are very similar to Teacher Child Interaction Therapy (as described by McIntosh et al., 2000), in which teachers engage in nondirective sessions with children designed to enhance the quality of their relationship. The Banking Time technique acts on nearly every compo- nent of a relationship between a child and adult; thus it is a powerful source of pressure on the relationship system. First and foremost it constrains the behavior of the adult. In so doing, a variant of interaction is created between child and adult that typically is viewed as different, novel, and better by most child and adult participants. This constraining of adult behavior in turn frees up the child to display behaviors (and competencies) that are typically not seen in routine interac- tions between teacher and child. The child often explores at a higher level and shows interest in the teacher and the teacher’s attention; in turn, the teacher’s perceptions (repre- sentational beliefs) may change or at least be subject to reex- amination. Feedback and exchange processes between teacher and child are altered as well—especially if the teacher utilized Banking Time sessions to impart a particular message to the child. Banking Time sessions allow the teacher to build credibility that supports these messages so that their words have meaning for the child. In this way, new pathways or di- mensions of feedback and communication between teacher and child become possible as Banking Time is implemented. The STARS approach also involves a set of other proce- dures that act on teachers’ representations and beliefs. These include videotaping interactions with children in the Conclusions and Future Directions: Developmental Analysis of Child-Teacher Relationships 227 classroom for review with the consultant, engaging in reflec- tion on relationships with children through directed inter- views, and analyzing classroom practices related to instruction and discipline. In combination with Banking Time sessions, these techniques are a comprehensive approach to intervention with child-teacher relationships. PATHS (Greenberg et al., 1995), just described as a classroom-level intervention, also has a focus on teacher- child interactions and relationships. In one study teachers im- plemented PATHS with specific regular and special education children in the second and third grades (Greenberg et al., 1995). This was designed to promote these children’s emo- tional understanding as assessed through emotional vocabu- lary, ability to recognize emotional cues, and ability to connect emotions to personal experiences. Teachers were trained to teach 60 30-min lessons on self-control, emotions, and problem solving to their classes. Participating teachers were observed and received consultation weekly in addition to an initial training workshop. Children who received the intervention had a larger emotional vocabulary, a more advanced ability to connect basic emotions to personal expe- riences, and a more advanced understanding of recognizing emotional cues in others, and they believed that they could manage their feelings more than the children who did not receive the intervention (Greenberg et al., 1995). Children with lower initial symptom levels (as measured by teacher reports) were more likely to improve their emotional vocabu- lary as a result of the intervention than were children with highly elevated initial symptoms. Finally, Hughes and Cavell (1999) described an interven- tion called Primetime for aggressive children that includes enhancing the teacher-child relationship (in addition to other relationship components and problem-solving skills train- ing). The Primetime intervention espouses a relationship- based perspective on competence and attempts to reduce aggressive behavior by reorganizing the child’s relational skills with parents, peers, and teachers. Primetime focuses on building a mentoring relationship as a support and source of skill training. Evaluations suggest that positive relationships between the children and the mentors were related to reduced levels of teacher-reported externalizing behavior. Summary In sum, child-teacher relationships have been the focus of a number of applications directed at improving child out- comes. In some applications relationships are affected as a by-product of interventions targeted at children’s skills or at school organizations, whereas in other applications improve- ments in child-teacher relationships are the specific focus of the intervention. Results indicate that child-teacher relation- ships can be improved as a consequence of direct and indirect effects and that improvements in relational quality are corre- lated with improved child outcomes, particularly in the do- main of social adjustment. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS: DEVELOPMENTAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD-TEACHER RELATIONSHIPS Throughout this chapter we have emphasized the advantages to be gained—conceptually, empirically, and practically— from a developmental system analysis of child-teacher rela- tionships. The arguments, review, and positions advanced as a result of this analysis have confirmed this view and lead to the following conclusions concerning these relationships.
classroom-, school-, and community-level influences on children’s adjustment in school settings, it is helpful to focus on child-teacher relationships as a key unit of analy- sis. A relational focus is an important conceptual advance and may provide a means for understanding processes that have been difficult to study.
ized as multicomponent systems involving attributes of the individuals involved, reciprocal, bidirectional processes related to representation and exchange of information, and embedded in ongoing interactions with school and com- munity factors. These factors interrelate in complex ways, and understanding the unit as a system provides impor- tance conceptual and methodological leverage on this complexity.
graphical region, and school profiles—and using multiple methods of informant-based or observational assessment— relationships between children and teachers are marked by variation in the extent of emotional and interactional en- gagement or involvement and in qualities of the emotional experience of that involvement. Negativity appears to be a particularly salient aspect of teachers’ relationship experi- ence whereas emotional closeness, involvement, and sup- port appear salient from the child’s perspective. 4. Across similarly diverse samples, variation in the quality of child-teacher relationships is related in expected directions to a number of concurrent and future indicators of child outcomes in the domains of classroom adjust- ment, motivation, and self-esteem; to beliefs about school and schooling; to academic success; and to teachers’ 228 Relationships Between Teachers and Children perceptions and emotional-well being. Child-teacher rela- tionships are also associated with indicators of the broader school climate and organizational ethos. It is important to note that there is converging evidence that these relations between child-teacher relationships and child outcomes are independent of other commonly used predictors of those outcomes, providing support for the view that the child-teacher relationship is a unique source of variation in children’s experience. 5. Applications that focus on improving children’s’ experi- ences in school—particularly applications that emphasize social, emotional, or motivational aspects of school expe- rience or that build on findings from naturalistic studies of child-teacher relationships—demonstrate that child- teacher relationships can be enhanced and that such enhancements are related to improvements in child com- petencies and perceptions as well as teacher confidence and beliefs. These conclusions establish fairly clearly that a decade of research with a specific focus on child-teacher relationships has been productive and fruitful. Clearly, a well-defined and identifiable literature has developed and yielded information of conceptual and applied benefit to educators and psycholo- gists. Yet the literature is fairly new, and if its potential is to be realized, several challenges lie ahead in terms of issues that require attention in the next decade:
associations of child-teacher relationships with child out- comes, teacher outcomes, and school climate variations. For example, teacher-child conflict and emotional nega- tivity appear to be more predictive of child outcomes in el- ementary school than is teacher-child closeness (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Ladd et al., 1999), whereas emotional sup- port experienced from teachers seems quite important in middle school (see Eccles & Roeser, 1998). It is important to establish, in either multi-age cross-sectional studies or longitudinal studies, the extent to which different qualities of child-teacher relationships are related to different out- come domains for children and teachers, at different ages or grades. 2. The extent to which associations between child outcomes and child-teacher relationships are context specific (e.g., stronger for behavior in school vs. home settings) is an- other area for analysis. Questions concerning whether these relations are localized or specific to a given class- room setting and whether they extend to other settings and the extent to which context-specific or disperses associa- tions extend longitudinally are of great interest. 3. For years there has been interest in the coherence in the quality and form of relationships that children develop with parents, teachers, and peers. From the view of rela-
key relationships in which children are involved, with a focus on the extent of similarity and dissimilarity (and the personal and contextual correlates of similarity and dis- similarity), will yield insights into the development of personality and social relationships. 4. With regard to naturalistic and intervention research, there is much to be learned from further understanding of the degree to which child-teacher relationships can com- pensate for the negative effects of earlier experiences. The relative power of the child-teacher relationship to alter or affect developmental trajectories in relation to es- tablished and ongoing influence of the parents or peers can provide insight into the plasticity of developmental processes as well as fuel advances in school policy and programming. 5. There is a dire need for further integration among the con- stituencies involved in research and theory on child- teacher relationships and for this integration to lead to productive use and application of information for the purposes of teacher training (pre and in-service), teacher evaluation, and school design. Continuation of the rela- tive isolation of teacher education from this emergent knowledge base will constrain both the advancement and application of that knowledge. In particular, we believe that a focused effort to study the development and train- ing of teachers from a relational perspective (Goodlad, 1991) is imperative to improving teacher and child out- comes. In sum, this chapter marks the emergence and consolida- tion of a relatively new area of inquiry and understanding: relationships between teachers and children. The insights and improvements gained from the last decade of research in this area bode well for the future. REFERENCES Adelman, H. S. (1996). Restructuring education support services and integrating community resources: Beyond the full service school model. School Psychology Review, 25, 431–445. Ainsworth, M. D., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, D. (1978).
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