Student–teacher closeness and conflict in students with and without special educational needs

Teachers play a key role in creating effective conditions for students to succeed in school. The quality of student–teacher relationships is consistently associated with social, emotional, behavioural and academic adjustment, and this is even more relevant for students with special educational needs (SEN), considering these students’ emotional, social and learning vulnerabilities. This study aimed to examine the associations between students’ externalising and internalising behaviour, social skills and academic performance, and teachers’ perceptions of conflict and closeness in their relationships with students with and without SEN. Data regarding 360 students in Year 3, Year 5 and Year 7 (169 students with SEN) were collected. Teachers (n = 74) reported on the student–teacher relationship and students’ social skills, behaviour problems and academic performance. Special education teachers (n = 38) provided information regarding the diagnosis and profile of functioning of students with SEN. Results showed that teachers’ reports of students’ social skills and externalising problems were the strongest predictors of closeness and conflict. Internalising problems and SEN status also predicted decreased closeness, despite smaller effects. Taken together, findings support the importance of professional development opportunities focusing on facilitating teachers’ relationships with students with perceived challenging behaviour.     

School deportment and student teacher sex and ethnicity

The association between office referrals and the ethnicity and sex of 20 grade 1-6 teachers and 567 (323 black, 130 white, and 114 Spanish surnamed) students was studied for two years. White teachers reported disproportionately more students and infractions, followed by Spanish surnamed and black teachers. The distribution and frequency of reported infractions were associated with teacher and student ingroup rates, rather than differential teacher x student cross-group rates: (a) i. e., disproportionately more male, then black students were reported and with greater frequency by teachers of each sex and ethnicity, respectively; however, (b) teachers' referral frequencies were moderately higher for own-ethnic and other-sex students.     

Observational,student, and teacher perspectives on interpersonal teacher behavior: Shared and unique associations with teacher and student emotions

Teachers’ interpersonal behavior in class is important for teacher and student emotions. Often the same rater (either teacher or students) is used to assess both perceptions of teacher behavior and emotions, which makes it vulnerable to common-method bias. Including other perspectives on teacher behavior has been proposed as a solution, but it is unclear to what extent different perspectives are correlated and how to separate their shared and unique variance in explaining emotions. Behavior of 80 teachers was rated from three perspectives (observers, students, and teachers) in terms of Agency (i.e., social influence) and Communion (i.e., friendliness). The three perspectives overlapped more strongly for teacher agency than for communion. Especially for students, teacher communion was a stronger predictor of emotions than agency. Our innovative statistical approach showed that the strong association between ratings of teacher behavior and emotions of the same rater are unlikely to result from common-method bias only.     

Facilitating social learning in teacher education: a case study

It is increasingly recognised that social learning by teachers can stimulate professional development. In this study, we search for the social behaviour patterns which can act as a catalyst for professional development, with an explicit focus on student teachers’ learning. Based on the ‘Dimensions of Social Learning (DSL) Framework’, including 4 dimensions and 11 indicators of social learning, the present study explores the social configuration of one network of primary teachers (n?=?12), student teachers (n?=?12) and teacher educators (n?=?2). Two research questions guide this exploration: (1) What patterns of social behaviour in teacher networks are likely to lead to professional learning? (2) What network facilitation guidelines can be discerned to assist teachers and teacher educators wishing to optimise student teachers’ professional development? Data collection consisted of video recordings, reflective notes and semi-structured interviews with network members. The findings paint a picture of how social learning in teacher networks is related to the group’s social configuration. Observation criteria and student facilitation guidelines are suggested to support professional development within teacher networks. For each dimension in the DSL Framework, one point of attention is discerned to optimise students’ learning in teacher networks.     

The impact of student characteristics and teacher efficacy on teachers’ predictions of student success

This study examined how the interaction between student and teacher characteristics affects teachers’ predictions of students’ academic and social success. Three hundred and eighty-four general education teachers responded to (a) one of 32 possible case studies describing a student, in which gender, reading achievement, social behavior, and attentiveness were manipulated experimentally and (b) to a 16-item teacher-efficacy scale. Results showed that (1) teachers with high efficacy make less negative predictions about students, and seem to adjust their predictions when student characteristics change, while low efficacy teachers seem to be paying attention to a single characteristic when making their predictions. (2) All teachers respond similarly to students who exhibit a combination of aggressive and inattentive behaviors, that is, if students are friendly, inattentiveness is tolerated more than if they are aggressive. (3) All teachers make higher predictions of academic success for students reading on grade level even when they are aggressive, than for students reading below grade level even when they are friendly. The authors discuss the importance of attending to the complexity of characteristics each student brings in to the classroom.     

Teachers matter: Measures of teacher effectiveness in low-income minority schools

Teachers make a difference in student academic growth. Students from low-income, minority communities attend schools with less resources and less qualified teachers than students in wealthier communities. The Race to the Top (RTTT) policy by the U.S. Department of Education has attempted to address the achievement gap based on SES and the disparity in the quality of teachers between communities. The policy stipulates that teacher effectiveness be determined, in significant part, by student growth measures and supplemented with multiple observation-based assessments. The emphasis placed on student outcomes to indicate teacher effects has served to link teacher evaluations with teacher effectiveness. This review article examines the reported benefits and critical responses to the use of a prominent student growth measure, the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), in terms of its implementation as an evaluation tool of teacher effectiveness in low-income, minority schools. Models of observational teacher evaluations, taking into consideration common attributes of effective teachers in low-income schools, are presented as supplemental measures to provide more in-depth information to interpret value-added analyses and to minimize possible misinterpretation of student growth data or the misclassification of teachers’ effectiveness for teachers in low-income schools. Information obtained from a combination of evaluation measures can be used to identify both effective and ineffective teachers, to target areas in need of improvement to increase teacher effectiveness, and to make decisions concerning the equitable distribution of effective teachers, especially for students who are most in need.     

Teachers' situation-specific mastery experiences: teacher,student group and lesson effects

Following a model on the cyclical nature of teacher (“trait”) self-efficacy and context-, task- and situation-specific (“state”) mastery experiences (TSSME), we investigated the variability and effects of lesson characteristics (e.g. lesson sequence), student group characteristics (e.g. proportion of students receiving free school meals) and teacher characteristics (e.g. teacher experience) on teachers' situation-specific mastery experience. Forty-three teachers reported on 1,055 lessons in 385 student groups using electronic questionnaires in Personal Digital Assistants during a period of 2 weeks. Two domains of TSSME (support of learning and organisation of classrooms) and perception of students (engagement and behaviour) were found. Multilevel models found roughly a quarter of the variance in TSSME between teachers, a quarter between student groups and half between lessons. Student group characteristics differentially predicted TSSME. Perceived student engagement was more predictive of TSSME than perceived student behaviour. More experienced and high-efficacy teachers had higher TSSME. The findings have implications for our understanding of teachers' everyday practice with different student groups.     

Values in education: a challenge for teacher educators

The (growing) political, social and scientific attention to the moral aspects of teaching also concerns teacher education.This article reports an exploratory study into the preparation of student teachers for moral education. The designing of goals, program parts and teaching and learning methods for a part of the first year curriculum of a teacher education institute for primary education is described. Next the teacher educators who carried out the curriculum and the student teachers who participated in it, were asked whether they recognized the moral aspects of the curriculum as designed. Finally, we tested the effects of the curriculum on the learning of the student teachers, using a pre- and post- test. The results of the study evoke, among others, the conclusion that more attention is needed to the implicit and unplanned aspects of preparing students teachers for moral education.     

Troubling identities: teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers and teacher educators recognizing and valuing difference. Too often, in teacher education programs, when markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, ‘race’, or social class are examined, the focus is on developing student teachers' understandings of how these discourses shape learner identities and rarely on how these also shape teachers' identities. This article reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnicity and socio‐economic status. In a preliminary stage of the research, we asked eight Year 3 teacher education students who had attended mainly Anglo‐Australian, middle class schools as students and as student teachers, to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they constructed their own identities around ethnicity and social class. In this article we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation, troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.     

Capturing teacher priorities: Using real-world eye-tracking to investigate expert teacher priorities across two cultures

Classroom teaching is complex. In the classroom, teachers must readily attend to disruptions and successfully convey new tasks and information. Outside the classroom, teachers must organise their priorities that are important for successful student learning. In fact, differing gaze patterns can reveal the varying priorities that teachers have. Teacher priorities are likely to vary with classroom expertise and can conceivably change with culture too. Therefore, the present study investigated expertise related and cultural teacher priorities by analysing their gaze proportions. To obtain this data, 40 secondary school teachers wore eye-tracking glasses during class time, with 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from the UK and 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from Hong Kong. We analysed gaze proportions during teachers' attentional (i.e., information-seeking, e.g., teacher questioning students) and communicative (i.e., information-giving, e.g., teacher lecturing students) gaze. Regardless of culture, expert teachers' gaze proportions revealed prioritisation of students, whereas novice teachers gave priority to non-instructional (i.e., not students, teacher materials, or student materials) classroom regions. Hong Kong teachers prioritised teacher materials (e.g., whiteboard) during communicative gaze whereas UK teachers prioritised non-instructional regions. Regarding culture-specific expertise, with Hong Kong experts prioritised teacher materials more than UK experts who, in turn, did so more than UK novices. We thus demonstrate the role of implicit teacher gaze measures as micro-level indicators of macro-level and explicit aspects of instruction, namely teacher priority.     

Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals

Teachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of same-race teachers and other observed teacher qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a disciplinary referral. Using data that track all disciplinary referrals and the identity of both the referred and referring individuals from a large and diverse urban school district in California, we find that Black students’ probability of receiving at least one referral is about 3 percentage points (26.6% of Black students’ base rate) smaller than for white students when they have a Black teacher versus a white teacher. The reduced likelihoods of receiving referrals from same-race teachers also convert to reduced likelihoods of being suspended. These results are mostly driven by referrals for violence, interpersonal offences, and walkout infractions, middle school students, and students from high-poverty schools. Students are also less likely to be referred by more experienced teachers and by teachers who hold either an English language learners or special education credential. While it is unclear whether these findings are due to variation in teachers’ effects on actual student behavior, variation in teachers’ proclivities to make disciplinary referrals, or a combination of the two, these results nonetheless suggest that teachers play a central role in the prevalence of, and inequities in, office referrals and subsequent student discipline.     

Personality similarity between teachers and their students influences teacher judgement of student achievement

This study examined personality similarity between teachers and their students and its impact on teacher judgement of student achievement in the domains of reading comprehension and mathematics. Personality similarity was quantified through intraclass correlations between personality characteristics of 409 dyads of German teachers and their students. This similarity index was combined with teachers’ global and task-specific judgements of student achievement. Personality similarity has a significant effect on global judgement in both domains under study. Students who are similar to their teacher are judged more positively than students who are dissimilar, even when students’ test performance is controlled. This effect could not be verified for task-specific judgements. Results indicate that impact of potential sympathy bias in social judgements differs between different types of judgement. That is, global judgements are more likely to be biased than more specific judgements. Theoretical and educational relevance of the findings are discussed.     

Examining the influence of teacher behavior and curriculum-based movement breaks

Little research has explored the impact of teacher behavior in the relationship between classroom movement breaks and student outcomes. The authors' primary purpose was to explore teacher behavior during classroom movement breaks to determine if teacher behavior served as a moderating variable in the relationship between physical activity and student achievement. The second major aim was to examine these relationships across two different types of movement breaks: (a) academic-content movement breaks and (b) aerobic-based movement breaks. Children (n = 466) in Grades 3–5 from four elementary schools served as participants in the study. Results found that teachers who encouraged students to move and teachers who moved themselves did not necessary have students with higher activity levels during the movement breaks. However, significant differences across the type of movement break provided were found. Implications and limitations are discussed.     

The effect of facilitative communication training on teacher response quality

Training designed to enhance facilitative communication between teachers and students is becoming an increasingly important element of teacher training programs. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effect of facilitative communication training on the quality of teacher response to various student problems and to the accompanying emotional states of anger, joy, or depression. The subjects consisted of 64 undergraduate teacher education majors who responded in writing to 15 audiotaped stimulus vignettes. A 5×3×2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to measure the effects of problem situation, emotional state, and training on empathic understanding. The results indicated significant differences between trained and untrained groups, as well as differences in quality of response due to emotion, with joy eliciting greater empathy than depression or anger. Significant interactions among the variables also were obtained. Implications are discussed in terms of human relations training for teachers.     

Learning with and from: positioning school students as advisors in pre-service teacher education

This article reports on an innovative pedagogical approach within the Learning Partnerships program in which school students help to ‘teach the teachers’ within pre-service teacher education. Classes of school students join with classes of pre-service teachers to provide input on how teachers can enhance school students’ engagement and wellbeing. The article draws on data collected from 125 students (aged 13–16) and 120 pre-service teachers in these workshops. Findings generated from a mixed methods study combining pre-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 38, Teachers: 33) and post-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 69, Teachers: 15) and post-workshop surveys (n = Students: 96; Teachers: 101) demonstrated that the workshops were mutually beneficial for both students and pre-service teachers. Participants found that workshopping together enhanced their belief in the possibility of positive student–teacher relationships. The pre-service teachers reported greater confidence in communicating with young people about the issues that affect student engagement and wellbeing. The school students reported that they were more willing to use teachers as a source of help. Implications include the need for increased attention to a ‘third space’ for learning in teacher development which provides opportunity for learning with and from young people about how to foster their engagement and wellbeing.     

Utility of kindergarten teacher judgments in identifying early learning problems

Most existing research on early identification of learning difficulties has examined the validity of methods for predicting future academic problems. The present study focused instead on the sensitivity of kindergarten teachers to learning problems in their students and on the continuity of teacher-identified problems over time. To identify early learning problems, kindergarten teachers in a suburban school district rated student progress toward six academic objectives as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Twenty percent of the district's 303 kindergarten children received unsatisfactory ratings in at least one area. Thirty-eight of these children (identified group) were matched to 34 children with satisfactory ratings in all areas (nonidentified group). Results of testing conducted during kindergarten revealed poorer academic achievement in identified children than in nonidentified children. Children from the identified group also performed more poorly than children from the nonidentified group on tests of phonological processing and working memory/executive function and were rated by teachers as having more behavior and attention problems and lower social competence. Follow-up of the sample to first grade documented continued learning problems in the identified group. These findings support the use of teacher judgements in early detection of learning problems and argue against reliance on discrepancy criteria.     

'A Special Duty of Care': Exploring the narration and experience of teacher caring

The present article questions our conceptualisation of teacher caring in contemporary Australian society. It draws on media discussions of the school and teachers, and the writer's ethnographic experiences in an urban secondary high school, to explore our expectations of teachers and the ways in which these expectations shape teachers' relations with students. Our discussions about teachers suggest that underlying debates about the responsibilities of teachers are widely shared idealisations of the teacher figure. I suggest that Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and more specifically the development of this concept to talk specifically about an institutional habitus, can inform our understanding of the ways in which these ideals are enacted in a particular educational setting. I explore the ways in which broader social processes of social class and gender interplay and contribute to shaping caring relations between teachers and students through the intermediary structures of a specific high school.     

A systematic review of teacher guidance during collaborative learning in primary and secondary education

For this review, we synthesized quantitative and qualitative research on collaborative learning to examine the relationship between teacher guidance strategies and the processes and outcomes of collaboration among students (66 studies). The results show that several aspects of teacher guidance are positively related to student collaboration, for example when teachers focus their attention on students’ problem solving strategies. During student collaboration, opportunities arise for students to engage in collaborative activities that support their learning process. The way teachers take more or less control of these moments determines whether these opportunities can be turned into real moments of learning for the students. This review highlights the important yet challenging role of the teacher during collaborative learning.     

Exploring practicum: student teachers’ social capital relations in schools with high numbers of pupils living in poverty

The complexity of practicum in initial teacher education, in terms of the range of diverse social relations and differing school contexts, provides a challenge for teacher educators worldwide, aiming to guide and shape opportunities for student teachers learning to teach. This challenge is further compounded by societal problems linked to child poverty. Drawing from social capital theory, this paper explores the kinds of social relations that are currently associated with student teachers’ practicum experience in schools located in areas of social and economic deprivation or with significant proportions of pupils living in poverty. The paper brings to the surface types of social relations that are beneficial to mitigating the effects of poverty on educational outcomes. The case is made that practicum does not currently support the principles of social capital theory by enabling student teachers to develop an understanding of how to make connections, and develop the social relationships required to support positive educational outcomes for the children and young people in such contexts. Findings indicate that more effective ‘joint practice’ is required to better support student teachers’ professional learning.