Making Sense of Student–Teacher Relationships: Teacher Educator and Candidate Engagement with the Relational Practices of Teaching

ABSTRACT

Although research on student–teacher relationships (STRs) consistently demonstrates STRs’ association with student achievement and well-being, teachers typically receive limited guidance regarding how to cultivate these relationships. Efforts to promote teacher dispositions toward STRs and learning of relational practices—practices that ground strong STRs—are promising but scattered. This case study, which analyzes observation and interview data, program materials, and teacher candidate artifacts, extends knowledge in this area. The authors explore how one purposefully selected program, unique in its efforts to promote relational practices, incorporated relevant programmatic and instructional structures, and how candidates in turn developed relational practices. Faculty stressed STRs’ importance but hesitated to didactically teach relational practices. This stance encouraged instructors’ relational practice teaching and generated promising ideas about relational practice teaching. It also led to varied, idiosyncratic relational practice repertoires among candidates. These findings inform discussion of how and whether teacher educators might further incorporate relational practice teaching and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Student–teacher relationships
• teacher education
• teacher relational practices
• teacher dispositions
• sensemaking theory

Notes

1. MTUC is a pseudonym, as are all participant names.

2. The references in this sentence are Weick’s. See Weick (1995) for full reference information.

3. A pseudonym.

4. We use the terms candidate-participants and instructor-participants where necessary to distinguish them from candidates and instructors who did not directly participate in the study. The program’s only two directors participated in the study so we do not identify them as director-participants.

5. These names are pseudonyms, as are all individual participants’ names.

6. The National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released, during our data collection period, a highly publicized evaluation of teacher education programs (Greenberg & Walsh, 2010) that was critical of programs that did not provide explicit, written evidence of exactly how the programs prepared teachers for practice.

7. Candidates’ scores fell within a one-point range (on a 4-point scale) for “evidence of developing relationships” and within a .75 point range for “tone and rapport.”

8. Verbatim text from MTUC handbook is slightly altered or paraphrased to protect the research site’s confidentiality.

9. Grossman et al. (2007) describe a similar teaching practice used by a teacher whom they observed.

10. The child study paper required first-year candidates to observe one student in multiple settings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Phillippo

Kate Phillippo is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Education. Her research interests include student–teacher relationships and student and teacher experiences of education policy.

Elizabeth Levine Brown

Elizabeth Levine Brown is an assistant professor at George Mason University in the College of Education and Human Development. Her research addresses the developmental and psychosocial influences on marginalized students’ learning.

Allison Blosser

Allison Blosser is assistant professor of education at High Point University in North Carolina. Her research interests include school diversity practices and pre-service teacher education.