Adaptive communication in educational contexts: A study of teachers’ communicative strategies

The present study examined individual differences in psychological development among prospective teachers as these affect the adaptive, “person‐centered” quality of their communication with students. Significant relationships were found between abstract psychological development and use of person‐centered communicative strategies in regulative and interpersonal educational contexts. In addition, differences in the quality of the teachers’ construal of the student‐teacher relationship were significantly related to their ability to manage those relationships in their communication with students. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of the impact of differences in teachers’ communicative development upon development of students and their implications for future studies of relationships between specific components of psychological and communicative development.