Attributions and emotional competence: why some teachers experience close relationships with disruptive students (and others don’t)

ABSTRACT

Disruptive student behaviour is a major concern for teachers, causing classroom conflict and emotional fatigue. Whilst student-teacher closeness is known to reduce student aggression and improve behaviour, it is not yet known why some teachers experience close relationships with disruptive students and others do not. This qualitative study therefore examined relational closeness between elementary teachers and disruptive students in Sydney, Australia. Using a teacher speech sample task, we identified eight disruptive students with ‘complicated’ student-teacher relationships: high in both closeness and conflict. Eleven classroom teachers and seven support teachers each spoke about their relationships with the eight students. Speech samples were analysed using an inductive content analysis to determine characteristics that may facilitate relational closeness in spite of student-teacher conflict. Findings revealed two characteristics of teachers’ speech that guided relational closeness: attributions for disruptive behaviour and emotional competence. Not all teachers, however, described a close relationship. These findings provide new directions for interventions that aim to improve student-teacher relationship quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Student-teacher relationships
• disruptive behaviour
• closeness
• emotional competence
• attributions
• five-minute speech sample

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Editor, Professor Christopher Day, for his support throughout the revision process and for the opportunity to have our work featured in Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. Additionally, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful feedback and careful reading ensured that our approach and design was clear and defensible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We included moderate (3) ratings in the ‘low’ conflict/closeness categories and not the ‘high’ conflict/closeness categories for two reasons. First, moderate levels of misbehaviour and conflict in the classroom were not rated as problematic and somewhat common: particularly in younger grades when students’ regulatory abilities are still developing (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). We therefore restricted our categorisation of ‘high’ conflict to those with high or very high ratings. Second, we saw moderate ratings of closeness to be ‘lukewarm’, with salient close relationships instead rated high or very high. In determining the relationship factors that best predict closeness as a protective factor, we were keen to ensure that closeness was unequivocal.

2. We selected our eight complicated cases on the basis of classroom teachers’ relationship expressions at Phase 1, because (i) classroom teachers experienced greater face-to-face contact than did support teachers, and (ii) speech samples obtained at Phase 1 described relationships that had formed over an entire school year.

3. All participants’ names that appear in this article are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin F. McGrath

Kevin F. McGrath is an associate lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University. [email protected]

Penny Van Bergen

Penny Van Bergen is an associate professor in educational psychology in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University. [email protected]