To be published in the Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
IntroductionThis chapter reports on results of research from 25-year program of studies investigating teacher-student interpersonal relationships in secondary classrooms. This research focuses on the role of the teacher and builds a knowledge base about managing classrooms to create effective learning environments. Starting in the Netherlands, this line of research now has developed to many other countries such as Australia, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the US. In this chapter, we will focus on Dutch research, referring when useful to the research in other countries.We begin this chapter with a discussion of the multiple perspectives that can be used to analyze teaching and then describe the communicative systems approach, the central element of the interpersonal perspective that is the focus of this chapter. We then turn to other element, the Model for Interpersonal Teacher Behavior and measurement instruments developed to map teacher interpersonal behavior. The remainder of the chapter reviews studies on diverse issues covering the development of interpersonal teacher behavior during the teaching career, problems of beginning and experienced teachers including the non-verbal behavior and the spatial position of the teacher in the class, teacher interpersonal relations and student outcomes, differences between teacher and student perceptions of the relationship, and finally interventions to improve relationships in class.
Multiple perspectives on teachingClassroom teaching is a complex task in a complex environment. Usually a (Dutch) secondary school teacher is in a modest-sized room with between 20 and 40 students. Many factors including emotional, cultural, interpersonal, and environmental issues influence the teacher, the students, and what occurs in class (Shuell, 1996). To reach their aims in this complex situation teachers have to fulfill many functions often at the same time (e.g. motivating, instructing, and organizing) (see Doyle in this volume XXXX). To grasp this complexity, some researchers 1 distinguish between different types of teaching acts such as classroom management or instructional behaviors (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1986;Creemers, 1994;Lee, 1995 Lincoln's paper on the constitution show, for example, the perspective of instructional effectiveness, a discourse perspective, a moral perspective, and a gender perspective (see the analysis of the Bennett tape, Morine-Dershimer, 1986).As will be clear from these examples, perspectives can be distinguished from each other, but some also overlap. In particular, the classroom management and interpersonal perspectives overlap. In the research reviewed in this chapter, teaching has been studied from an interpersonal perspective. The interpersonal perspective describes and analyzes teaching in terms of the relationship between teacher and students. The analysis of the teacher role in this persp...
