Interpersonal adaptation in teacher-student interaction

A Quantitative Exploration of Two Teachers with Contrasting Emotions: Intra-Individual Process Analyses of Physiology and Interpersonal Behavior

“…We explored the existence of linear, quadratic, and cubic trends in the three time series. Table 2 shows that the time series for Agency and Communion for both teachers were best described by the cubic trend model (i.e., linear + quadratic + cubic term), which corresponds to previous findings (Pennings et al, 2017). Halfway the 12 minutes (approximately 300s), there was an increase in Agency for both teachers, reflecting the moment where they took the lead in opening the lesson, and their Agency-level stabilized at about 7.5 minutes (450s).…”

“…With this method, teachers' Agency and Communion can be coded by external observers as it unfolds over time . Research on these moment-to-moment processes has shown that teachers' interpersonal behavior is not constant but dynamic, and more variability in teacher interpersonal behavior tends to occur in classrooms with poorer social climates (Mainhard, Pennings, Wubbels, & Brekelmans, 2012;Pennings et al, 2017). The CAID method is described in more detail in section 2.3.2.…”

“…We focused our analysis on the first 12 minutes of the lesson, because the lesson start is at the same time very important and very demanding regarding teacher-student interaction (Pennings et al, 2017;Van Tartwijk, Brekelmans, Wubbels, Fisher, & Fraser, 1998). First, we examined univariate characteristics of the heart rate, Agency, and Communion time series: a) linear, quadratic, and cubic trend models, which indicate whether teacher's heart rate (or Agency, or Communion) in-or decreased continuously during the lesson and whether it de-or accelerated at some points, b) autocorrelation, which indicates to what extent heart rate values carry over to the next moment in time (i.e., temporal dependency), and c) stability, which combines the temporal dependency with the amplitude of heart rate changes.…”

“…The autocorrelation became negative when leaving out the first time lag and using a time lag of two, which might indicate a cyclical pattern. 2 However, as research has shown that trends and cyclical patterns are individual teacher characteristics (Pennings et al, 2017), and in the absence of strong methodological guidelines (Hamaker & Wichers, 2017), we did not want to draw conclusions based on the data of only two teachers, but decided to follow previous studies in choosing a first-order time lag and a relatively small time interval (Dormann & Griffin, 2015). Moreover, although both teachers' level of interpersonal behavior was highly predictable from the value five seconds before, this does not mean that there were no meaningful fluctuations in Agency and Communion during the lesson start (as is also evident from the graphs presented in Figure 3).…”

“…Finally, teachers' interpersonal behavior is only one of the two constituent parts that make up classroom interaction. In future research, it would be interesting to combine physiological measures with observation of students' interpersonal behavior, to see whether, for example, refraining from unfriendly reactions to hostile student behavior is as challenging for teachers as is often claimed (De Jong, Van Tartwijk, Verloop, Veldman, & Wubbels, 2012;Pennings et al, 2017;Sadler et al, 2009).…”