Relationships Matter: Reciprocal Links Between Teachers' Emotions and Teacher-Class Relationship Quality

• In Event: Emotions: A Consequential Reality to the Work of Teachers and Professors

Abstract

Objectives: There is cumulative empirical evidence that teacher-student relationship quality (TSRQ) and both teachers’ and students’ affective outcomes are linked (Roorda et al., 2011; Roza et al., 2022; Spilt et al., 2011), while the majority of this body of research is cross-sectional and correlational. The key objective of the present contribution was to identify and quantify potential causal effects from teachers’ emotions to the relational atmosphere in class, and vice versa, through a longitudinal cross-lagged panel design.

Theoretical framework: Different theoretical perspectives, including attachment theory (Pianta et al., 2002), self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002), and interpersonal behavior theory (Wubbels & Brekelmans, 2005), consent that well-functioning social relationships are a determining factor for subjective well-being and positive emotions. For teachers specifically, it has been argued that good teacher-student relationships also have indirect positive effects on their emotions via feelings of efficacy and motive-consistence (Frenzel et al., 2021; Spilt et al., 2011). Conversely, emotion theories also compellingly argue that human emotions are critically functional for social relationships (Yee et al., 2014). Specifically, positive emotions serve to begin, grow, and successfully maintain relationships, whereas negative emotions can have adverse consequences for relationship quality. Thus, it is to be expected that teachers emotionally profit if they perceive the relational atmosphere in classes as positive, but also that their emotions should shape how well they succeed at building relationships with their students. As compelling those theoretical propositions are for effects both from TSRQ to teachers’ emotions, and from teachers’ emotions on TSRQ, the existing empirical evidence regarding those effects is scarce.

Method: The present data had a longitudinal 3-wave repeated measures design allowing to specify two consecutive full cross-lagged panels. In total, N = 93 teachers (58% female) participated in the study. They reported about their experiences of enjoyment, anger, and anxiety when teaching the target class (Frenzel et al., 2016) as well as the relationship quality with that class (Roza et al., 2022) in the second (T1), 5th (T2), and 8th month of the schoolyear (T3). We specified three separate cross-lagged models linking teacher self-reports of the TCRQ, on the one hand, and their enjoyment, anger, and anxiety, on the other.

Results and conclusions: Results showed that TSRQ at T1 was positively related to teacher enjoyment at T2 and negatively related to teachers’ experience of anxiety at T2. Further, TSQR at T2 was positively related to teachers’ enjoyment at T3 and negatively related to the experience of teacher anger at T3. With the exception of higher levels of teacher enjoyment at T2 being related to higher levels of teacher-class relationship at T3, effects from emotions to relationship quality were very weak. As such, our reciprocity assumption was only partly supported, as the order of effects from TCRQ to emotions seemed to be dominating (see Figure 1).

Scholarly significance: This research is unique in providing longitudinal evidence that teachers’ emotions are shaped by their perception of TSRQ. We conclude that interventions targeting TSRQ seem promising to boost teacher well-being.

Authors

• Anne C. Frenzel, University of Munich
  Presenting Author

• Andrea Faber, University of Munich
  Non-Presenting Author