Good Teacher-Student Relationships: Perspectives of Teachers in Urban High Schools.

Teachers interact with students on a daily basis, and the types of relationships they have with them directly impact students' social, emotional, and academic experiences at school. Good relationships between teachers and students have been associated with students' increased motivation, academic achievement, high rates of attendance, and attitudes towards school. Although there has been consistency in research findings regarding teacher behaviors desired by students, there has been little research on desired student behaviors from the perspective of teachers.Cole and Walker (1989) pointed out that schools provide few structural supports to help teachers meet the social demands of their jobs and teachers may therefore experience conflict, confusion, and stress over the boundar- ies of their professional roles. In fact, teacher-student interactions have been identified as the primary sources of stress leading to teacher burnout (Friedman, 1995; Phillips, 1993). Although problematic relationships with students may exacerbate teacher stress, it has also been suggested that satisfying relationships may serve as buffers against teacher stress (Cohen & Willis, 1985; Gugliemi T Day, Elliot, & Kington, 2005).Teacher attrition is a serious problem for the nation's schools: Of the approximately 3.3 million public school teachers who were teaching during the 2007-08 school year, 8% transferred to a different school and 8% left the profession the following year. Of the teachers who left their jobs in the 2008-2009 school year, 45% felt a higher sense of personal accomplishment in their new positions (Keigher, 2010). It has been found that teachers' sense of personal accomplishment can be enhanced when teachers are involved in decision-making and when the school climate fosters their basic needs of relatedness and competence (Roth, Assor, Kanat-Maymon, & Kaplan, 2007).Not only are high rates of teacher turnover disruptive to students and the school, teachers with low organizational commitment often reduce their job performance before they quit (Horn & Kinicki, 2001). For example, teachers who have emotionally withdrawn from their jobs will be less tolerant of student behaviors and are more likely to respond punitively to misbehavior. Punitive responses to misbehavior are likely to trigger more noncompliant, acting-out behavior (Gable, Hester, Hester, Hendrickson, & Sze, 2005), which in turn will increase teachers' negative attitudes towards teaching. Hopkins and Stern (1996) explained that high levels of commitment push teachers to search for better teaching methods, even when students exhibit negative attitudes or difficult behavior. Teachers who have few discipline problems tend to have better relationships with students than teachers who have many discipline problems, and good relationships with students are associated with lower levels of stress and greater job satisfaction (Collie et al., 2011).Despite the importance of good teacher-student relationships, very little is known about how teachers define or perceive good relationships with students. This absence of research lends itself to the need for further study. A problem related to this research area is that although teachers may be aware of what they consider good relationships with students, they may feel unable to establish such relationships with students in large urban high schools, due to the structural and organizational constraints of the school. …