The well-being of teachers (TWB for short) is not only relevant for the quality of teaching (McCallum et al., 2017) but also interesting from a financial and economical perspective as TWB correlates with a lower burn-out risk (Renshaw et al., 2015) and a lower career exit rate (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2018). One source of TWB is the teacher-student relationship (TSR for short) (Spilt et al., 2011). The extent to which TSR affects students and their school success has been widely studied (Cornelius-White, 2007). In contrast, the role of TSR as a determining factor for TWB still needs to be investigated (McGrath & Van Bergen, 2017). Therefore, our qualitative study addresses the role of TSR for TWB from primary teachers’ perspective.

Drawing on research from the field of well-being psychology (Diener et al., 2018) and supported by Hascher's (2011) definition of habitual well-being in school, TWB is understood as a longer-term dominance of positive emotions, cognitions and physical sensations over negative emotions, cognitions and physical sensations in relation to the professional activity as a teacher. According to Hamre and Pianta (2001) TSR is described from a dyadic perspective. It refers to cognitive schemata that both the student and the teacher develop on the basis of previous relational experiences and which influence how relational experiences between two individuals are interpreted (Claessens et al., 2017). Furthermore, TSR is distinguished from the relationship between a teacher and the class on a collective level (Wubbels et al., 2014).

In terms of appraisal theories (Chang & Davis, 2009), it can be assumed that the influence of TSR on TWB is linked to the importance ascribed to the TSR by the teacher. Arguments for the importance of TSR for the teacher can be found in theories of needs and motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2002), professional identity (Butler, 2012) and neurobiology (Insel, 2003). Qualitative as well as quantitative research findings could show that, especially for primary school teachers, the fulfilment of the need for social belonging with students is related to TWB (Klassen et al., 2012). However, studies examining the importance for TWB of social relationships with individual students, rather than their relationship with the class as a whole, are scarce. Thus, we investigated what importance primary school teachers attribute to TSR in general and with regard to their well-being at school.

The role of TSR plays for TWB does not only depend on its importance for the teacher. Also essential is how teachers deal with emotions, cognitions and physical sensations triggered by TSR in the long term and what possibilities they see as influencing the quality of TSR. In addition to structural frameworks in school (Bergin & Bergin, 2009), researchers see the promotion of relationship quality in the area of teachers' social-emotional competence – in that teachers reflect on their relationship schemata (Evans et al., 2019) and are able to interrupt negative habitualised appraisal patterns (Newberry, 2010). Studies that examine ways of dealing with or promoting TSR that inhibit or promote well-being are rare. Thus, we investigated how primary school teachers describe TSRs that inhibit well-being and how they deal with them and how primary school teachers describe TSRs that promote well-being and to what extent they see possibilities to promote them.

The present study is part of the project "Teacher Wellbeing (WoLe)” which was carried out by the Department of Research in School and Instruction at the Institute of Educational Research at the University of Bern. Semi-structured interviews with primary school teachers from the German-speaking part of Switzerland were conducted. According to Spilt and Koomen (2009), interviews can elicit feelings, beliefs and expectations of teachers in TSR that cannot be captured by other measures such as questionnaires or observations. Specifically, semi-structured interviews allow the research to be as open as possible and at the same time as structured as necessary in terms of comparing. The sampling of the teachers was carried out in a top-down procedure through predefined criteria. Only primary school teachers were recruited who have at least three years of teaching experience and hold the position of a classroom teacher. In Switzerland classroom teachers teach the majority of subjects, carry the main responsibility for the class and thus seem to have particularly intensive TSRs. In total 26 teachers (84 % female; Mage = 39.8 [SD = 13.9]; Mteaching years = 15.87 years [SD = 13.4]) were recruited on a voluntary basis and were assured of complete anonymity and confidentiality, specified in a written consent form. The interviews took place between the beginning of January 2020 and the end of February 2020 and lasted about an hour. The basis for the interviews was a relationship map that the teachers had prepared in advance. They were asked to locate the quality of the relationship with each student in their class in a coordinate system consisting of the two orthogonal axes "closeness" and "conflict". The axes were described with the German items of Milatz et al. (2014) of the “Student-Teacher-Relationship-Scale» (Pianta et al., 1995). To start the interview, teachers were asked about the importance of TSR in everyday school life and specifically for their well-being. Afterwards, individual examples of TSRs that inhibited or promoted TWB were discussed in depth. The recorded and transcripted interviews were then analyzed and condensed in accordance with the structuring qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2018) using MAXQDA 2020. A category system was developed in a multi-stage procedure, whereby categories were formed both deductively and inductively. Two interviews were coded by a second researcher. The interrater reliability of the categories by the corrected kappa value (Brennan & Prediger, 1981) of к = 0.74 can be classified as good.

The results show that TSR plays an important to very important role for teachers in everyday school life and is a source of both positive and negative emotions, cognitions and physical sensations. Although examples of TSRs inhibiting or promoting TWB revealed to be complex and varied across individuals, some tendential differences could be noticed. Relationship qualities such as conflict, lack of authenticity, lack of honesty, lack of communication of needs by the student as well as the feeling of the teacher of inadequately supporting the student tend to be found in TSRs that inhibit well-being. The fact that teachers sometimes also report closeness despite a lot of conflict indicates a high level of social-emotional competence among teachers. Some teachers report rigid negative patterns of interaction in which they see no improvement through alternative possibilities of action. Almost all TSRs that promote well-being can be characterized by intense closeness and no or only few conflicts. TSRs in which students behave according to the teacher's ideas are described. Relationship qualities such as students active request for a relationship, motivation, positive interactions with classmates, humor or good parental cooperation are mentioned. Teachers occasionally explain that TSR can be perceived as a negative source of well-being in the short term but as pushing their individual professional learning having a longer-term positive effect on their TWB. In addition to an appreciative and understanding attitude towards students and good cooperation with special education teacher and parents, time slots outside of regular school hours and extracurricular activities are seen as an important platform for fostering relationships. These results show the high relevance of TWB and TSR for research as well as for teacher education.

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