Overarching goal

One main goal of the BeKool study (Beziehungs- und Kooperationsqualität unter Lehrenden und Lerndenden/Quality of Relationships and Cooperation among Teachers and Learners) was to explore what role teachers’ relationship work plays in their provision of high-quality instructions. For this purpose, the study applied a mixed-methods design. Quantitative student ratings were used to assess teachers’ instructional and relational work. Based on these assessments, five teachers of a sample of 38 were selected for semi-structured interviews on their thoughts and beliefs about the importance of relational work for their teaching in secondary schools and in classrooms with “difficult” students. Depth-hermeneutic interpretation groups analyzed the interviews. Within the previous two years, the findings of three of the total of five case studies were selected for publication: One teacher with above average results on both dimensions, instructional and relational work, and two teachers with mixed results on both dimensions. This presentation summarizes the findings of the three case studies and discusses their theoretical and practical implications.

Case study 1: An exhausted special education teacher takes a look back

In the first case study, we ask if the perception of the quality of teaching and/or relationship work from the perspective of students gives an indication of latent and unreflected conflict dynamics in the teacher-student relationship (Hirblinger, 2017). If this is the case, indications of such dynamics should be found in the depth-hermeneutic analysis of a teacher interview about the importance of relationship work for teaching. In the case of an interview with a teacher whose instructional and relational work is rated as of particularly high quality by his students, comparatively little evidence of latent and unreflected conflict dynamics in the teacher-student relationship can be expected.

Case study 2: Emotional challenges after a career change

Although a lot of alternatively certified teachers work in German schools nowadays, little empirical evidence regarding their relationship work exists (Trautmann, 2019).  Therefore, in the second case study, we explore how an alternatively certified teacher balances his emotional closeness and distance in dealing with students with psychosocial difficulties, and student-teacher-conflicts. The interviewed teacher has a doctorate degree and used to work at a university before changing his career. In preparation of his teaching career, he had completed an in-service teacher traineeship. Given the limited practical experience of this teacher, we expected to find evidence for conflicts between the teacher and his students and coping strategies that help the teacher to balance his own emotions, but potentially limits student development.  

Case study 3: Relational struggles of a learning therapist

The third case study presents the results of an interview with a teacher who was selected due to her high-quality instructional work and low-quality relational work from the perspective of her students. In the course of the depth-hermeneutic analysis, we pursued the question of how this atypical result, can be understood from a perspective on the latent/un- or preconscious dimensions of pedagogical relationships. The selected teacher is a young learning therapist who thought about ending her teaching career before it had started. We expected to find evidence of latent and unreflected conflict dynamics in the teacher-student relationship that would partially explain the seemingly contradictory student ratings.

Quantitative Analysis for interview selection In 2019, quantitative data were collected via a student survey in 12 Berlin schools in 39 classes (N = 452). The instruments included, on the one hand, the Tripod 7Cs of Effective Teaching (Tripod Education Partners, 2016) for the assessment of the instructional quality from the perspective of students. This is one of the leading instruments for evaluating teaching quality in the USA (Geiger & Amrein-Beardsley, 2019), whose criterion validity (Cantrell & Kane, 2013), construct validity (Dietrich, 2019), and test-retest reliability (Polikoff, 2016) have been confirmed. On the other hand, the survey also included instruments to measure teacher-student relationships: Positive identification of students with the teacher is a 3-item variable derived from the Composite Teacher-Student Relationship Instrument (Barch, 2015), emotional sensitivity of the teacher is a 3-item variable from the Teacher-Student Relationship Scale (Pianta, 2019), and Care is one of the Tripod 7Cs. Average scores were calculated for both categories, teaching quality and relationship work: The class average of the Tripod 7Cs exclusive of the Care category for instructional quality (α = .92); the class average of the three variables positive student identification with teacher (α = .85), teacher emotional sensitivity (α = .75), and Care (α = .89) for relationship work quality (joint α = .81). The mean scores were used to identify teachers. Depth hermeneutics The analyses of the teacher interviews were based on depth hermeneutics (König, 2018). This approach was chosen because relationships do not only take place on a conscious level, but include latent aspects that cannot be measured quantitatively, but exert a great influence on relationship dynamics (Sandner, 2018). The goal of depth hermeneutics is to trace fractures and voids in the interview material on the basis of emotional irritations with the aim of interpreting latent, unconscious/preconscious meaning (König, 2018). The depth hermeneutical analysis is carried out in groups of at least three people who work through and discuss the interview material using the technique of evenly-suspended attention, which has its roots in psychoanalysis. Specific “scenes” (Lorenzer, 2006; Würker, 2007) and corresponding emotional reactions in the research group, which emerged during the analysis process, were investigated with regard to the emotional significance for the researched persons.

The summative results of the BeKool study indicate that even the best teachers struggle with the provision of high-quality teacher-student relationships. However, if teachers fail to build positive relationships with their students, they can cause a great deal of suffering, especially among students with psychosocial difficulties. In the first case study, the teacher’s relationships with his students and his instructional work were perceived as of high quality by his students. However, the depths-hermeneutics analysis suggests that this teachers’ professional success was built on a great deal of emotional suppression, i.e., feelings of anger and frustration towards his behaviorally difficult students. His end-of-career exhaustion indicates that he had too few opportunities to release built-up anger and frustration during his work life, possibly at the expense of his emotional health. The second case study shows how an alternatively certified teacher created a great deal of emotional distance to his students in order to maintain his own emotional balance. Unfortunately, this might have happened at the expense of his students’ social-emotional development. The third case study suggests that teachers can provide instructions that are perceived of high quality without building high-quality relationships with students. However, such a teaching approach might also cause a great deal of social-emotional and possibly even academic harm. Given these results, we strongly recommend that all teachers receive professional development training that focuses on the social-emotional aspects of teaching. Such training needs to include psychodynamically oriented self-awareness opportunities, which allow for a self-reflection on deep-seated and unconscious/unrecognized intrapsychic conflicts that interfere with the building of healthy relationships. They also provide even the best teachers an opportunity to “release steam” and positively integrate feelings of anger and frustration that inevitably build up in pedagogic professions and might otherwise be mentally suppressed.

Barch, C. (2015). On measuring student-teaching relationships: sorting out predictors, outcomes, and schematic structure of students' internal relationship representations. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. Retrieved from https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1950 Cantrell, S., & Kane, T. J. (2013). Ensuring fair and reliable measures of effective teaching: Culminating findings from the MET project's three-year study. Retrieved from Seattle, WA: https://usprogram.gatesfoundation.org/-/media/dataimport/resources/pdf/2016/12/met-ensuring-fair-and-reliable-measures-practitioner-brief.pdf Dietrich, L. (2019). How teaching styles predict school climates. In D. Zimmermann, U. Fickler-Stang, L. Dietrich, & K. Weiland (Eds.), Professionalisierung für Unterricht und Beziehungsarbeit mit psychosozial beeinträchtigten Kindern und Jugendlichen (pp. 107-117). Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Geiger, T., & Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2019). Student perception surveys for K-12 teacher evaluation in the United States: A survey of surveys. Cogent Education, 6(1), 1-16. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2019.1602943 Hirblinger, H. (2017). Lehrerbildung aus psychoanalytisch-pädagogischer Perspektive [teacher education from a psychoanalytic-pedagogical perspective]. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag. König, H.-D. (2018). Die Welt als Bühne mit doppeltem Boden: Tiefenhermeneutische Rekonstruktion kultureller Inszenierungen [the world as a stage with a double bottom: Deep hermeneutic reconstruction of cultural stagings]. Wiesbaden, GER: Springer VS. Lorenzer, A. (2006). Szenisches Verstehen - Zur Erkenntnis des Unbewußten [scenic understanding - on the knowledge of the unconscious]. Baden-Baden: Tectum-Verlag. Pianta, R. C. (2019). Student teacher relationship scale (STRS). Retrieved from https://curry.virginia.edu/faculty-research/centers-labs-projects/castl/measures-developed-robert-c-pianta-phd Polikoff, M. S. (2016). Evaluating the instructional sensitivity of four states' student achievement tests. Educational Assessment, 21(2), 102-119. doi:10.1080/10627197.2016.1166342 Sandner, D. (2018). Entwicklungslinien der Gruppenanalyse [lines of development of group analysis]. Gruppenpsychotherapie und Gruppendynamik, 54(1), 19-34. doi:https://doi.org/10.13109/grup.2018.54.1.19 Trautmann, M. (2019). Seiten- und Quereinsteiger in der Schule. Neue alte Wege in den Lehrerberuf [lateral entrants in schools. New old ways into the teaching profession]. Pädagogik, 6, 6-8. Tripod_Education_Partners. (2016). A guide to Tripod's 7Cs framework of effective teaching. Retrieved from Cambridge, MA: http://www.scsk12.org/instructional/files/2017/Student%20Feedback/Guide%20to%20Tripod%27s%207Cs%20Framework.pdf Würker, A. (2007). Lehrerbildung und Szenisches Verstehen: Professionalisierung durch psychoanalytisch-orientierte Selbstreflexion [professionalization via psychoanalytic-oriented self-reflection]. Baltmannsweiler, GER: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.