The role of the teacher in classroom peer relations

Abstract

The classroom is a fundamentally social setting, which can foster students’ learning but can also seriously hamper students’ functioning in school. Positive relationships with the teacher and peers are essential for students’ social and academic adjustment. To connect these two social agents, this dissertation focused on the role of the teacher in classroom peer relations. The classroom peer system can be understood on multiple levels, including the individual, dyad, and classroom group. To do justice to this complexity, each of these levels was taken into account. Similarly, the teaching practices that were investigated are interactions teachers have with an entire class and with individual students. The general hypothesis that guided the studies was that teachers, by modeling positive versus negative behavior and affect in relations with others in general and with specific students, can set the stage for positive versus negative relations among classmates. A three-wave longitudinal design over the course of one school-year was employed, which allowed the examination of both concurrent and prospective associations between teacher practices and peer relations. Students and their teachers in 59 fifth-grade classrooms from 41 schools in the south/east of the Netherlands participated in the study. At each wave, students completed questionnaires regarding their teachers, peers, and themselves. Teachers also completed questionnaires about their students and themselves. Moreover, teacher behavior towards individual students was observed using video recordings. Multilevel analysis, path analysis, growth curve modelling, and social network analysis were applied to answer the research questions. The chapters focusing on peer relations at the level of the classroom group found that, by modeling supportive rather than conflicted interactions, teachers foster a classroom peer ecology in which positive rather than negative peer relations and interactions are the norm and social status is distributed in a more egalitarian rather than hierarchical manner. The studies on individual students’ social status show that teacher behavior towards a student, as well as peer perceptions of the teacher-student relationship, are related to students’ peer liking, disliking, and isolated status. That is, teachers can put their students in a positive or negative light by interacting with them in a positive or negative manner. Finally, a study on dyadic ties between students further supported the role of the teacher as a social referent for peer relationships. Taken together, the studies in this dissertation show that the teacher indeed is a factor in classroom peer relations. This dissertation has added to the emerging literature on the role of the teacher in classroom peer relations by investigating processes over time, examining classroom, individual, and dyadic levels of peer relations, and disentangling teacher effect on peer liking, disliking, and isolated status. Based on the findings, teachers might purposefully adapt their everyday practices to foster peer relations. When teachers regulate their contact with students in such a way that it benefits the classroom peer ecology, individual students’ social status in the classroom, and dyadic ties between students, they shape an environment in which students’ social as well as academic learning can blossom.