Quality of school interaction: can the classroom climate be improved?

Abstract

Interpersonal relationships established at school are fundamental for a child’s academic development. The main objective of this paper was to adapt, apply and evaluate an intervention program for teachers (based on Weber, Salvador and Brandenburg, 2005) aimed at improving interaction between Elementary Education teachers and students. The study was conducted in the Initial Series of a public Elementary Education school in a municipality in the state of Paraná-Brazil. The measurement instrument used to verify interaction between teachers and students was the Teacher Leadership Styles Inventory (Batista and Weber, 2015), whereby 323 students answered the inventory regarding classroom interaction with their teachers (n=14). The predominant Leadership Style indentified upon initial data collection was the Negligent style, indicating that, in the students’ perception, their teachers had low responsiveness and involvement signalling the need for interventions to modify their teachers’ interaction style. Based on the data, an intervention programme was applied and evaluated with two independent groups. It was tested through repeated measurement in three stages (Teacher Leadership Styles Inventory) and was characterized as an experimental study. Ten joint meetings with all teachers divided into two groups were held. Each meeting lasted around two hours and aimed to raise awareness and build the capacity of the teachers for better interpersonal relationships with their students. The themes of the meetings were planned using experiential and informative methodology according to the needs identified in the preceding stage. The results show some positive changes in relation to teacher leadership styles as perceived by the students. Scores for the Authoritative Style increased while scores for the Negligent Style decreased. There was also a significant reduction in the use of Coercive Control in the strategies used by teachers to control student behaviour in both groups. The intervention conducted with teachers shows favourable results as to its use to make interpersonal relationships at school more effective and affective.