This study explores the role of high school students’ perceptions of teacher understanding in the development of caring student-teacher relationships. Whereas past research has embedded understanding as a facet of care, this research distinguishes between care and understanding to examine whether and how understanding is necessary for care. Extending Noddings’ (1992) conceptions of caring as virtue and caring as relation to consider understanding as virtue and understanding as relation , the researchers analyzed 33 interviews with high school students discussing 65 student-teacher relationships to consider the nuances within these different types of relationships. The findings confirm that caring as relation is the more desirable form of teacher care and that in most instances of relational caring, students perceive that teachers understand them both as people and learners. However, this is not uniformly the case, and many students perceive agency in co-creating their relationships with teachers by regulating the extent to which they allow teachers to understand them. The researchers recommend greater attention to the development of understanding as virtue within high schools as a middle ground between a complete lack of understanding and extensive relational understanding. This research has implications for teachers and school leaders seeking to foster stronger student-teacher relationships.
Background Student engagement is a cognitively complex domain that is often oversimplified in theory and practice. Reliance on a single model overlooks the sophisticated nature of student engagement and can lead to misconceptions and limited understandings that hinder teachers’ ability to engage all of their students. Assessing varied models simultaneously frames student engagement as a dynamic process contingent upon interactions among many contextual variables. Purpose We explore the relationship between how high school teachers understand student engagement and their ability to consistently engage students in their classes. We present cognitive flexibility theory and its seven reductive biases to illustrate the complexity of engaging students across contexts and subjects. This theory makes a compelling a priori case that teachers who more consistently and effectively engage students in their classes are likely to be those who possess higher levels of cognitive flexibility in the domain of student engagement. To test this hypothesis empirically, we asked: Do teachers who are more effective at engaging students reveal more cognitive flexibility when discussing student engagement, as compared with teachers who are less effective at engaging students? Research Design We present a mixed-methods case study conducted over three years at one high school. We utilize annual student survey data to identify teachers with whom students reported relatively more and less classroom engagement. Then, we examine the comments of 18 teachers who participated in annual focus groups about student engagement across those three years to identify differences in how more and less engaging teachers express cognitive flexibility in their understanding of student engagement. Findings We find that teachers whom students found more engaging tended to illustrate more cognitive flexibility in how they thought and spoke about engagement. By contrast, teachers whom students rated as less engaging tended to see engagement in more simplistic and compartmentalized ways. Within these trends, the data provide evidence that individual teachers fall along the seven theorized continuums regarding the extent to which they demonstrated cognitive flexibility on engagement. Conclusions By bringing cognitive flexibility theory to the domain of student engagement, we call for a new research agenda focused on understanding the development of teachers’ knowledge of student engagement and, in turn, engaging instruction. In place of receiving a new model, tool, or checklist, teachers need opportunities to grapple with the complexity of engagement, to see and analyze various cases, and to build schema in relation to their classroom practice.
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