An Intervention to Promote Positive Teacher–Student Relationships and Self-Determination Among Adolescents With Emotional Disturbance

Abstract

Positive teacher-student relationships provide adolescents with disabilities the confidence to explore new challenges in and out of the classroom. Goal-setting and self-determination skills have been consistently shown to promote healthy transition adjustment among students with disabilities. Despite the growing awareness of the importance of positive teacher-student relationships and self-determination, there is a paucity of specific strategies designed to improve teacherstudent relationships while supporting self-determination for adolescents with high-incidence disabilities. This practitionerfocused article describes the Adolescent Goal-Setting Intervention (AGSI) and how it can be implemented in an educational context to promote teacher-student relationships and self-determination.

Measuring Relationships Between Adolescents With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders and Their Teachers: A Psychometric Report

“…For students and teachers who rate the overall relationship as high-quality (high closeness, low conflict), this mutual agreement may reinforce teacher actions that further benefit a teacher–student dyad such as greater trust and fulfillment of obligation, and lead to higher quality relationships with others—resources not often available to students with EBD (Trainor, 2008). For those students who believe their relationship is poor or disagree with teachers on relationship quality, teachers would then be able to select targeted interventions to improve their relationships (e.g., Lind, Poppen, & Murray, 2017). Teachers may also choose to adjust their interactions based on lower rated items within the STRS-SV or STRS-RT such as being more patient or offering fewer verbal corrections and more positive praise statements.…”

Enhancing Self-Determination Skills for Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

“…These findings indicate that transition planning for students with EBD would be an ideal time to incorporate instruction related to self-determination. Two specific areas that can enhance self-determination for students with disabilities include goal-setting and youth autonomy (e.g., self-advocacy; Cuenca-Carlino, Mustian, Allen, & Whitley, 2019; Lind, Poppen, & Murray, 2017; Lingo, Williams-Diehm, Martin, & McConnell, 2018; Mazzotti et al, 2016). Both goal-setting and youth autonomy have been found to be promising predictors of post-secondary success for students with disabilities (Mazzotti et al, 2016; Royer, Lane, Cantwell, & Messenger, 2017), as they empower students to make choices about the direction of their future and create clear and specific plans for how they can achieve those goals.…”

“…Both goal-setting and youth autonomy have been found to be promising predictors of post-secondary success for students with disabilities (Mazzotti et al, 2016; Royer, Lane, Cantwell, & Messenger, 2017), as they empower students to make choices about the direction of their future and create clear and specific plans for how they can achieve those goals. In addition, goal-setting and youth autonomy interventions have been found to improve measures of self-determination (Cuenca-Carlino et al, 2018), behavior (Royer et al, 2017), and teacher–student relationships (Lind et al, 2017).…”

Instructional Feedback: An Effective, Efficient, Low-Intensity Strategy to Support Student Success

“…Although you as the teacher are most likely the one to set academic goals based on standards and curriculum, your students also benefit from understanding the behaviors and social skills needed to successfully complete the activity. This is an opportunity for you to model and teach students to set learning goals, an important element in the development of self-regulated learners (Lind, Poppen, & Murray, 2016).…”