New Perspectives on Investigating Teacher-student Relationships

Hunter Gehlbach

Teacher-student relationships lie at the heart of students’ schooling experience. Past studies have linked these relationships with multiple student outcomes. However, how to best improve teacher-student relationships to impact these outcomes remains an open question, particularly at the secondary level. The proposed longitudinal study takes two steps towards answering this question. First, the study seeks to understand the associations between teacher-student relationships and students’ achievement, behavioral, motivational, and affective outcomes over time. Extending previous research by assessing both students’ and teachers’ perspectives on their overall relationships at two time points within the school year will clarify our understanding of these associations. Second, the study examines a previously unstudied precursor to teacher-student relationships. Specifically, social perspective taking – the motivation and ability of teachers and students to discern one another’s thoughts and feelings – is investigated as a promising basis for interventions to improve teacher-student relationships. The proposed study will generate new knowledge by tracking the associations between social perspective taking and teacher-student relationships as well as between these relationships and educational outcomes at the beginning and end of the school year. The goal of this research is to lay the foundation for developing perspective-taking interventions to improve teacher-student relationships.

About Hunter Gehlbach

Hunter Gehlbach is an educational psychologist with an affinity for social psychology. His interests lie in improving educational settings through enhancing the social interactions of teachers and students. His specific interests within social psychology focus on social perspective taking, i.e., how people discern the thoughts and feelings of others within the classroom. For example, after explaining a new concept, how do teachers infer which students understand the idea and which are confused? How do students decide whether the teacher is becoming frustrated by their behavior? In addition to this substantive interest, his methodological research focuses on helping social scientists to design effective questionnaires. After graduating with a B.A. from Swarthmore College in psychology and education, Gehlbach taught high school social studies before returning to school for an M.Ed. in school counseling from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut in 2005-06 and has been an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since then. Recently, he served as a member of the Spencer Foundation’s task force on developing high quality educational researchers.