Abstract
Four in ten pupils in England were not in regular contact with their teachers during the lockdown (Lucas, Nelson & Sims, 2020). The recent report for the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that a third of pupils were not engaged with their lessons, fewer than half (42%) wanted to return their work, and pupils in the most disadvantaged schools were the least likely to be engaged with remote learning (Eyles et al., 2020).
As schools adjust to the reality of post-covid era, it's vital to understand the aspects of teacher-student relationships needed for school re-integration of pupils. Prompted by this need, we conducted a cross-cultural virtual Delphi study with 3 highly-experienced school leaders from England (n=1), Netherlands (n=1) and United States (n=1) aiming to explore which school-based relational aspects are to be currently prioritized by schools.
Applying thematic networks technique we organized the data into global themes (n=3) and organizing themes respectively (n=20) (Attride-Stirling 2001, p. 388-389): student-teacher aspect (n=17), student-student aspect (n=2) and student-school aspect (n=1). The prevalent re-occurence of teacher-student-related organizing themes throughout the data, points toward influencial role of teacher-student relationship for building positive classroom climates.
This result is in line with recent empirical study by Dietrich & Cohen (2019) based on 146,044 students from 7247 classrooms, 131 schools, and 29 districts in the United States.