Teacher Attunement to Student Friendships: Associations with Victimization in Elementary School Classrooms

ABSTRACT BODY: Teachers use a variety of strategies to prevent problematic student interactions. They may use strategies that affect interactions indirectly by being highly sensitive to students’ needs and creating a positive classroom climate (responsive teaching), or they may use direct strategies such as controlling opportunities to interact through seating arrangements (Gest & Rodkin, 2011). The effective use of direct strategies likely requires knowledge of existing peer networks (attunement; Hamm et al., 2011). The present study asks two questions: (1) Are responsive teaching and friendship attunement associated with less child-reported victimization? (2) Without highly responsive teaching, can teachers’ attunement to friendships provide an alternative avenue to reducing victimization?

Methods: Participants were 934 children in 48 1^st-, 3^rd-and 5^th-grade classrooms assessed three times across a school year. Responsive teaching was measured with the CLASS observational assessment (Pianta et al., 2008). Children circled friends’ names; teachers indicated each child’s friends. Children reported their perceived Physical and Relational Victimization. Final analyses will add 33 classrooms (430 children).

Results: Responsive teaching was estimated from the Emotional Support domain of the CLASS using bifactor modeling (Hamre et al., 2013). Friendship attunement was calculated as the proportion of all possible friendship ties on which the teacher and child agree that a friendship exists. Latent growth curve models estimated trajectories of victimization. Neither responsive teaching nor friendship attunement predicted growth in victimization, but fall responsive teaching was marginally associated with lower physical and relational attunement in the fall (all ps < .10). Fall friendship attunement was also associated with less fall victimization (all ps <.01). Finally, a significant interaction term indicated that when teachers had low scores on responsive teaching, high friendship attunement was compensatory in that children reported levels of victimization on par with classrooms high in responsive teaching.

Conclusions: Low responsive teaching could be considered a risk factor for victimization given that classrooms with less responsive teaching had increased likelihood of victimization. However, teachers’ attunement to student friendships mitigated this negative outcome. Our models suggest teacher attunement to friendships may serve as a protective factor under conditions of risk (i.e., low responsive teaching; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). These results suggest that helping low-responsive teachers become attuned to students’ friendships may be a viable strategy to improve student outcomes that could complement efforts to improve responsiveness.