The Impact of Teachers on a Child's Life

As all parents know, children’s relationships with their teachers can be of great important influence, affecting students’ connection to school, motivation, academic performance, and psychosocial well-being. Students spend a great deal of time at school, and the classroom is the source of many of their interpersonal relationships and activities. Although a child’s social adjustment to school was initially examined primarily through relationships with classroom peers.

The Effect of Teacher on Student Behaviour

Academic achievement: Relationships with teachers may have an impact on students’ learning and academic achievement. Children with better social skills may be more talented at interacting in positive ways with teachers and peers, and teachers may interpret positive interactions as reflecting not only social competence but also intellectual competence. In addition, children who are motivated to seek approval from their teachers may employ achievement-related behaviors to meet this goal. Finally, supportive relationships with teachers may augment students’ motivation to learn and actively participate in subject domains that have traditionally held little interest for them. Increased participation may result in changes in attitude regarding the subject domain as students experience increased desires, interest, and identify utility.

Psychological adjustment: It is been understood that the support from teachers also affect psychological adjustment on a child’s life. In a preschool population, it is been found that secure attachment with a teacher partially compensated for insecure child-mother attachment relationships, predicting teacher-rated social competence and pro-social behavior. In a primary school population, students who present their self more positive bonds with their teachers obtained higher scores on self and teacher-reported social and emotional adjustment outcomes. In addition, primary school children appear to make judgments about their classmates based on perceptions of how the target child interacts with and is perceived by the teacher, which has implications for peer acceptance and rejection. Teacher support also appears to have an impact on psychological adjustment in older students. Students who attended middle schools that deliberately sought to enhance teacher-student relationships tend to have fewer adjustment difficulties during the change. Indeed, changes in perceptions of teacher support predicted changes in both self-esteem and depression among middle school students, such that students who perceived increasing teacher support showed corresponding decreases in depressive symptoms and increases in self-esteem, while students who perceived decreasing teacher support showed increased depressive symptoms and decreased self-esteem.