Teachers' choices for the teaching career and their teacher-student interpersonal relationships in the classroom

This paper reports on the relationships between teachers’ reasons forchoosing a teaching career and their interpersonal behaviour in the classroom. In doing so,it extends international research with the FIT-Choice scale - an instrument that examinesdifferent classes of teachers’ motivations: perceived abilities; intrinsic, personal & socialutility values; and task perceptions (Richardson & Watt, 2006; Watt & Richardson, 2007,2008) – to the context of the Netherlands. It also contributes by linking the framework toresearch on teacher-student interpersonal behaviour in the classroom (Wubbels,Brekelmans, den Brok & van Tartwijk, 2006). Teacher-student interpersonal behaviour isconceptualised here in terms of two major dimensions: control (the degree to which theteacher determines the interaction) and affiliation (the degree to which teachers andstudents are cooperative or oppositional). Prior research suggests that teacher-studentinterpersonal behaviour is strongly linked to other teaching variables, teacher stress orburn-out, but also to student outcomes (Wubbels et al., 2006)