Agency and communion of teacher behavior in dyadic interactions with primary school children. Differences between children depending on their grades, gender, linguistic background, and special educational needs. Abstract. The behavior of teachers in teacher-child dyads can be described on the two universal orthogonal dimensions of interpersonal behavior: Communion (e.g., warmth, need satisfaction) and agency (e.g., steering, control). Certain combinations of manifestations on these dimensions are particularly favorable: students are motivated and learn more when their teacher demonstrates strong communion. It is less clear, however, whether a moderately strong or strong agency of the teacher is particularly beneficial. Via a newly developed questionnaire, we investigate whether teachers align their agency complementarily to the child's competence and whether this translates into stronger teacher agency towards groups of children whose mean competence is lower, namely (a) children with special educational needs, (b) children with a non-German first language, and (c) boys. Seventy-two teachers described their behavior toward five children in their class (N = 302) on 13 items each which capture different combinations of communion and agency in a circumplex of eight facets. As expected, facets with very strong agency correlated positively (r = .54 and .65), and facets with very weak agency correlated negatively (r = -.46 and -.59) with the child's grades. After aggregating teachers' reports across groups of children, we found that teachers exhibited higher levels of behavior on facets with strong agency towards children with special educational needs or with non-German first language, irrespective of these facets' communion. Most of these differences disappeared once children's grades were controlled for. In comparison with their behavior towards girls, teachers showed significantly stronger behavioral manifestations towards boys on facets characterized by strong agency and, simultaneously, only (moderately) weak communion, even after controlling for children's grades. Results are discussed against the background of research (a) on the connection between teacher behavior and students' motivation, and (b) on the reasons for the lower success of boys at school.
