Preschool Children’s Observed Interactions with Teachers: Implications for Understanding Teacher–Child Relationships

Theory and research point to the daily interactions between individual children and teachers as formative to teacher–child relationships, yet observed dyadic teacher–child interactions in preschool classrooms have largely been overlooked. This study provides a descriptive examination of the quality of individual children’s interactions with their teacher as a basis for understanding one source of information theorized to inform children’s and teachers’ perceptions of their relationships with each other. Children’s dyadic interactions with teacher, including their positive engagement, communication, and conflict, were observed across a large and racially/ethnically diverse sample of 767 preschool children (M = 4.39 years) at three time points in the year. On average, most children displayed low-to-moderate levels of positive engagement (78%), while nearly all children showed rare communication (81%) and conflict (99%) with the teacher. Boys demonstrated lower positive engagement and higher conflict with the teacher than girls. Black children were observed to demonstrate higher positive engagement with the teacher compared to White children. No differences in interaction quality were observed for Black children with a White teacher compared to White child-White teacher or Black child-Black teacher pairs. Results advance our understanding of dyadic teacher–child interactions in preschool classrooms and raise new questions to expand our knowledge of how teacher–child relationships are established, maintained, and modified, to ultimately support teachers in building strong relationships with each and every preschooler.