The teacher-class relationship A mixed-methods approach to validating a new scale

Teacher-student relationships have been shown to be highly relevant for student outcomes, but they are also important for teachers. Teachers have a basic need for relatedness with their students and recent empirical evidence underlines the relevance of teachers' relationships with the students of a class. However, a validated instrument which specifically addresses the relational phenomenon between a teacher and the entire group of students within a class - which we define as teacher-class relationship - is yet missing. Thus, the goal of the present research was to develop and validate an instrument which captures the teachers' self-reported quality of the teacher-class relationship (the TCR scale). To do so, we adopted a mixed methods approach: In Study 1 (qualitative, N = 56), we analyzed interviews to explore the cognitive validity of the TCR items, and in Study 2 (quantitative, N = 209), we tested the psychometric quality of the TCR scale and its external validity in terms of correlative links with related constructs. Study 1 results showed that seven out of the original 13 developed items were highly cognitively valid in that the teachers associated main aspects of relationship quality with these items and answered them by referring predominantly to the whole class instead of individual students. Study 2 results confirmed that these seven items formed a unidimensional scale with high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .89). Furthermore, the TCR scale was significantly linked with teachers' class-specific teaching emotions and self-efficacy as well as with teachers' job-related burnout symptoms and emotional labor. We conclude that the TCR scale represents a reliable, valid and parsimonious instrument to measure the quality of teacher-class relationships. We hope that the existence of this scale fuels future research to further investigate teacher-class relationships and their connections with teachers' emotional and professional wellbeing.