Commentary
Commentary: The invisible hand of the teacher
Thomas A. Kindermann
Portland State University, USA
abstractarticle info
Article history:
Received 5 May 2011
Accepted 24 May 2011
Traditional empirical studies on developmental processes in school tend to view contributions of teachers,
peers, and the classrooms’ social structure (and even parent effects) as if all were independent of one another.
As this Special Issue demonstrates, however, these processes are more complex. When classroom interactions
are seen as the “engine” of development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998), attention to the invisible hand of
the teacher is necessary. The contributions to the issue show empirical strategies common to such a
perspective (use of cross-informant data, attention to interconnections between different kinds of
relationships and to interconnections between the social and academic domains), and they all highlight
common conceptual features (focus on relationships and social structure, on reciprocal processes, and on the
person characteristics of teachers and peers). Taken together, the findings from the studies should have a
collective impact on teacher education.
© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Developmental processes in school appear to be more complex
than traditional empirical studies suggest. For decades, developmen-
tal psychologists have focused mainly on parental influences and
educational psychologists have studied teacher influences, but both
have followed largely separate lines of inquiry. Although a third kind
of developmental influence on children in school, peer relationships,
has traditionally received much attention from theorists (e.g.,
Baldwin, Piaget, Vygotski; see Rubin, Bukowski, & Laursen, 2009;
Cairns & Cairns, 1994), an empirical strand to these efforts has only
emerged fairly recently. Mostly, this research has just added another
independent line of inquiry.
The current Special Issue on the “Invisible Hand of the Teacher”
signals that this is changing and that the separate research strands
are becoming integrated. Peer relationships appear to provide a
bridge that brings the areas together: Peers share space with teachers
in school (as well as with parents at home and in their neighbor-
hood), and their influences play out simultaneously. Thus, educa-
tional and developmental psychologists have become interested in
how teachers and peers jointly influence children's development in
the same setting. This interest is explicitly guided by Urie Bronfen-
brenner's postulate that social interactions are the “engine of
development” (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998;seealsoEccles &
Roeser, 2010).
School is probably the single most influential cultural institution
in the world (e.g., Meece & Schaefer, 2010), and influences from
teachers seem to be normative for the vast majority of children
(estimates are that between 65% and 75% of the world's children
receive formal education, with larger proportions in the more
developed countries). UNESCO data suggest that in the coming
30 years, more children will receive formalized education than in all
of human history before (United Nations Development Programme,
2010). Teachers are the trained organizers of formal education and
culturally predestined to be influential; experiences in school are
likely some of children's most formative developmental influence.
Peer influences are similarly ubiquitous; they are basic to human
nature and occur outside of schools as well. In contrast to relation-
ships with teachers, peer relationships are based largely on children's
own preferences and decisions to spend more time with specific
agemates than with others. This Special Issue sheds light on how
much of peers' developmental influence is regulated by teachers'
efforts in the school context.
In this commentary, I would like to follow two threads of thinking
that run across the contributions to the current Special Issue. First, the
contributions show empirical commonalities, namely, an appreciation of
the interconnectedness of several kinds of interpersonal relationships in
the classroom, which comes together with the use of cross-informant
data, and attention to how the academic domain and the interpersonal
or social domain are interconnected in school. Secondly, the papers also
share a second set of commonalities that give these research efforts a
direction. The goals are to focus our attention on social relationships and
reciprocal processes between teachers and peers in the classroom, on
children's perspectives and needs, and on teachers as people whose
relationships with students are connected to students' own relation-
ships among each other. This line of thought supports efforts to
reintroduce attention to relationships into the professional training of
teachers, because it would be beneficial for students' development. The
goals of “engineering” teachers as managers of instruction, as
“unbiased” executives of knowledge transfer, and as impersonal
evaluators of knowledge acquisition have dominated the literature for
too long. The field may be ready for revisiting its past. Gronlund (1959),
for example, explicitly argued that training in sociometric methods
should be part of teachers' preservice preparation.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 32 (2011) 304–308
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
0193-3973/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2011.04.005