| dc.description.abstract | Background: Children spend an increasing amount of time in school, where teachers and other school staff act as facilitators of emotional competence development. Through emotion socialization and the creation of close student-teacher relationships, teachers are important for children’s positive school outcomes. How teachers engage in emotion socialization and create high-quality student-teacher relationships is affected by their own emotional competencies. Their abilities in emotional awareness, understanding, regulating and expressing emotions all affect their consequent emotion socialization styles and relational quality to their students. The current study piloted the “Tuning in to Kids in Schools” (N- TIK-Schools) intervention in Norwegian primary schools, aiming to increase teachers’ emotional competencies and emotion socialization practices, and consequently improve their relations to students. The main goal was thus to investigate the relationship between teachers’ emotion socialization styles and the quality of their relationships to students, and the impact of the intervention on these factors. Method: Two waitlist-control and two intervention schools in Grorud municipality in Oslo were recruited. Baseline measures were collected through an online questionnaire before implementation of the N-TIK-Schools program was initiated in the intervention schools (autumn 2019). All staff at the intervention schools were given a half-day seminar on emotional competence, additionally, the school administrations received a two-hour supervision. Teachers and teacher assistants who work with children in 1st to 4th grade were given group supervision, consisting of 6 x 1.5 hour group sessions following a structured manual. Comparisons between the intervention groups and the control group were made on their emotional styles and relationship qualities to students using a 2 x 2 mixed ANOVA. Results and Conclusion: The results suggest that teachers’ emotional style is related to student-teacher relationship quality, evident through significant associations between participant’s responses to emotional style and student-teacher relationship. There were no significant effects of the intervention on teachers’ emotion socialization style or Conflict in the student-teacher relationship. An unexpected interaction effect was found for Closeness in VI the student-teacher relationship, indicating a significant increase for the control group only. The pilot study N-TIK-Schools did not show the desired effects. The discussion raises questions whether the intervention itself could be faulty, such as intervention dosage being too narrow, or caused by challenges in operationalization or assessment issues. Short follow- up times could additionally be insufficient to capture changes that might require more time. Further, ceilings effects in the intervention schools on perceived use of Emotion Coaching and Closeness to students do also make improvements unlikely and difficult to find. The measurement tools used were adapted to a school context, and particularly the adapted STRS measure, revised to a general classroom setting, was suboptimal, and is not recommended for future use. The N-TIK-Schools pilot can, by bringing forward the challenges mentioned above, contribute to development of future studies of interventions targeting teacher emotional competence and relationship quality. It is highlighted that future interventions on emotional competence training in schools should use observational tools and/or more direct assessment in addition to self-reports from school staff. | eng |