Student Teachers’ and Educators’ Perceptions of Educator Interpersonal Behavior at Teacher Education University in Iran

Abstract Classroom is an environment where teachers and students as inhabitants of different worlds are supposed to experience some sort of daily give-and-take. Such inherent discrepancies between these two groups of interlocutors might be among the untouched areas of research. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the cords and discords between first-year student teachers’ and their educators’ perceptions of educator interpersonal behavior. The sample of the study included 4 EFL educators and 102 student teachers majoring in TEFL at two branches of Iranian Teacher Education University. Data were collected with the Australian version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) that was validated and modified into four formats for measuring the participants’ perceptions of the actual educators and an ideal educator interpersonal behavior. The results indicated that although both groups perceived an ideal educator interpersonal behavior similarly, the educators generally overestimated their cooperative behaviors and underestimate their oppositional ones in comparison to what their student teachers perceived. The results also indicated that male and female student teachers perceived some cooperative behaviors in the educators from the opposite gender more significantly. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that there are some perceptual mismatches between student teachers’ and educators’ perceptions of actual educator interpersonal behavior. Therefore, the findings imply that educators should take some measures to locate these perceptual mismatches and eliminate them gradually.