Mind-mindedness and educational stance in a sample of primary school teachers

Mind-mindedness has been defined as the caregiver's ability to consider the children's mental states and refer to them in commenting behavior. The present study embedded mind-mindedness in the discourse about the quality of teacher-pupil relationship in primary school alongside other instruments that investigated the educational style in terms of authoritarian paradigm, methods, and control. The 169 Italian primary school teachers involved in this study completed, through an online survey platform: a description of one selected pupil (Mind-mindedness representational measure), Adultcentrism Scale for Teachers, The Black Pedagogy Scale (cf. Rutschky, 1977, 2015; Miller, 1980, 1983), and Problems in School Questionnaire. In general, descriptions of pupils provided by teachers showed a prevalence of mental attributes over behavioral ones. A higher percentage of mental contents in teachers' descriptions associated with a teaching style oriented to support pupils' autonomy. The agreement with Black Pedagogy methods associated instead with poorer descriptions. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between the report of higher diffusion of Black Pedagogy's practices nowadays, and the tendency to use more mental attributes (absolute frequency). For future research, it would be interesting to deepen the level of adult mind-mindedness in further educational contexts and in describing children of different ages, also through a qualitative methodology