Classroom Stress and School Achievement

Abstract

This paper reviews briefly the development of both theoretical and practical resources used by British educators to deal with ethnic minority pupils whose presence has increased substantially in some schools since the 1950s. Drawing on the writer’s own research,¹ it focuses on the skills of teachers in inter-personal negotiations with their ethnic minority pupils. The social and academic outcomes of classroom relations are considered and indicate that the teachers’ skills of perception and communication appeared inadequate for the range of social expression demanded of them in interaction with West Indian, predominantly Jamaican, pupils.