Striving to connect and striving to learn: Influences of relational and mastery goals for teaching on teacher behaviors and student interest and help seeking

•Two studies examined effects of teachers’ relational and mastery goal orientation.•Relational GO predicted teacher and student reports of teachers’ social support.•Mastery GO predicted teacher and student reports of stimulating instruction.•Teacher GO influenced student engagement by influencing teacher behaviors.•Relational GO predicted students’ help seeking; mastery GO predicted interest.

We extended a new achievement goal approach to teacher motivation to predict that relational strivings to achieve caring relationships with students and mastery strivings to develop competence have different consequences for teacher behaviors and thus for students. Participants were 341 teachers in Study 1 and 51 middle school teacher-class pairs (1281 students) in Study 2. As hypothesized, teacher relational goals predicted teacher reports of social support for students and teacher mastery goals predicted teacher reports of cognitively stimulating instruction (CSI). HLM analyses of Study 2 data confirmed that teacher relational goals predicted student help seeking via the relation with perceived teacher social support. Teacher mastery goals predicted student interest; this relation was partially mediated by perceived CSI. Results establish strivings to connect and to learn as distinct systems of teacher motivation.