Yet it is often precisely that one story that reveals what disappears in large datasets. Not what works on average, but how things break down. Where rules collide with expectations. Where good intentions turn into misunderstandings. And where emotions are not just noise or inconvenience, but signals that something may be structurally misaligned.
A recent longitudinal case study from China by Zhang and colleagues follows three people over 3 years. One single triad: a mathematics teacher who is also a homeroom teacher, a student, and his mother. No survey. No effect sizes. And no strong causal claims. Instead, the study draws on interviews, classroom observations, conversations, drawings, and chat messages. The result is not a checklist of “what works”, but a close examination of how collaboration between school and family can become emotionally derailed, and how it can also recover.
What the researchers show is that tensions between teachers, students and parents rarely revolve around a single incident. Not around that one watch that was confiscated, or that one public reprimand in class. They are better understood as clashes between different logics:
- The student seeks recognition.
- The teacher seeks order and fairness.
- The parent seeks protection and individual care.
Each of these aims is defensible in itself. The problem arises when they are all active at the same time, without being made explicit.
At the start of the school year, the student appears as the “ideal pupil”. He seeks recognition. The teacher rewards it. The mother, in turn, embraces the teacher as an ally. For a time, everything aligns. However, this alignment does not last. Gradually, the student slips back into familiar patterns. He becomes restless, searching, and occasionally disruptive. In response, the teacher turns to public discipline. What she experiences as a way to safeguard fairness in the classroom is, from the student’s perspective, experienced as humiliation. Meanwhile, the mother senses that her son has been hurt, yet feels compelled to remain loyal to the school. As a result, she chooses silence.
That silence, in retrospect, proves decisive. Not because it escalates the conflict directly, but because it reveals what the conflict is actually about. This is not, in the first place, a problem of behaviour, but of meaning. For the teacher, the issue concerns rules. For the student, it concerns dignity. And for the mother, it concerns loyalty.
It is at this point that the strength of a case study becomes visible in a way that large-scale research rarely captures. You can observe how emotions move between people over time. Shame in the student gradually hardens into anger. Insecurity in the parent turns into withdrawal. And the teacher’s professional commitment to fairness begins to feel, to others, like emotional coldness.
Against this background, the researchers identify four recurring tensions: between student idealism and teacher authority; between discipline and parental expectations; between collective fairness and individual care; and between open communication and avoidant coping. Yet the study’s real contribution lies less in this typology than in how it is interpreted. The analysis shows that emotions do not signal personal failure. Instead, they point to tensions embedded in the system itself.
Seen in this light, the problem is not that the teacher acts too strictly. It is that her role requires her to be both objective and relational simultaneously. The problem is not that the mother remains silent. It is that harmony and conflict avoidance outweigh confrontation in her cultural context. And the problem is not that the student is difficult. Rather, it is that the adults no longer share a clear sense of what they are working towards together.
That shared goal only shifts later, when the mother explains that her son wants to become a pilot. With this disclosure, the story changes. Attention moves away from grades and discipline towards future orientation and meaning. The teacher stops interpreting the student as resistant and begins to see him as searching. Consequently, she abandons public reprimands and initiates short, private conversations after class. She no longer asks the mother to be stricter; instead, she invites her to think along. At home, the mother adjusts her tone. She reproaches less and supports more. In turn, the student regains room to exist without constant evaluation.
Notably, no new method is introduced. No protocol. And no intervention programme. What changes instead is the shared narrative about who this student is and what the school represents in his life.
Reading this, I was reminded of what Belfi and colleagues argued in 2015, building on Coleman’s earlier work from 1990 on collective teacher efficacy and parents. Collaboration between school and family does not primarily depend on aligning rules, but on aligning meanings. As long as different actors define the problem differently, solutions remain elusive. Emotions expose those mismatches. They function not as noise, but as signposts.
This case becomes even more telling because it centres on a mathematics teacher. In many cultures, including our own, mathematics carries associations of rationality, objectivity, and distance. Unsurprisingly, that logic shapes the teacher’s initial responses. She follows the rules correctly, yet overlooks the emotional layer. Only when she reframes her role from controller to guide does the interaction begin to shift.
This, in turn, raises an uncomfortable question. Do we actually prepare teachers for emotionally complex situations like these? Or do we persist in treating parent-teacher interactions as rational consultations, when, in practice, they operate as relational negotiations?
Ultimately, the strength of this single case lies precisely there. Not in generalisability or representativeness, but in recognisability. Anyone who has ever sat through a parent-teacher meeting will recognise this pattern immediately. The tension between equality and differentiation. Between rules and care. Between speaking up and staying silent. Large datasets can confirm that school-family relationships matter. What they rarely show is how fragile those relationships are.
Sometimes, you do not need a thousand students to see something fundamental. Sometimes one student, one parent, and one teacher suffice to reveal where the system comes under strain.