Intact social relationships are a basic prerequisite for successful teaching. Aggressive behaviour by pupils and teachers impairs these relationships, makes teaching-learning processes more difficult and jeopardises the healthy development of all those involved. Research can support schools in dealing with aggressive behaviour.

While aggression research has become increasingly specialised in recent years and has investigated individual special forms of aggression such as bullying, schools are confronted with the whole range of aggressive behaviour. The study ‘Aggression in Teacher-Student Interactions’, or LISA for short, takes a holistic approach and examines different types of aggressive behaviour on the part of pupils and teachers. It takes a multi-perspective approach to analysing how frequently such behaviours occur and how they are interrelated. Aggressive behaviour is understood as an interactional problem in which several parties (pupils or teachers) interact with each other and thus contribute to the further course of events. LISA also investigates which factors influence the aggressive behaviour of pupils and teachers.

LISA thus makes an important contribution to schools and teachers by looking at aggressive behaviour in interaction and identifying key influencing factors that can prevent escalating patterns of interaction. These findings can help to sensitise schools in dealing with aggressive behaviour.