Students educated in self-contained special education classrooms and the teachers who serve them are in crisis. Self-contained classrooms are separate from general education classrooms and may be resource classrooms housed within general education schools or separate schools or districts serving primarily students with disabilities. Under-researched and excluded from most large-scale efficacy and response to intervention (RTI) trials, students in self-contained classrooms make little progress academically and behaviorally (Lane, Wehby, Little, & Cooley, 2005; Siperstein, Wiley, & Forness, 2011). These outcomes are poorest among the approximately 362,000 students in American public schools who are categorized as having an emotional and/or behavioral disorder (EBD; US Department of Education, 2015). Among the promising strategies for improving student outcomes is ensuring that their instruction occurs in settings with high quality teacher-student interactions (Curby, Rudasill, Edwards, & Pérez-Edgar, 2011). A key distinguishing feature of the self-contained special education classroom is the regular presence of multiple educators, namely a special education teacher and one or more paraeducators. Classroom quality, as well as student and teacher outcomes, in self-contained special education classrooms may be improved by targeting the interactions between the special educator and paraeducators. Drawing from evidence that quality teacher-student relationships lead to positive student outcomes (Battistich, Schaps, & Wilson, 2004; Rimm-Kaufman, Curby, Grimm, Nathanson, & Brock, 2009), the authors argue that positive teacher-paraeducator relationships support student learning in important ways (Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007) and also provide students with a model for positive interaction styles. The first step in supporting the relationship between teachers and paraeducators in self-contained special education classrooms is to identify the full range of interactions that may promote or inhibit this relationship. This research builds a framework of teacher-paraeducator interactions in restrictive settings with an aim of improving student and teacher outcomes.