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Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teacher in a typical school year. That's enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a student's lifetime love of learning—and it's enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails.
Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students.
"People sometimes mistake a kind of casual familiarity and friendliness for the promotion of really deep relationships that are about a child's potential, their interests, their strengths, and weaknesses," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies the effects of emotions and mindsets on learning.
"A lot of teachers ... have really strong abilities to engage socially with the students, but then it's not enough," she said. "You have to go much deeper than that and actually start to engage with students around their curiosity, their interests, their habits of mind through understanding and approaching material to really be an effective teacher."
In a forthcoming longitudinal study with Bank Street College of Education, Immordino-Yang is tracking how the highly effective teachers of low-income students set classroom norms and feelings of trust and safety for students—but also leverage that foundation to promote students' deeper thinking and engagement.
Why are teacher-student relationships important?
"The relational part of teaching may very well be its most underrated aspect. ... When teachers are good at building relationships with students, the skill is seen more as cover for a lack of content knowledge or wherewithal to instruct with rigor," James Ford, the 2015 North Carolina State Teacher of the Year and the program director for the Public School Forum of North Carolina, told Education Week. To...