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“Students say best teachers relate to them, make them think.” Is this news?
As I was online looking through the local news about the record-breaking flooding in Binghamton, NY where I used to live, this unrelated headline from September 4, 2011 caught my eye.
Broome-area students say best teachers relate to them, make them think
‘It’s nice when you can talk to a teacher, when it’s interactive’
It seems with the first day of school approaching, a Binghamton Press reporter interviewed area high school students to get their perspective on what makes a good teacher.
They found that students agree with the American Psychological Association teaching module report, “Improving Students’ Relationships with Teachers to Supply Essential Support for Learning” and this quote from Sara Rimm-Kaufman, author of the APA module:
“Teachers who foster positive relationships with their students create classroom environments more conducive to learning and meet students’ developmental, emotional and academic needs.”
The APA module noted a positive student-teacher relationship shared these characteristics:
- Teachers show their pleasure, that they enjoy their students.
- Teachers interact in a responsive and respectful manner.
- Teachers offer help by answering students’ questions in a timely manner and offering support that matches the children’s needs in achieving academic and social objectives.
- Teachers help students reflect on their thinking and learning skills.
- Teachers know and demonstrate knowledge about individual students’ backgrounds, interests, emotional strengths and academic levels.
Pair these positive relationship-based traits with exceptional instructional skills and knowledge of the content, and we have all we could ask for from a teacher.
Good teaching + Caring Relationships = Better Behaving Students + Higher Academic Achievement
I trust this is not news to most parents and educators. Specific personal and professional competencies are necessary for success in any field – sales, health care, construction, counseling, research, law enforcement, administration, running a restaurant. And beyond these field-specific skills and knowledge, success is a product of a strong work ethic and a commitment to continuous improvement, and depends on an ability to relate with your clients and co-workers. In teaching, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the relationship between teacher and student is the critical factor for success, the foundation for everything that happens in the classroom.
People commonly talk about the culture and climate of their workplace – the norms that drive behavior, the way they are treated, and how it feels to work there. Why? Because how we feel in a certain situation and with certain people matters a great deal to us. We feel more secure and work harder for those who respect and care for us and who have earned our respect.
When we apply this premise to students in a school, its meaning is magnified by the expectation of society and families for students to respect authority, and by the potential for abuse when you have such an age and power differential. But it is also magnified by the beliefs and practices of the individual adults who work with our children. In no endeavor, other than parenting, is the relationship between the provider and recipient as critical and delicate as it is between teacher and student.
So to answer my question, no it isn’t news that students do better with teachers who relate to, respect, and challenge them, but it does bear repeating until every adult who interacts with children internalizes the message and molds their behavior accordingly.
A hurtful experience or a safe haven?
Violence happens in our schools every day. We just need to recognize it.
When we understand that violence is a continuum of hurtful, abusive behavior from subtle to overt, we realize that our students are suffering emotionally and physically, and that many of them are doing it quietly. Children react to hurtful treatment in different ways: they might act out, stop trying to learn, skip school, become physically or emotionally ill, drop out of school, and hurt themselves and others. If we acknowledge the common and pervasive forms of violence that happen on our watch, we can meet our obligation to give children the protection and support they need to be academically and socially successful.
What do we do about it? The antidote to school violence lies in a comprehensive safe school plan that builds a healthy school climate. This climate embeds in the hearts and minds of our children and our school staff the ideals of empathy, respect, tolerance, and compassion. With such a focus, violence of all kinds is recognized and prohibited. We take it seriously and intervene when students are being ostracized, taunted, teased, bullied, or harassed.
My soon to be released book, The Violence Continuum: Creating a Safe School Climate, will help individual teachers and whole schools define violence in terms of this range of hurtful behaviors, and then it will help them determine how and where their particular school needs to improve students’ experiences.
The resulting intentional effort we make to teach and model positive social skills as the foundation of everyday school life gives our children a safe place to learn. And it also teaches them to be good people in the process.
You can go to the Book: The Violence Continuum page for more information about school violence and how you can change the climate of your school and classroom.
Ready to share!
It’s time to share my fascination with what we call “school climate.”
And it’s also time to show my respect for the unique role teachers and principals play in setting a positive school climate and motivating students to learn.
For the past six years I have focused my energies on thinking, researching, and writing about education. I pulled from my experiences as a classroom teacher, building principal, staff development specialist, college teacher and supervisor of student teachers to write three books:
- Teaching is a Privilege: Twelve Essential Understandings for Beginning Teachers (2009)
- Story Power! Breathing Life Into History (2010)
- The Violence Continuum: Creating a Safe School Climate. (Release date November 2011)
The unifying theme of these books is my belief that we owe our students a safe school climate and an engaging learning experience. The climate of a school–how it feels to be a member of the learning community–depends on how each student is treated, by their peers and the adults. When children feel emotionally and physically secure, have a teacher who genuinely cares about them and teaches with enthusiasm, and they are given an active role in their learning, they will grow socially and academically into good people who know how to make healthy choices.
This what this blog is about: making our schools a safe haven and a challenging learning environment for our students. From pre-K to graduation, we need to systematically teach and model positive social skills and attitudes, and expect students to choose non-violent, respectful, and compassionate behavior.
SCHOOL CLIMATE 