Excerpt taken from Goodwin, Bryan. “Simply Better.” ADCD. 2015. 10 Sept. 2015
<http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/111038/chapters/Guaranteeing-Challenging,-Engaging,and-Intentional-Instruction.aspx>.
Building Strong Relationships with Students
Dweck has observed that great teachers both "challenge and nurture" their students. As an example, she
cites Dorothy DeLay, the famous violin instructor (who counted Itzhak Perlman among her pupils). One of
DeLay's students once remarked, "That is part of Miss DeLay's genius—to put people in a frame of mind
where they can do their very best. Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss
DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you are feeling nurtured" (Dweck, 2006).
In 1969, Judith Kleinfeld, then a Harvard doctoral student, traveled to Alaska "eager to do research that
mattered, to find ways of improving education for children who were not doing well in school" (1972). Hoping
to identify which teaching styles had the most positive impact on Native Alaskan students, she spent a year
observing classroom interactions between teachers and students in two boarding schools.
Over the course of the year, Kleinfeld identified four types of teachers. The first type she
calls traditionalists—teachers who set high expectations for students but viewed developing personal
relationships with them as outside their professional purview, offering little academic or emotional support to
help students meet expectations. Kleinfeld described one such teacher as follows:
Mr. W is a nervous man with a perpetually strained facial expression… During the observation, Mr. W. stood
behind his desk lecturing… He placed a summary of the main concepts of the lecture, highly technical
terms, on the board. The…students dutifully wrote down the words.
In a later interview, Mr. W. voiced serious concern for…students and noted that their main problem in the
class was vocabulary. They couldn't understand what he was saying…
Mr. W. mentioned, "[Some] students are afraid of me because I yell at them. Well, I do jump on them when
they are slack on work"
Building Relationships with Students
In the movies, relationships form easily, often during a montage scene while perky music plays in the
background. In real-life classrooms, though, it takes much more day-today effort to develop strong bonds
with students. Here are some tips for developing positive teacher–student relationships.
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Talk casually with students about their interests before or after class.
Greet students by name as they enter the classroom. (This may be especially important for "problem
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students," with whom it's easy to inadvertently limit interaction.)
Comment on important events in students' lives—for example, congratulating a student on a good
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performance in the school play.
Consciously seek to make eye contact with every student in the room.
Freely move about your room, deliberately seeking to move toward and be close to all students, especially
those who are struggling.
Use "get-to-know-you" activities at the beginning of the school year.
Although some of these tips may seem obvious, it's easy for them to fall by the wayside in the crush of daily
events. It can also be easy for teachers to skip these sorts of "touchy-feely" exercises in order to get down to
the "business" of teaching. However, teachers need to recognize that these sorts of relationship-building
efforts can make their job of teaching much easier, so it's worth investing time and energy in them.
Source: From Dimensions of Learning: Teacher's Manual, by R. J. Marzano and D. J. Pickering, with D. E.
Arredondo, G. J. Blackburn, R. S. Brandt, C. A. Moffett, D. E. Paynter, J. E. Pollock, and J. Whisler, 1997,
Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
The second teacher type Kleinfeld characterized as sophisticates—aloof and undemanding. The third type—
warm but undemanding—were sentimentalists. Only those belonging to the fourth group—the supportive
gadflies—were successful with students. Teachers in this group combined "high personal warmth with high
active demandingness". In the classrooms of these teachers, students actively participated in discussions
and were willing to work hard for their teachers, with whom they had developed a positive, mutually
respectful rapport. In short, this group of teachers demonstrated the power of the old saying, "People don't
care how much you know until they know how much you care."
In a later publication, Kleinfeld coined a new term for supportive gadflies—warm demanders (1975). Since
that time, dozens of scholarly articles have used it to describe the widely affirmed quality of effective
teachers: setting high expectations while nurturing student growth. Hattie's recent examination of 800 metaanalyses on student achievement lends further credence to this concept, finding that one of the strongest
correlates of teacher effectiveness is teacher–student relationships. Hattie found that the top teacher–
student relationship variables associated with higher levels of student achievement are as follows:
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Nondirectivity (i.e., encouraging student-initiated and -regulated activities)
Empathy
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Warmth
Encouragement of higher-order thinking