Strategies to connect teachers and students in school

Dr Emma Burns, from Macquarie’s School of Education, explores what comprises teacher-student relationships and how they can be enhanced in the classroom.

Positive teacher-student relationships are shown to be strong predictors of students’ motivation, engagement, wellbeing, and achievement in both the short and long-term. Building relationships takes time and should be done intentionally with all students. This can be challenging in the time crunch of a lesson. Below are some helpful ways to think about building positive relationships that work within a lesson.

Teacher-student relationships are complex and diverse. They can be broadly thought of as comprising three dimensions:

  1. Closeness: relational warmth, social support, and emotional support that a student feels from their teacher, such that a student feels their teacher likes them and cares about them as an individual.
  2. Feedback: the instructional support and academic guidance, direction, and help that students receive from their teachers.
  3. Conflict: negative interactions that occur between a student and their teacher. For students, conflict often results from perceptions of unfairness.

The quality of a relationship (i.e. how positive or negative it is) is dependent on the relative levels of each dimension, with more positive relationships having higher levels of closeness and instructional support and lower levels of conflict.

To build closeness, it is important to engage in behaviours that demonstrate a teacher knows their students and cares about their interests and futures. There are several ways this can be done:

  • Asking students about their week, weekend, or important events that they had (i.e. sports carnivals, music concerts, etc) and taking opportunities to follow up on these topics.
  • Using the curriculum to connect the learning material to students’ current interests and future goals. Drawing clear links supports closeness, as well as students’ enjoyment in class.
  • Where appropriate and within professional boundaries, making sure students know that a teacher is available to listen to challenges the student may be having and can help the student connect to other appropriate staff/resources.

To provide effective and constructive feedback, it is recommended teachers consider answering the following three questions developed by Hattie and Timperley1 when they provide feedback to students:

  • Where am I going? aim to provide students with reminders of (1) the focus of the assignment and whether the student understood the instructions and what was being asked of them, and (2) how they have performed on similar assignments in the past.
  • How am I going? aim to provide clear information about performance. Where possible, providing more specifics about where students performed well, where they have performed poorly, and where they have improved from prior work is helpful.
  • Where to next? aim to provide some individually specific advice to the student about areas in which they can improve. This may be providing a summative statement about the types of questions that students frequently got wrong or content that needs to be revised, as well as recommendations for study strategies.

Conflict. Conflict is common and not always avoidable in classrooms, but it is important to reduce conflict where possible. Strategies for reducing conflict via perceived unfairness, are as follows:

  • Applying rules and classroom expectations consistently across students.
  • Acknowledging when students are experiencing negative emotions and not dismissing these negative emotions. If negative emotions persist, teachers may seek time to discuss these emotions and their causes with students to identify pathways forward.
  • Engaging in democratic discussions. This could mean taking students input about classroom life seriously and, where appropriate, providing relevant choice for classroom activities.

For repairing relationships with students, finding time to discuss the conflict with students in a non-disciplinary capacity is recommended. This allows the student to explain their point of view and affords teachers an opportunity to get to know that student better.

Dr Emma Burns specialises in the socio-motivational factors and processes that impact adolescents’ adaptive engagement, achievement and development. Specifically, she examines how high school students' relationships with their teachers impact their academic beliefs, values, and goals, and the multiple processes by which these factors impact their engagement and achievement over time. Dr Burns is currently completing an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) within the Macquarie School of Education.