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Why You Should Care About How People Are Feeling

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Why You Should Care About How People Are Feeling

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Katie Martin | Informed by Research, Inspired by Practice

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Why You Should Care About How People Are Feeling

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In Permission to Feel, Marc Brackett writes, "It is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition- we ask some variation of the question, "How are you fee

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A teacher shares her best practices for establishing strong relationships with her class at the start of the school year.

One day, Alyssa, an eighth-grade student, came to our middle school wearing a purple bandanna as a headband, even though she knew that our school's dress code does not allow bandannas. While it seemed like a simple issue to reconcile, I soon found another teacher knocking on my door that morning, asking me to tell Alyssa to take the bandanna off. He said he didn't feel comfortable handling the situation but knew I could persuade Alyssa to follow the rules because she trusted me.

That day, I took Alyssa aside, and we had a private conversation about why bandannas were not allowed at school. I assured her that I understood why she wanted to wear a headband, and I even offered her the option of wearing a different one. After our conversation, Alyssa calmly went to the bathroom and returned to class without the bandanna on her head.

This seemingly small encounter reminded me of the power of positive relationships in schools and why teachers must be intentional about building them. In the classroom, positive relationships are the foundation for learning success. Yet as teachers, we sometimes neglect to take the time to learn about our students as people, which can create barriers to learning and make even small interactions (or conflicts) challenging to handle.

Alyssa wasn't a perfect student, and math didn't come easy for her, but she worked hard in my class. She asked questions. She even came in before and after class for additional help or just to talk about her social life. She trusted me because I worked hard to build a relationship with her by showing that I respected her and cared for her well-being.

Many teachers feel pressure to cover content and to tackle many other job-related duties. However, I have found that investing time early and often to learn about students-by making small changes in our classroom-creates an environment where they are motivated to be successful. Here are six strategies I use to build better relationships with my students.

1. Learn names quickly and correctly. Too often, students, especially those who are marginalized, feel invisible in our schools. Value student diversity and identity by learning names quickly and pronouncing them correctly. Only use nicknames if students prefer them; never create a nickname for a student, because this strips him or her of the identity that is embedded in a name. Every year on the first day of school, I have my students create name tents and pronounce their names correctly for me. I practice pronouncing their names often. I take up the name tents and pass them out each class period until I have learned all of the students' names. I greet each of my students at the door by name before class.

2. Students are never too old for show-and-tell. Help students feel they're more than just another student by allowing them to bring in something that represents them, their culture, or some activity that they enjoy doing at the beginning of the year. Plan five to 10 minutes each day for a few students to share what they brought until you have given everyone in the class the opportunity. In my classes, students have brought in baby pictures of themselves, goggles that they use for their competitive swim team, and souvenirs from a family vacation. Once, my student Hannah brought her ukulele and sang the class a song. She turned show-and-tell into a party, and my students loved every minute of it.

3. Post student pictures and student work. Elementary teachers are very good at sharing student work, but middle and high school teachers often neglect this important practice, feeling that it's unnecessary for older students. I've found older students still need to be reminded that you value their work. When my students participate in the show-and-tell, for example, I snap a picture of them. Those pictures are then printed and posted on a bulletin board in class that stays up all year long. The students love seeing how they have changed over the course of the year because they realize that their growth and development is not only physical, but intellectual and emotional as well. In addition, students are so proud when their exemplary work, such as individual math projects and group work on math tasks, is displayed and celebrated.
©Theresa Montgomery
4. Assign seats, and change them often. We all know that middle school students don't always get along, but when students have opportunities to work together, they learn about each other and discover ways to work together even though they're different. I have my students sit at tables in my middle school math classroom. I assign them to tables of three or four students each; then they change seats once per week using an online random seat changer that is embedded in our attendance management system. After each change, the students answer a quick question, such as, "Who would you love to have dinner with and why?" to get to know the people at their table before spending a week collaborating with them on mathematical tasks.

5. Find small ways to connect. In my first-period class, we often have circle time on Monday mornings or after a break. We stand in a circle and pass a ball around. The person with the ball shares a compliment about another person in the circle, what they did over the weekend or the break, or how they are feeling in the moment and why. Once a student participated in goat yoga for a friend's birthday over the weekend. We were all intrigued by her pictures of goats walking on their backs during yoga class! If I forget circle time on Mondays, my students always remind me. They also always insist that I share too. Though it can seem like every minute is needed to get through the academic content, I've learned that a five-minute investment once a week to learn about each other is invaluable to my students and builds a better culture in my classroom.

6. Simply listen. As teachers, we often feel like we need to keep a professional distance from our students, but I've found that taking time to make small talk can help break down barriers to learning. Because I've made myself approachable, some of my students will tell me stories about their lives during the five minutes between classes. I stop what I am doing, look them in the eyes, and listen. I love seeing their eyes light up as they tell me these stories, and these encounters always leave me a little more knowledgeable about who they are as people.

All students deserve to have adults in their schools who care about them enough to be intentional about building positive relationships that give them the space to make mistakes and learn. If we truly expect our students to learn with us, they need to know that we care about them. They also need opportunities to learn about each other, so that they can build a community in which they grow together as learners.

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6 Strategies for Building Better Student Relationships

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A teacher shares her best practices for establishing strong relationships with her class at the start of the school year.

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Featured Resources
From Education Northwest From REL Northwest Additional featured resources Through Others' Eyes
This blog post from the New Teacher Center offers several strategies for perspective taking. It includes strategies for building empathy, role playing, using arts and literature, engaging in dialogues and more. The post links to several videos that illustrate the post's key points and includes a set of questions that can be used for cultivating empathy through self-reflection and a set of activities for teachers and students to practice perspective taking.
Race Forward Video
In this video from Race Forward, eight young men talk about how they navigate around implicit bias in the classroom-and as they build their lives.
Creating Opportunities through Relationships (COR)
These learning modules are designed to strengthen teacher-student relationships. The modules can be taken alone or together depending on the needs of your organization and include video presentations, reflective questions and interactive components.

Research-Based Resources and Interventions
Black Achievers' Experiences with Racial Spotlighting and Ignoring in a Predominantly White High School
This study looks at the adaptive behaviors that high-achieving Black students employed in a predominantly White high school to maintain school success and a positive racial self-definition. Findings indicate that students experienced racial microaggressions in the form of sometimes being spotlighted because of their race (i.e., racial spotlighting) and sometimes being ignored because of their race (i.e., racial ignoring). Students managed these experiences by utilizing a variety of resilient strategies that represent varying degrees of resistance. The article concludes with implications for teacher education and creating culturally inclusive school and classroom environments.
Brief Intervention to Encourage Empathic Discipline Cuts Suspension Rates in Half Among Adolescents
There is increasing concern about rising discipline citations in K-12 schooling and a lack of means to reduce them. A brief intervention aimed at encouraging an empathic mindset about discipline halved student suspension rates over an academic year. This intervention, an online exercise, can be delivered at near-zero marginal cost to large samples of teachers and students. These findings could mark a paradigm shift in society's understanding of the origins of and remedies for discipline problems.
Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Strategies
This article introduces culturally responsive classroom management as a pedagogical approach to guide the management decisions that teachers make and shine a light on the negative consequences of classroom management on students whose behaviors do not conform to middle-class norms. While the article summarizes a wealth of research on student discipline in schools, it focuses on the challenge of classroom management when students and teachers come from different cultural backgrounds.

Double-Check: A Framework of Cultural Responsiveness Applied to Classroom Behavior

Despite years of investigation and reporting on the disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in office discipline referrals and special education, little progress has been made in reducing these disparities. It is recommended that school personnel identify cultural inconsistencies in disciplinary practices, and develop and maintain culturally responsive practices that facilitate improvements in student behavior. The Double-Check framework promotes such practices through self-assessment, and encourages school personnel to recognize their own attitudes and behaviors toward CLD students.
Social Motivation in the Secondary Classroom: Assessing Teacher-Student Relationships From Both Perspectives
Scholars have amassed robust evidence that teacher-student relationships are associated with a multitude of valued student outcomes. Drawing from a sample of 922 middle and high school students and their 127 teachers in six different schools, this article describes the development of a multifaceted approach to measuring teacher-student relationships at the secondary level that addresses four complexities of these relationships. It also focuses on four schools to examine how this measure predicts a series of student achievement, affective, behavioral, and motivational outcomes. Lastly, it assesses the promise of teacher-student relationships as a focal point for future interventions.
Social-Psychological Interventions in Education: They're Not Magic
This article reviews the theoretical basis of several prominent social-psychological interventions and emphasizes that they have lasting effects because they target students' subjective experiences in school, because they use persuasive yet stealthy methods for conveying psychological ideas, and because they tap into recursive processes present in educational environments. By understanding psychological interventions as powerful but context-dependent tools, educational researchers will be better equipped to take them to scale. The article concludes by discussing challenges to scaling psychological interventions and how these challenges may be overcome.

Related Websites

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) provides resources, tools, and research on high-quality, evidence-based social and emotional learning (SEL) for grades PreK-12 students. Topics include suggested frameworks for SEL, teaching approaches, and lessons learned from SEL professional learning communities.

The National Clearinghouse on Supportive School Discipline provides resources, tools, information, and fact sheets on positive approaches to school discipline. Topics include restorative justice, positive behavioral interventions and supports, conditions for learning, social-emotional learning, and evidence-based practices.

The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments provides tools, research reports, and technical assistance events on school climate, preventing and responding to discriminatory behavior at school, responding to trauma in K-12 schools, social-emotional learning, and resilience.

The Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports provides research, professional development resources, and tools to support implementation of positive behavioral interventions and supports in schools. The website also provides information on training and technical assistance resources to incorporate equity in school discipline practices.

The School Climate and Discipline section of the U.S. Department of Education's website provides information on resources, research, webinars, data tools, and policies related to school climate and discipline in early childhood and K-12 settings. It also includes several compendiums on evidence-based school and classroom practices.

The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences provides practice guides, intervention reports, single study reviews, and quick reviews of recent research on many topics relevant to early childhood and K-12 education. The website includes products and services provided by the What Works Clearinghouse, the Regional Educational Laboratory Program, the Education Resources Information Center, and national data resources.

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From Education Northwest From REL Northwest Additional featured resources Through Others' Eyes This blog post from the New Teacher Center offers several strategies for perspective taking. It includes strategies for building empathy, role playing, using arts and literature, engaging in dialogues and more.

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Prioritize Building Relationships With Your Students: What Science Says

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Relationships are at the heart of meaningful learning. We must attend to the social dynamics of learning by providing opportunities for students to develop their emotional awareness and skills.

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Strengthening Relationships with Students from Diverse Backgrounds (REL Northwest)

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How to quickly schedule a student into your advisory

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How to quickly schedule a student into your advisory

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Enriching Teachers and Enriching Students: A Strategy to Meet Student Needs

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Enriching Teachers and Enriching Students: A Strategy to Meet Student Needs

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Enriching Teachers and Enriching Students: A Strategy to Meet Student Needs