Coaching for Building Strong Student-Teacher Relationships
"Understanding or knowing our students is not something we achieve, it’s something that we live. Continuously." -Cornelius Minor
Teachers may struggle with building a positive classroom community or engaging students for any number of reasons, but often it’s rooted in a lack of a solid relationship with their students. Have you ever coached a teacher in this situation? It’s tough to figure out how to communicate to someone who cares about their students (like I try to assume of all teachers) that they just are not connecting with their students.
In my recent coaching partnership with a school principal, I supported her around how to coach one of her teachers who was struggling to deliver rigorous, engaging or culturally-sustaining lessons because she just lacked the relationships with her students. Students were bored and disconnected, and one students’ parent complained to the principal that her daughter was starting to hate school for the first time in her school career. Here, I’ll share some of the principles I shared with this school leader in order to coach her teacher around building strong student-teacher relationships.
1. Prioritize building your relationship with the teacher as a model
Before jumping into the conversation with your teacher about relationship building with students, do a quick check: How is your own relationship with this teacher? Have you put in the effort over time to build a positive rapport with this teacher? Are there feelings of frustration, resentment, or doubt in the teacher’s ability that have built up for you? Oftentimes, the teacher who struggles most with connecting with students may also struggle to connect with adults in the school. Or perhaps you feel like this teacher should know better because they’ve been teaching for many years. Or perhaps the other suggestions you’ve made in coaching are falling flat (because of the lack of relationships?) and you are feeling frustrated. Spend some time reflecting on your own relationship with the teacher first because you are modeling positive relationships building through your coaching partnership.
Make sure that you are on solid ground in terms of your rapport with your teacher before diving into the topic of student-teacher relationships. So many resources exist on coach-teacher relationships, but I’ll highlight a few here:
When you meet together, always take a few minutes to check-in about non-teaching life. Find connections between things you like to do, place you’ve been, things you value, or favorite sports teams. Then follow-up on these things when you meet again. Bringing up what happened in a recent episode of a commonly favorite show, or checking in on someone’s kid’s basketball game goes a long way for building rapport.
Celebrate the positive. Take time, even multiple times a week if possible, to pop into the teacher’s class for an informal visit and leave a colorful sticky note with just the great things you can celebrate! Alternatively, celebrate what a teacher shared during a PLC meeting, something great in their lesson plan, or their presence at an extracurricular school event.
Share about yourself too. The first of Zaretta Hammond’s trust generators, “selective vulnerability,” means simply being open to sharing about yourself too, including some of your own vulnerabilities or mistakes. This makes space for teachers to connect with you as a person and build trust with you.
2. Share the teacher’s classroom data & research on student-teacher relationships
After you’ve put in the time to build your relationships with the teacher, visit their class and collect data around the teacher’s relationships with students. What kind of data can you collect to help teachers see the state of their relationships with kids in their class? Here’s a few ideas to get started:
Ratio of positive to negative/redirecting comments, tracking which students are targeted with various comments
Frequency of using students names
Entry routine - does the teacher greet each student, make informal conversation, and start class with a positive welcome?
Frequency of students and teacher’s smiling or laughing
Evidence of connections to or knowledge about each other’s lives outside of school
I recommend collecting just one or a few of these data points at a time to share with teachers, focusing on whichever measure gets at the heart of the issue for the teacher. Sharing every data point at once can be overwhelming. Share this data with the teacher, asking them to reflect on what they notice and wonder.
Sharing research on teacher-student relationships is also a powerful tool for starting the conversation about relationship building with teachers. A review of 46 studies on the topic found that strong teacher-student relationships were associated with higher academic engagement, higher attendance, and fewer disruptive behaviors.
3. Provide specific strategies to build student-teacher relationships
Then, when you’ve guided your teacher through their own classroom data and the research on student-teacher relationships, don’t leave them hanging! Make sure to provide specific, actionable strategies to support the teacher in building strong relationships with their students. I recommend focusing on just one or two at a time. Practice these with the teacher, set expectations for immediate implementation and plan for how you’ll follow-up. Here are a few of my favorite strategies:
The 2x10 strategy: Focusing on one student at a time, take 2 minutes a day for 10 days in a row to chat with this student about life outside of school in order to build a positive rapport.
The first 3 minutes: The beginning of class sets the tone for the entire day or lesson. Teachers should greet every student by name with a smile at the door, engage in informal conversations with students, and start the lesson with a joyful welcome, such as “Good morning! I’m so glad you are here today!” (adapted of course to the teacher’s personality).
Moments of genuine connection: Setting a goal of connecting genuinely with all students, and creating a system for tracking that.
4-party system for getting to know your students: Great structure for starting relationship building from Jennifer Gonzalez at Cult of Pedagogy
4. Reflect together on the impact of working on building strong relationships
After teachers have put some action behind building positive student-teacher relationships, take some time to reflect in your next coaching meeting. Consider asking a question like, “What impact have you seen of using the 2x10 strategy with Student A on her engagement in class?” Or share updated classroom data, potentially of the same kind that you shared before. If you previously saw that negative/redirective comments were outweighing positive comments in a ratio of 2:1, but now the teacher has flipped that, share that data and celebrate together! There may be space to unpack biases or assumptions that the teacher held about their students, or their role as a teacher. Especially when teachers see the growth in themselves and their students based on how they’ve invested in relationships, you’ve built the foundation to have some important and even difficult conversations with the teacher.
5. Support relationship building throughout the year
With a win under your belt, the process is not over! Just like the quote from Cornelius Minor at the beginning of this post, relationship building is something we engage in continuously, in both the coach-teacher relationships and student-teacher relationships. We often leave relationship building to the beginning of the school year, or the beginning of a coaching partnership. Consider what additional strategies the teacher may benefit from, additional reflection needed, and ways to hold both yourself and the teacher accountable to making relationship building an on-going process and priority throughout the school year.
Remember, supporting teachers around relationship building may not go smoothly the first (or even second or third) time around. There are many deeply entrenched reasons why teachers may struggle with connecting with students. But students deserve to learn in classrooms where they feel known, heard, and valued. Putting in the work to facilitate positive student-teacher relationships is worth it.