How important are relationships in education?

Rita Pierson, in her classic TEDTalk, says “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” I thoroughly agree and I would like it mandated that every teacher watches her talk every year!

I want to expand her sentiment to include student to student relationships.

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“Kids don’t learn well in classes where they have bad relationships.”

This is proven at the worst end of the relational spectrum, where victimisation and bullying occur. A report by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) says "Students who are bullied for two or three years in mid primary school fall nearly 10 months behind their peers in numeracy by year 7.”

Children’s friendships are closely associated with children’s positive well-being. Children who enjoy close friendships are more likely to experience higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem and less likely to be lonely, depressed or victimized. Friendships during childhood are predictive of greater self-worth and coping skills later in life.

Children's Friendships and Positive Wellbeing

The correlation between learning and the relational context holds true for positive relationships as well. The best learning environments happen for students not only when the instruction is excellent but when relationships are strong with teachers as well as with fellow students.

If you disagree with how important relationships are to education I wish you well as you go on teaching your subject matter to students you don’t know (until A.I. comes in and sweeps away any need for basic content delivery).

For the rest, who do believe that relationships matter greatly for learning, consider these questions.

What endeavours do you undertake to increase relationship strength in your class?
How do you keep track of all the relationships at play?
How do you know which student relationships need intervention?
What do you do about it once you do know?

We need to agree that relationships matter and are worth our consideration and effort regularly. Give yourself an excuse for running at least some activities that are designed SOLELY to build successful relationships.

We need to consider how we holistically build relationship tools into our practice. What can be done when you are teaching English or mathematics which will mean that the classroom context will encourage healthy relationships rather than competitiveness or exclusion?

We need to follow up broken relationships. Just as we have remediation processes for illiteracy, students who are struggling with relationships will need targeted help. Without going into too much details about mediation, restorative justice and reconciliation (which needs a blog post for itself), teachers need to know which students are distracted from learning because of conflict in their class.

We need processes to assess and track relationships just as we have processes for assessing and tracking numeracy and literacy.

How you can track relationships and why it's important

When asked how they track the relationships of students in their class, most would answer that they use subjective observation. Consider how you could increase effectiveness of these observations.

One simple idea is to regularly meet with two students who you know like you (there’s always a couple in each class) and interview them about the relational dynamics in the class. You may find issues that are below the surface. This will help you to develop your curriculum delivery to match the relational dynamics of your particular class.

When you have greater insight into the connections between students you are often able to pre-empt anti-social behaviour. For instance, asking certain students to speak in front of their peers may be disastrous if they are being ostracised by a dominant member of the class. You could ask this student to do their presentation before your staff room instead.

Relationships can be tricky to manage, but they are so valuable that they are worth the effort to nurture.

Having a system for doing so can make it far easier to track the health of a cohort. Systems are not there to replace human interactions (obviously!! we are talking about the field of relationships) but a good system can prevent kids from falling through the gaps. They can also encourage you and your peers to continue to do the hard and rewarding work of building wholesome, empowering relationships with every student you come into contact with throughout your career.