Students and Teachers Need Each Other Right Now

Cleaning up my home office to make it more work-from-home friendly, I was dusting a clay pot and trying to remember who gave it to me.

Smiling at the care taken in forming and glazing the pot, I turned it over and found the name of a former student of mine etched in the bottom. A surge of memories followed about Joanna and our interactions during her high school years: conversations about her future as her advisor, her development into a fearsome hitter on the volleyball team as her coach, her expanding interest in the academic worlds of US history and economics as her teacher.

Joanna and her friends teased me as a novice teacher. They’d call me by my first name in the hallway, tell inside jokes, give me nicknames, and speculate on my private life. Some of this was profoundly embarrassing; most of it lifted my spirits with humor. In large and small ways, the relationships I developed with Joanna and many students like her enriched my professional life when we were engaged in teaching and learning in the classroom, on the volleyball court, or in casual conversation.

Building relationships and communities

The social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic presents an immediate challenge to what Dewey identified as the core of education — social interaction and learning. The phrase that captures this best for me is “the social construction of knowledge.” We tend to think of teachers providing social interactions to students for affective and cognitive development. What Joanna’s clay pot brings home to me is that the social aspects of teaching start from one-to-one relationships that build informal networks and expand to classroom (or athletics team) communities. These social experiences are created with students and nurture teachers like me. Joanna’s long-ago gift of a simple, well-crafted piece of pottery reminds me of the gratification and professional fulfillment that emanate from the growth and development of strong relationships and communities.

Teachers and students share the same basic needs that Abraham Maslow identified in the 1940s. Relationships and communities provide affiliations that bring joy, satisfaction, and a level of trust that supports and motivates higher performance. When things work well in the classroom — for teachers and for students — opportunities for affirmation (“esteem” Maslow called it) abound. When a student presents her group’s brilliant explanation of the nuanced differences between a rhombus and a parallelogram, students and teachers alike bask in the glow of success, and learning happens in the process. When the spike ends the match and we all celebrate together, memories are made that buoy us for the next challenge.

Finding a way in unfamiliar surroundings

COVID-19 short circuits Maslow’s Hierarchy and sends us all to the “safety-seeking” level because we — students and teachers — are uncertain about how to relate to one another virtually. Students and teachers alike may be feeling that their teaching and learning skills have been severely compromised, if not broken.

The pandemic demands that teachers redesign classroom experiences because they are virtual, hybrid, and/or socially distanced. Joanna had a vision for the shape, color, and shading of her pot. But if she didn’t have a wheel to throw it on, she would’ve had to adapt her design to hand-building. Teachers need a vision for how relationships are built that adapts to online teaching so that they are capable of building relationships and communities virtually.

First and foremost, students and teachers need the sense of safety that comes from positive relationships. Relationships don’t come easily, especially in urban and/or low-income settings where trust is low for a host of reasons.

Long before I met Joanna, I cut my teaching teeth in a middle school in Detroit. As a first-year teacher, I knew only a little about pedagogy, perhaps a little more about content, and virtually nothing about the lives and motivations of the students I faced every day. Mine was a battle-hardened homeroom that had run nine teachers out of the school that year by the time I started in January. For many, I was their next victim. Some were quietly hopeful that I would last through the end of the school year. At the end of the first week, I wasn’t sure I would make it to another Friday. As I embarked on this work my ideals about serving students in an urban context along with my goodwill were temporarily shattered.

My classroom had no heat, I had to make my own curricular materials and use ancient textbooks, there was no janitorial service and my room was perpetually filthy. Adaptation was hard for me because this was not the classroom I expected. Today, adaptation is even harder because COVID has created classrooms unfamiliar to nearly all of us.

As weeks and months went by, I was further and further under water with lessons to plan, papers to grade, and student conflicts to resolve. My assignment overwhelmed me — credentialed in social studies only, I taught US history, math, reading, and an elective in theater. I was required to supervise the lunchroom at least two days per week, which meant no break from 8:00–3:00. Nearly every lesson failed because of a combination of my ineptitude, students’ lack of prior knowledge, and classroom chaos. Some students loathed each other; others built themselves up by tearing others down. I was barely sleeping at night because of my anxiety about facing these students the next morning. Yet, I was trying to get better and make some little difference before the school year ended.

Improvements came slowly. The maintenance staff bled the air out of my hot water radiator and it clanked to life. By March, I’d broken up enough fights for boys to understand that fighting in and around my room only made sense if they really didn’t want to hurt anyone or be hurt themselves. Occasional lessons worked and more homework was being turned in. I was slowly adapting to an environment I barely understood.

Leveraging opportunity

A student approached me one day and said in a dejected voice, “Mr. Brazer, why don’t you take us on a field trip? I’ve never been on a field trip.” I said, “Come on, never? Really?” He was sincere and very sad. “Never.” Other students milling around chimed in, “That’s right. No one wants to take us on a field trip ’cause we’re too rowdy.” “Heh, heh! Ain’t gonna happen.” The field trip became my goal. It was an opportunity to give my students a taste of an enjoyable learning experience. As a US history teacher, I knew just the place we needed to go — a local museum located within a reproduction of a 19th century small town.

The students were right. No one wanted to take them on a field trip because adults didn’t trust them. The principal was skeptical when I proposed the trip, but relented when I persuaded three other teachers, the Title I aides, a few parents, and my girlfriend at the time to chaperone. More than 40 years later, specific memories are vivid. Terrance, who once threatened me in defiance of a directive I’d given him, approached me after lunch on the field trip. He was beaming and said to me, “You see, Mr. Brazer? I can be good, too.” He was right. He and my other students were happy and relaxed all day. Two of my students who chased each other through the halls of the school were the very model of courtesy as they escorted my girlfriend to many exhibits and engaged her in academic and social repartee. On the bus back to school at the end of the day, one of my favorite students jumped up and shouted to the crowd, “Let’s give a cheer for Mr. Brazer!” To my amazement, everyone did. The field trip experience surpassed my highest hopes.

Opening doors to learning

Virtual classrooms don’t have the behavioral challenges of my long-ago room 212. Instead, students just don’t show up. It is up to us as educators to give them the means, the motivation, and the will to show up. This means designing the online experience in a way that communicates the importance of every student in the community. That can only happen when we foster positive relationships with and among our students. We might start with a question to ourselves: “Do I want to be in the virtual classroom?” Asking why or why not might take us a long way down the road to better design.

My Detroit students, and Joanna and her friends, taught me that when teachers build relationships we open doors to greater academic possibilities. Strong relationships between teachers and students and among students make both affective and cognitive development possible. Getting there requires faith that if we are kind and persistent, relationships will come.

I won’t say that the rest of my year in Detroit was characterized by deep learning. It wasn’t, but my students and I were more open to learning together. They taught me that showing up every day, stopping fights, and fulfilling students’ aspirations for experiences that transcended daily routines demonstrated more caring than anything I might say to them.

Relationships embedded in teaching and learning are what make being a student and being a teacher special. It’s not merely about being friendly. It’s about creating experiences together that provide surprises, insights, achievement, and fulfillment that inform and enrich our lives — students and teachers — for decades. An English teacher in the Anaheim Union High School District transferred her in-person classroom use of mindfulness to focus student attention into her virtual classroom as a way of helping students relieve anxiety and stress and feel welcome online. They know through this small gesture that she cares about them — their affective and cognitive development — even if she can’t be with them physically. When classroom relationships — virtual, hybrid, or in-person — nurture a community in which members know and understand each other, respect each other, and learn together, achievement accelerates.

Of course, a great deal has changed since my teaching days, and today the COVID-19 pandemic has made teaching far more challenging than it was for me. How do you build relationships when your students come to school just some of the time, or they don’t come at all? This is the most important question of the moment. My answer to this questions is guided by something one of my favorite principal colleagues said to me years ago, “We’re in the business of making memories.” How can we make lifetime memories when we cannot be in classrooms with our students?

Building relationships and community to foster engagement in the virtual world

• Start with one: Begin to build trust by showing you care enough to reach out to each student as an individual. Teach students how to have remote conversations by calling them on the phone, or through your district’s video conference platform. Fifteen minutes gives you an opportunity to learn what matters to a student, how they are progressing in your class, and how they imagine their future. Fifteen minutes sets the student on a pathway for learning the norms and routines of discussion at a distance. And fifteen minutes of your full attention communicates that you care.
• Gradually ramp up discussion opportunities: Build trust between students by helping them have positive paired conversations. You might monitor pairs at first, then give them more autonomy and responsibility once they develop positive habits. Grow discussion groups gradually to four and six. You might start group work with what we call “quick questions” such as, “What is your favorite holiday and why?” or “What does NOT belong on your pizza?” to get small group discussions rolling. The questions are fun and don’t require prior knowledge, yet they reveal a lot about the person answering and open up opportunities for affiliation. (“I know, right? I hate pineapple on pizza too!”) From there, you can move small groups into content-based discussion and on to whole class discussion for the really big questions. Students will get multiple warm invitations to learn together through discourse.
• Narrate the class’s experience: Teachers have the power to interpret for their students what is happening in class. Show students the trust you have built together, identify the ways in which they display confidence in themselves as people and as scholars, and congratulate them for the rigor embedded in their classroom community that learns so well together. A narration might go something like this: “Thank you so much for participating in our conversations today. I really liked the way you listened to one another, built off each other’s ideas, and wrestled with our big questions. I can see that a lot of minds got changed today and there was a tremendous amount of learning going on. I can’t wait to get into our next big puzzle...” This kind of talk praises students for their participation in the learning process you have designed without privileging “right” answers or setting students up in competition with one another. You might also solicit student input into your narrative to help affirm the learning journey for you and for them. “Angela, what is one way in which you changed your mind today?” “Jamal, which part of our conversation did you enjoy the most and why?”
• Nurture your teaching inspiration: Take time to tap into your idealized sense of yourself and notice the ways in which you are succeeding as the kind of teacher you aspire to be. Affirmation is a powerful motivating force, but is rarely available to teachers who work in isolation. Make time for reflection in which you remember what you did right and how you know. Remembering and celebrating your successes will give you the energy you need to repeat them. The cheering on the bus taught me I could persevere and succeed.

Relationships can’t wait

Cultivating trust, developing confidence, and fostering a community constitute major professional challenges in traditional classrooms. Building relationships and community is far more complicated in the virtual world. Yet, we must adapt to changed conditions. Our students depend on us to make memories and we depend on our relationships with them to bring meaning and gratification to our teaching.

Would you like to turn this into a dialogue? I would love to know your stories about relationship building that supports teaching, learning, and community in the classroom. I’m sure others would too so that we can learn together. Please email one of your favorite relationship or community building stories or a picture or image that tells a story to david@teachfx.com.