Literature Review
After an analysis of case examples of literature on the topic of student-teacher relationships and the positive benefits they yield, it can be concluded that teachers actively cultivating relationships with their students does lead directly to positive benefits for high school students. Thus, it is a necessary component of the educators pedagogical practice to seek to utilize interpersonal building tools for the purposing of developing relationships with their students to best help the student achieve success inside, and indirectly outside, the classroom.
Student Learning + Student Motivation
The research conducted by Davis and Dupper (2004) seeks to analyze the way in which educators, administrators, and school social workers understand factors that cause students to leave school prior to graduation. The authors argue that a key factor missing from analyses and policies surrounding school drop-out rates is the role that positive student-teacher relationships play. According to them, the majority of studies orientate the conversation around the concept that students “dropout” as an individual phenomenon or a phenomenon based on external factors such as family life and society. However, through an extensive review of recent literature on the subject, the authors show that an important contributing factor to students withdrawing from school early are feelings of alienation due to ideas that teachers do not care, or want them there. As a result of their analysis of recent research, the authors conclude that influencing factors found within school should be a new focus of research and policies designed to reduce dropout rates because school environments can be changed. In specific connection the positive benefits that result from teachers cultivating relationships with high school students, teachers can strongly help minority, disadvantaged, and at-risk youth through relationship building as a means to prevent the occurrence of students being “pushed out” of the education system due to the reasoning above.
In Frymier & Houser’s article ‘The teacher‐student relationship as an interpersonal relationship’, the authors’ goal is to investigate and analyze the role that communication and interpersonal relationships have in the classroom. Communication is identified as critical to interpersonal relationships and includes immediate verbal and nonverbal behaviour. The authors’ understanding of communication is drawn from Burleson and Samter’s ideas of communication skills for friendship and utilizes ideas of affective and nonaffective components. The authors conducted two studies to investigate the role of communication in the student-teacher relationship. One study involved asking students what their perceptions of teacher communication were, as well as what they thought the most important components of communication were that would lead to a conducive learning environment. The resulting research in the first study found that students perceived communication skills as key to good teaching. The second study extended from this and found that referential communication skills, which is the ability to relate content knowledge accurately, were perceived by students as being important. Further, ego support and immediacy were skills were found to be equally important. These studies proved that these skills are crucial to student learning and student motivation. By showing that interpersonal relationships beyond course content enable students to achieve higher cognitive learning, the authors provide support for the argument that teachers cultivating relationships with their students can yield positive benefits in the form of academic success.
The article by Johnson addresses the concept of resiliency and its connection to students’ interactions with their teachers. A longitudinal study of students in Australia that lasted from 1998 to 2005 was conducted to investigate the connection of how greater resiliency can result from positive student-teacher relationships. The author utilized qualitative data through interviews with students in low-income Adelaide schools. The author defines resiliency as both a process and an outcome when individuals cope with risk, threats, and adversity. Significantly, this study contributes to our understandings of the role of a teacher as more than a transmitter of information, but also as an important individual in the students’ lived experience and a primary factor in helping students navigate the difficulties and stressors of everyday life. Central to the author’s research was his identification of “the little things” done by teachers in the classroom as major contributing factors in nurturing resiliency in students. When tied to the framework of what relationships can produce, the development of resiliency can be identified as a resulting benefit from teachers actively cultivating relationships with their students.
The article by Fan aims to answer whether there is a correlation between student-teacher relationships and academic achievement in Social Studies. The results of the study show that there is a strong correlation between a positive student-teacher relationship and high academic achievement in Social Studies. The significance of this is that it important that teachers cultivate positive interpersonal relationships with their students. This will leave to the creation of a conducive, safe learning environment. Fan notes that the creation of a positive interpersonal relationship needs to extend beyond course content and that teacher’s should be genuinely interested in their students’ personal problems. Fan’s study was carried out in Cross River State, Nigeria and involved 1954 Junior Secondary School III students from 50 out of 73 schools in the Zone (488). To complete the study, Fan distributed the Teacher-Students Relationship Questionnaire and a multiple choice Social Studies test. The study is significant because it shows that a positive interpersonal relationship between students and teachers is strongly correlated with higher academic achievement from all types of students.
Rogers et al. conducted a study designed to provide insight into student-teacher relationships with ADHD students. Interestingly, the article notes that behavioural problems are correlated with lower reports of student trust in their teachers. Further, behavioural problems are predictive of a students’ school adjustment capabilities. Significantly, when students with behavioural problems are emotional supported by their teacher, it reduces the risk of students engaging in distant or conflictual relationships with teachers in the following years. While the conclusion at the end of the study was that further research was necessary, the results of the study indicate that students with ADHD generally have a poorer interpersonal relationship with teachers, which may exacerbate at-risk behaviours and/or reduce student motivation to learn and work collaboratively with teachers. Interestingly, the research notes that both teachers and students feel less emotional connectedness to one another. This may contribute to maladjustment and poor outcomes for the students at school. In direct relation to student-teacher relationships, it can be extrapolated that an improved, stronger closeness between a student with ADHD and a teacher could lead to increased student motivation and increase the likelihood of the student yielding positive benefits in the classroom that other students more easily access via relationships with their teacher.