Preface
I’ve been thinking about this question lately: “Could I describe a hug if someone asked?” Could I describe its purpose? Its sensations? Could I articulate its associated emotions? Are hugs small moments or signi cant moments of a ection? Do you need to physically embrace to feel hugged?
As I ponder these questions, many memories come to mind about when I was, or felt, hugged. One memory was in the early part of my teaching career. A fellow educator started to take an interest in my rapport with students. He was a talented and respected veteran teacher, known for his classroom culture of respect and rapport. We met often during our free periods to share how we tried to connect with students on a more personal level both inside and outside the classroom. During these exchanges, whenever I shared my ideas, his attention always remained intensely focused on me—as if he were examining the contours of every word I spoke. It felt as if he cast a spell on the world that stopped time, allowing us to have the space to deeply explore our ideas. When this teacher stopped time, he gave me the impression that I mattered, that what I shared was important to him. It was if he had fused his presence with mine in such a way that I could feel him listening to me.
What I experienced in these exchanges is something I wanted my students to experience—I wanted to stop time. I wanted to show them that I cared about them as people more than I cared about my lessons. I wanted to let them know that their viewpoints and life experiences were worthy of respect, and that their inner emotional experiences were important to explore.
So, I stopped time.
e idea of stopping time to connect with students appears in many books, including Ratchetdemic by Christopher Emdin (2021). In his book, Emdin states, “Children need validation from the adults in their lives to develop a sense of self-worth” (p. 28). I wholeheartedly agree. Children are yearning for people to stop time and notice them, hear them, love them, and validate their experiences. It is how they make sense of the world.
is book contains strategies and practices that can help you stop time in your classroom—to implement a more caring and relational pedagogy that can engender feelings of safety, connection, and worth in your students. ese strategies might help you unlock the pedagogical potential of students’ words, actions, and moments of self-expression.
Finally, as you read this book, I hope you feel hugged—hugged for the work you do for students that often goes unseen, unacknowledged, and unappreciated.
DOING THE INVISIBLE WORK
Satisfactory personal relationships are a prerequisite for learning.
—DANIEL CHAMBLISS
Take a moment and picture yourself teaching. What comes to mind? Is it a favorite instructional activity, a student’s inspiring speech, or a moment when a student shared something insightful about their learning? Whatever it is, let those images and thoughts linger for a moment.
Now, I want you to visualize your teaching again; but this time, visualize the invisible teaching you do—the actions that no one can directly see, yet are as valuable to student learning as any observable practice. ese invisible teaching practices might include your sincere curiosity about students’ lives, the sense of support you feel when you see a student struggling, an empathetic mindset you use to plan a lesson, or a facial expression you give to a student to show that they matter.
While those images surface, I will say this—much of our value as educators comes from invisible actions, the actions that no one can necessarily see but students can feel. ese actions can sometimes be the di erence between whether a student sees school as a rewarding place that respects their individuality or a place that dismisses their identity—denying the full expression of their culture, values, and personality.
In her book e Poet X, author Elizabeth Acevedo (2018) writes about her school experience as a young girl. She re ects on the beginning of a school year when she meets her new teacher for the rst time and says, “I have a feeling Ms. Galiano actually wants to know my answer” (p. 38). I believe this statement represents a feeling for many students—they want to be heard and respected for who they are, not for who their school wants them to be (Turner, 2012).
ere seems to be a mindset in education that there is simply not enough time to get to know students. Perhaps this mindset is the result of a collective consciousness of the educational system that creates a type of pedagogical inertia, reminding teachers year after year that content and testing matter more than students. For example, teachers must get through the required curriculum so students can do well on the district or state (or province) exams.
It is time to undo this mindset and create schooling that prioritizes humanity, a system in which educators nurture student well-being more than the unit plan and develop compassion alongside the curriculum. We need to augment the relational aspects of our policies and practices in schools—practices that help students learn how to accept themselves, maintain relationships, and selfsustain in the larger world.
Schools Can Do Better for Society
Since 2012, I have had the opportunity to work in school districts across the United States on pedagogy reform. On each trip, I meet talented and passionate educators who care about their students and move mountains to help them to succeed. is lls my heart. However, at the same time, I hear frustrations from these same teachers like the following.
• “I can’t do [that student-focused practice] because my district has us giving assessments every two weeks, and I need to get students ready for them. ose scores go into my evaluation.”
• “[ is practice] would be meaningful, but it takes too much time, and I have to get through all these state standards.”
• “ e state says we have to teach all these standards, but there are too many to possibly get through in a year. So my school leadership has us pick the essential ones, but how do I know which are essential?”
• “Students are kids, and kids don’t have the expertise that I do, so even though I want to get to know them better as people, they rst
must learn the content. If we have time, then I’ll ask them what they think about [the learning]. Otherwise, the tests will have to tell me everything I need to know.”
When I hear these kinds of comments, I feel frustrated because it signals that students “never genuinely engage in the development of self” (Bandura, 1977, p. 146).
Herein lies the problem. Students may nd themselves in a school that knowingly, or unknowingly, communicates that achievement and knowledge are more important than them; almost as though they’re saying to their students, “We’ll care about you after we nish getting ready for the SAT.” Students can feel this, which can cause them to be confused about their teachers’ intentions and their school’s sincerity (Coyle, 2018). ey can feel devalued and isolated, with perhaps a distorted sense of self-worth (Emdin, 2016). So, how can schools, and society, do better?
A Relational Approach to Teaching and Learning
At its core, education is a human experience—an experience with in nite combinations of emotions, thoughts, abilities, and knowledge. However, the education system does not seem to be built around the idea of human experience. It seems to be built around the idea of human utility—developing students’ capacities to contribute to the gross domestic product (Deresiewicz, 2015). If educators are not aware, they might continue to build lessons in which utility is the goal and a more passive style of learning is the norm.
One way is for schools to consider a more relational approach to teaching and learning. We are conscious beings with an inherent drive not only for information and meaning, but also for connection (Cole, 2018). Vivek H. Murthy (2020), the twenty- rst surgeon general of the United States, states, “It is in our relationships that we nd emotional substance and power we need in order to thrive” (p. 51). Yet I continue to visit schools across the United States that sacri ce authentic and sincere relationships with their students for the rote development of skills and short-term application of knowledge.
To emphasize my point, the late Paulo Freire (2000), renowned educator and philosopher, states in his book Pedagogy of Freedom, “To transform the experience of educating into a matter of technique impoverishes a fundamentally human experience, namely, [its] capacity to form a human person” (p. 39). Such a reductive transformation might look like this: “Here is how you solve this mathematics problem. [Shows steps]. Now you try it.”
To minimize the negative e ects of such a reduction, teachers can incorporate relational practices that value each student’s identity. Relational teaching methods not only focus on the how of learning, but also the who. For example, a relational teacher might say, “ ese problems can be tricky, and it’s OK to be stuck here. Can you tell me what you think the next step is?” is keeps their focus on the learner, not just the learning.
We must protect students’ right to be human before protecting a curriculum, assessment, or grading policy. To help you achieve this goal, I present the following seven actions you can take to implement more relational policies and practices.
1. Make teaching more than a mechanical-transactional experience.
2. Shift the responsibility for learning to students.
3. Respect students’ life experiences.
4. Have better metrics for learning.
5. Pay attention to unspoken school-culture messages.
6. Make student agency and e cacy a goal of education.
7. Teach with students.
e scope of each action is broader and more nuanced than I have time to cover in this chapter. However, in the following sections, I attempt to brie y introduce the more salient aspects of each action.
Make Teaching More Than a Mechanical-Transactional Experience
I invite you to ask yourself, “Do I want to deliver lessons in which the primary goal is to know content and develop rote technical skills?” or “Do I want to provide lessons that help students gain the con dence and habits they need to sustain themselves throughout their lives?”
As you wrestle with these questions, it is important to remember that teaching is not just about teachers making a di erence in students’ lives; rather, it is primarily about teachers helping students learn how to make a di erence in their own lives. In other words, teachers can be more in uential in students’ lives by helping them become independent thinkers and learners. erefore, I challenge all teachers to see themselves not as, for example, a mathematics teacher, art teacher, or English teacher, but as a teacher who uses mathematics, art, or
English content and context to create con dent, self-de ning, self-governing human beings.
To help you think about how you might achieve such a paradigm shift, I propose the following three general instructional tenets. Help students learn how to:
1. Create their competency
2. Verify the validity of their competency
3. Believe in their ability to maintain their competency
I will discuss these tenets, along with a relational lesson structure, in more detail later in the book, speci cally chapter 5 (page 99).
Shift the Responsibility for Learning to Students
Making a change toward a relational teaching approach means shifting the responsibility of learning to the student (Bandura, 1997; Schimmer, Hillman, & Stalets, 2018). Learning is the student’s responsibility, while teachers are responsible for the conditions of learning. ink of a gardener. A gardener prunes, waters, and tends to the plant, providing all the conditions for growth. If the conditions are right, the plant is primed to grow and thrive. Similar are teachers, who nurture and provide the conditions for student growth.
Research about student responsibility in learning is vast, with some research citing that lack of responsibility can impede student growth and arrest socialemotional development (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Lang, 2021). Other studies show that a lack of agency in children’s development could have compounding e ects contributing to many social issues, such as poverty (Bandura, 1997; Zimmerman, Schunk, & DiBenedetto, 2015) or violent crime (Hill, 2020). e point is, when we shift responsibility for learning to students, we allow them to claim the authorship of their learning and ultimately, their lives (Giroux, 2020).
Respect Students’ Life Experiences
If we connect the learning in the classroom and the living students are doing outside the classroom, students may nd more meaning in their time at school and potentially be willing to take more ownership of their growth (Darder, 2014). is means that if a teacher pays attention to the lives students are leading outside of school and attempts to connect to those lives during their instruction, their lessons might be more relevant to students. Emdin (2016)
argues a similar point: “I came to realize [that] . . . I could go directly to the students’ [lives] and simply work to make connections between [their lives] and the content I was charged to [teach]” (p. 143).
Have Better Metrics for Learning
If we are serious about the pursuit of relational pedagogy, then it is important to consider better measurements of student success. Many schools still use grade point averages (GPA), letter grades, and state (or province) scores as barometers of student success and overlook more humanistic measurements, such as relationship quality, grit, and self-reliant behaviors because they are di cult to calculate and analyze.
David M. Levy, technologist and professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, states that as teachers, “we are being measured and evaluated all the time on things that don’t have to deal with what I think is central to human values, like our ability to be human beings with one another” (as cited in Felten & Lambert, 2020, p. 80). e absence of these hard-to-measure metrics can leave many schools ignoring basic humanism when creating lessons, evaluating progress, and building school culture. If we can focus on measuring more humanistic measures, like strength of relationships and levels of support in students’ social networks, perhaps we would be more likely to help students learn how to transform their learning and life trajectories (Espinoza, 2011).
Pay Attention to Unspoken School-Culture Messages
Using the conventional measures of GPA, state (or province) rankings, or AP scores could leave the advertised school culture in con ict with the actual culture (Muhammad & Cruz, 2019). For example, a high school district may publicize a balanced education for all its students but at the same time, celebrate achievement by overfocusing on high SAT and AP scores in their community newsletter. Or its sta may use these metrics as they review student learning. Both of these practices can implicitly signal to students that achievement matters above anything else and press students to take on more and be someone they may not want to be, which can weigh on students’ psyche and even drain them physically (Emdin, 2021). For example, students may think they have to “shoulder a heavy load of Advanced Placement (AP) courses” because it’s expected (Hibbs & Rostain, 2019, p. 15).
Make Student Agency and Efficacy a Goal of Education
It is documented that the higher one’s e cacy and agency, the more robust the motivation, con dence, and drive to learn (Bandura, 2011; Dunlop, Beatty, & Beauchamp, 2011). Same with the converse—the lower one’s agency, the more apathy and indi erence one might have toward learning (Anderson et al., 2019). Both agency and e cacy have been shown to correlate to many health and wellness bene ts such as healthy actions and choices, increased e ort, perseverance, ability to handle adversity, healthy thought patterns, and lower stress or depression (Bandura, 1997; Hattie, 2015; Zimmerman et al., 2015). E cacy and agency have many causal connections to successful learning, such as increased feedback acceptance, more meaningful self-re ection, and more accurate self-assessment (Hattie, 2012). Even with the corpus of research, ecacy and agency are often seen as traits students will develop after primary and secondary education.
Teach With Students
Although teachers have more experience and expertise than their students, it doesn’t mean students don’t have any of their own. When we teach with students, we create meaning and knowledge from their minds and lives. Learning is an emergent concept, resulting from the interdependent collaboration and productive discourse between teachers and students—not from transactional exchanges of knowledge (Brown et al., 2014). Students know when their teacher is not respecting their inherent wisdom; when this happens, they may become disinterested or disengaged (Emdin, 2021).
Outcomes of a Relational Approach
In my school district, you can nd a commitment to these seven relational teaching actions in our Portrait of a Graduate (see gure I.1, page 8). is portrait reminds us that our purpose is to nurture strong relationships so students can develop a sense of community and become self-de ning adults who lead meaningful lives.
Further, this portrait guides us in the development of our policies and practices and reminds us that we are all human beings who long to connect, learn, and self-actualize.
