Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain. Marilee Sprenger B.

      Chapter 1

      Building Teacher-Student Relationships

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       The brain is most interested in survival and has a deep need for relating to others.

      —John Medina

      If you read no other chapter in this book, read this one. This reading alone will make a big impact in your classroom—as it could in every classroom. Building and maintaining relationships is the core of life. The central role of relationships is also backed by research. According to Hattie (2017), positive relationships between teacher and student have an effect size on learning of 0.52. The effect size is a measure of how important a difference is between two groups. This means that based on a meta-analysis of relationships, teacher-student relationships can accelerate learning more than the average 0.40, which represents a year's worth of growth. Before we can teach students how to handle relationships with their peers, we, as educators, need to model relationship building.

      When it comes to the subject of history, there isn't a finer teacher than Sarah. She loves her content and can often mesmerize her students with stories, monologues, and rare tidbits of information about a country's war heroes and relationships, both personal and professional. When the school survey was given to 6th through 12th grade students, however, Sarah did not fare well.

      She was crushed when she reviewed the answers her students gave in several areas. Although 88 percent of her students agreed that Sarah explained things in a different way if students didn't understand, only 15 percent said that she noticed when they were having difficulty, and only 5 percent said that she helped them when they were upset.

      At first, Sarah was angry. She thought, "With all the time I spend preparing the best lessons for them, making sure that I help them see and hear history, how can they say I don't notice their content and personal issues? What's wrong with them?"

      By the time Mr. Mercer called her in for a meeting to discuss the results, Sarah had begun to calm down and was trying to figure out how the students had come to their conclusions. She sat down across from her principal and mentor. He smiled and began by saying, "Sarah, you know you are a great teacher and you reach most of your students. Your teaching style is above reproach. My observations in your classroom have shown me how you can dazzle reluctant learners, and whether I'm observing your 8th graders absorbing the nuances of the Civil War or your 10th graders tackling the reasons leading up to the war in Vietnam, your kids view you as a knowledgeable historian. You can make them feel connected to Holocaust victims and survivors, but you don't seem to make them feel connected to you! It wasn't until I studied the surveys that I realized this.

      "I apologize for not looking closely enough to realize that you have a relationship with your class, but you don't really relate to your individual students. That is, you don't have a personal relationship with them. Your dynamic presentation of material draws them to the content, but you must establish a way to draw them to you. They need to trust you as a person. Many of them need to feel noticed as individuals. Seventy-four percent say that you give them specific suggestions for improving their work, and out of the 150 students you teach, that says a lot. But only 25 percent say that you support them both inside and outside the classroom. Let's talk about what you can do to increase this. You see, the students who are upset about this are the ones who can't get your full attention, the kids who need to know someone cares about them, not just their content or their grades.

      "It's not always easy to build relationships with pre-adolescents and adolescents. You and the other adults in their lives are their last best chance to get beyond some of the trauma and stress they experience—many on a daily basis."

      At this, Sarah sat back in her chair and sighed. "Mr. Mercer, I've never been good with relationships. Even though I can conjure up unusual and interesting lessons, I don't relate to people well. I think I need to take a course!"

      Sarah isn't the only one with this problem. If you ask adults how many teachers they had meaningful relationships with—that is, how many teachers they trusted and knew cared about them—most respondents would probably come up with only one or two from grades K–12 and most likely none at the university level.

      But the brain isn't finished developing until the mid-20s, and it needs so much guidance! When we ignore the importance of meaningful teacher-student relationships, we miss opportunities to help our students grow and relate to others in their world. Whether you teach kindergartners or postgraduate students, building relationships with those brains that are entrusted to you—even for just a few hours per week—offers the largest payoff in terms of learning and working in a world full of people with whom relationships can be life-changing. In other words, relationships should come first in the classroom, the staff room, and the board room. The goal should be to prepare our students for making lasting connections throughout their lives.

      Maslow Before Bloom

      "You can't take care of the Bloom stuff until you take care of the Maslow stuff!" says Alan Beck (1994), founder of Advantage Academy. Beck was born into poverty, but with the help of various teachers along the way, he became a successful student, attained a PhD, and pursued a successful career in education that eventually led to opening the academy. He pledged to teach students in a way that provides hope for the future.

      Beck's comment about Bloom and Maslow refers to the work of Benjamin Bloom (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) and Abraham Maslow (1998). Most teachers have a basic knowledge of the work of Abraham Maslow, who created a hierarchy of human needs. They also are aware of the push to use Bloom's taxonomy, a hierarchy of learning objectives classified into levels of complexity. Bloom's work is usually presented only in the cognitive domain, leaving out the affective and sensory domains. However, getting our students up the scale of Bloom's taxonomy is impossible without first meeting their basic needs. Too often our traditional approach to education has focused on levels of cognitive learning, leading up to higher-order thinking and largely ignoring students' needs.

      Today, many schools and organizations are focusing on Maslow's hierarchy. But in my most recent book on memory, How to Teach So Students Remember (Sprenger, 2018), I offer a comparison between Maslow's hierarchy and the hierarchy presented by Matthew Lieberman (2013), who believes that Maslow had it wrong. Maslow's hierarchy arranges basic needs this way: physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Lieberman, in contrast, believes that we should begin with belonging and love. He argues that it is relationships that provide us with our physiological needs and safety needs. Think of an infant who needs food or a diaper change or