Nurturing close student–teacher relationships

Close student-teacher relationships offer a wealth of benefits for students, teachers, and society. For students, these benefits extend to academic performance, social success, psychological engagement, and classroom belonging, and they emerge over and above competing patterns of disruption that can emerge among students exhibiting behaviours of concern. Yet some students are more likely to experience close relationships than others. Those at risk of a poor student-teacher relationship include boys, students from low SES backgrounds, students from ethnic or cultural minorities, and students exhibiting learning difficulties. In this chapter we review concepts of student-teacher relationship quality and draw on recent research findings to challenge the traditional positive-negative binary. In particular, we highlight the emergence of more complicated relationship patterns in both primary and secondary contexts. Next, we consider how best teachers can build strong relationships with their students. We position teaching as a form of relational labour with multiple stages of relationship formation and renegotiation within which to intervene. We highlight specific strategies for building closeness and reducing conflict, and outline steps school leaders and school systems can take to support teachers in this work.