Effects of Positive Student-Teacher Relations

{{formatDate('Tue Sep 17 2019 23:02:49 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time)') }}, Tejaswini Sundar, Review

Effects of Positive Student-Teacher Relations

Teachers and the teaching profession play a major role in educating the future of each generation. Instilling in young minds matter to raise questions and explore a topic and the determination to seek their answers, is what makes teachers a valuable asset to every student belonging to any age group. Though technology has advanced and changed fields for the better, it still doesn’t have the capability to replace an educator. Therefore, the role of a teacher holds an emotional value in a classroom setting. Supportive student-teacher relationships boost student activity and retention in the classroom. These also provide a student with a supportive and secure environment to learn under no stress. The relationship between a student and teacher can affect the learning capability and curve of a student, with its effects also touching areas you might not immediately notice. To further prove my point, here’s an experiment I came across that got me thinking.

The Experiment

About 120 six-year olds were asked to be seated in front of computers, and as part of the experiment, these kids were to be giving a series of cognitive tests. The experiment was performed to determine how student-teacher relationships affect the way students think. Researchers had taken pictures of the teachers that taught these children, and displayed them for less than a second before students began to solve problems. It wasn’t displayed for too long for any change to take effect, but change was noted. Students that had a close relationship with their teacher solved questions faster than students that didn’t form any type of bond. To test whether this bond still had its effects on students months after they had graduated preschool, the same test was conducted with a few differences. By now, these children were now in primary, and had formed a different types of student-teacher relations with their primary school teachers. The test had covered subjects from both pre and primary school, but this time, pictures of both the pre and primary school teachers were displayed before moving to the problems they were to solve. Problems that displayed the student’s favorite pre school teachers were solved faster than problems that displayed their favorite primary school teachers. This experiment didn’t just prove that student-teacher relationships affect the way a student thinks, it also proved that supportive bonds formed at a young age have lasting effects on students.

S stands for Supportive and Secure

Secure and supportive relationships are especially important to children of the preschool age group. They are known to have bonds that last long not because they’ve been developed at a young age, but maybe due to students needing the time to allow elders, such as teachers, to reach out to them. Children don’t just need the time to feel personally connected to you: it’s how your bond with a student in your class gets them to lower down their stress hormone levels. Given what we know about the effects of an affectionate touch, it seems probable.

How does a bond with your student affect their stress levels?

Another experiment studied hormonal changes in the stress hormone cortisol, in elementary school children going through a typical week in school. These classes were handled by teachers who formed little to no type of bond with their students. It was noted that the students stress hormone profiles seemed fairly normal at the beginning of the school week, which then started to increase atypically. This meant that students attending these classes were under a lot of stress. Another set of children attended classes taught by their favorite teachers; teachers with whom they've had a strong, supportive and secure bond. The cortisol shifts in their body was observed to be normal throughout the week.

Another benefit to supportive and secure bonds is that students exposed to the idea of their teacher being their emotional support system, tend to have fewer behavioral outbreaks later on. This also helps them develop better language skill, and show more engagement in classroom activities. Bullying is be a serious issue, and there's much your bond with a student can do to protect them from it. Studies show that children who are actively rejected by their peers at the beginning of the school year experienced less bullying after a few months - if they developed an above-average relationship with their teachers.

Can you equate all of the above to student-teacher relations?

Teachers too, are human beings. Therefore, one would only find it helpful to maintain such relations with students that are coperative, attentive, and socially proficient. But this doesn't hold a student who's "at risk" to benefit the most out of this relation. When students are exposed to these bonds at a young age, they learn to cooperate, think, and learn in the light of a positive relation. These bonds affect a child as he/she grows older; to provide an overview: stronger bonds evolve to better grades.

There's much a role of a teacher can do to benefit the classroom setting. All that you need is to identify such scope, and help them get through their problems positively. This is also why technology can never replace pedagogy; without an emotional support system in place, students and teachers alike would feel the need to shift back to traditional teaching methods, as they would prove to be more successful. With education becoming more student-centralized, it is time that our teaching methods evolve to support and provide for the future generation.