Studer Community Institute

Building relationships reduces learning gap

October 16, 2014
/ Reggie Dogan
/ education

Improving education is a common theme that creates discussion and disagreement throughout the country and this community. Every year (seems more like daily) new programs are added and just as quickly dropped. Standardized tests come and go. Teachers and principals are hired and fired. When it’s all said and done, some students succeed. Too many still are failing. Now comes some interesting research revealing that students do better in school simply by getting to know more about their teachers and vice versa. The recent study by a Harvard education professor Hunter Gehlbach suggested that something as simple as a getting-to-know-you exercise could improve classroom relationships and even close the achievement gap. It has long been held that positive relationships between student and teacher are vitally important to creating a healthy and wholesome classroom environment. An Atlantic article this month, “Kids Get Better Grades When They Share Similarities With Their Teachers,” highlights powerful effect of student-teacher relationships in reducing the achievement gap between underserved (mostly blacks and Latinos) and well-served (white and Asian) students. Just by teachers and students simply getting to know more about each other — the study suggests — led to significant improvement in academic achievement, the study suggests. The new study, ”Creating Birds of Similar Feathers: Leveraging Similarity to Improve Teacher-Student Relationships and Academic Achievement,” found that the building the relationships between teacher and student reduced the achievement gap between these student populations by 65 percent. It seems farfetched that something as simple as establishing relationships can improve student learning and reduce achievement gaps. It’s so much easier to measure success and/or failure by test scores and grades. But we shouldn’t overlook the importance of interpersonal relationships and how building on them can lead to success in the classroom and the delivery of education to students.

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Building relationships reduces learning gap

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