Positive Student-Teacher Relationships: Effective Classrooms

Positive student–teacher relationships are the foundation of every effective classroom. They influence student behavior, engagement, motivation, and academic success long before instructional strategies take root.

In this episode of The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, you will hear how critical role relationships play in building classrooms where students feel safe, valued, and empowered to learn. This conversation highlights how intentional interactions, consistent expectations, and respectful communication shape classroom culture and strengthen trust between educators and students.

Listeners will reflect on practical ways to cultivate meaningful connections while maintaining professionalism, authority, and high expectations. The episode also addresses how strong relationships support classroom management, improve student engagement, and contribute to emotionally supportive learning environments across K–12 settings.

Designed for teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders, this episode encourages educators to examine how their daily actions communicate care, belief, and accountability.

Because effective classrooms are not built on content alone—they are built on connection.

The environment we create determines the learning that takes place. Build it with purpose.

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Hello and welcome back. My name is Lashonta, and I am your host for The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. Thank you for returning and listening to our strategies and tips to be effective in the classroom. If you did not have an opportunity to hear the first episode, the first episode focused on having the right attitude and passion before declaring education as your major and doing some self some self-checking and trying to figure out do I have what it takes in order to be in education?

So if you didn't have an opportunity to listen in on that episode, I encourage you to go back.

Our focus for today will be on relationships, building positive student-teacher relationships. And even if you are not a classroom teacher, everyone who is a part of education, from the superintendent, lawmakers, to the substitute teacher who may come into your classroom or in your building, everyone in education has an impact on our students. So our focus is on the classroom environment and how teachers build relationships with students. But if you are someone in education that fits another role, please keep in mind that this episode is also for you as well.

So again, our focus will be students and teachers learn to build rapport and positive relationships so that learning becomes more relevant to students. So today the focus is on positive relationships, positive student-teacher relationships. Our next episode will be on building rapport, and then our episode after that will be relating to relevance, relevance of content, and how to tie in all of those connections that we will be talking about today.

One of my favorite quotes is by Richard G. Scott. And the quote is, We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day. And the first time I saw that quote, I thought it was awesome because it's so true. Whatever you want to become in life, whatever you want to do, you practice. Every day you try to perfect that particular task.

Every day that you work on.

So when do we begin building these positive relationships? And I mentioned the first day of school. I can remember as a classroom teacher getting ready over the summer, coming up with these awesome ideas of how what type of activities I'll I would have planned for my students. As we all do as classroom teachers, we are putting together things that we want to do with our students that first day in order to make the connection. So we're we're brainstorming, coming up with all types of things. We're going on Pinterest, we're going on the internet, we're buying resources.

But learning our students is not just a first day of school event. It's not just the first day of school, it's not just the first week of school, or even the first month. We continue to make connections with our students all year long. Now, sometimes things may come up and get in the way of us being able to be consistent in learning our children. We may have things that happen at home, um, where our personal lives may play a role in how we handle ourselves on the job. We may have where those difficult students are placed in our classes, or we are teaching 35 to 40 students in a classroom, and we're thinking to ourselves, how in the world am I supposed to learn all of these children?

But we're not going to focus on the negative. We want to focus on building positive relationships. We already know that those are things that can and will happen, but in order to maintain an effective classroom environment, even with 35, 40 students, you must be able to make the connections with them.

Some other things that we typically do in order to build relationships and make connections. We do the get to know you activity sheet. And I can remember as a classroom teacher doing that same type of sheet with my students and asking them about their favorite colors, their favorite sports team, and um just asking a series of questions in order to get some relevant information that I needed about them. But it didn't just stop at that sheet. Making connections doesn't just end at getting information on a sheet of paper.

Making the connections goes even further. Embedding those interests within your lesson planning, embedding those interests within your lectures. So you bring out and you personalize your lesson by talking about and bringing an end what those interests are of those students.

But my advice to educators would be to try to do some type of getting to know you activity with your students on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. It doesn't have to take longer than five or ten minutes. But when we begin to put our focus so much on state assessments, and it's not to say that those are not important. We know it's important because we know that there are a lot of things that ride on how well our students do on state assessments. But five or 10 minutes once a week, twice a week, can have a powerful impact on your test scores.

Because if you make those connections with your students and you build that trust with your students, they will do just about anything for you. So relationship building, positive relationship building is very important. One thing that I also encourage educators to do is to also give their students learning inventories. Learn your students' style. What is it that helps them to learn better? Are they auditory learners? Do they have to move around? Are they kinesthetic? Um, do they have to touch things?

Make sure that you try to learn your students' learning styles. Um, getting information about their family, not just who their parents are, but an interesting fact about their family history, and sharing that information, getting them to talk a little bit about their family. Now, you will have students that may not want to discuss their family for different reasons, but this is another piece, another tool that you can use with most of your students is getting them to talk a little bit about some interesting facts about their family history.

Another thing that we as educators tend to focus on when we're talking to our students is what are their plans for the next five years of their life, next 10 years? Where do they see themselves after high school? And sometimes our students don't always have answers to those questions, and our job is to help guide them along the way to making decisions about what is it that they want to do with themselves. Because again, our focus is on helping our children be ready for their future, whether it's going on to college or whether it's making sure they're career ready, our job is to prepare them for the next steps.

But one thing we also need to bring into the picture when we're making connections with our students is talking about what are their plans for the current school year, not just in your class, but what are their plans and making them think beyond to go on to the next grade level, making them think further, what is it that you want out of the school year? How can we, your team or your teachers, your principal, how can we help you to be the best student that you can be? And making sure that the students understand best does not always mean I have an A in the class, but what is that student's definition of being the best for that school year in that school, in that school district?

I love how middle schools they embrace the concept of teaming. Um, with teaming, teachers are able to share information, they share students, and they're able to stay on top of what students are doing, how they're excelling, um, if they need to make improvements in their classes, but as a team of teachers, they're all talking about the same groups of students. This concept is also seen at the high school level when you have your freshman academies or freshman focus, and what you have just a pure freshman class that they all see the same teacher.

I love the teaming concept because it gives you an opportunity to talk about those same groups of students. And it's not to say it can't be done if you don't have teams at your school, it's just you have to make sure that you have it embedded within your school week to talk about what's going on with your your students.

Building that trust is very important, very important in building trust with your students. If a student can trust you, the student again will do just about anything for you. And trust doesn't mean having to come being able to confide in you about some deep dark secret, but trusting you to teach him or her and not just allowing the student to get away with any and everything in the class. How we also make connections, how we talk to our students, the tone of voice that we use is very important. Uh, many times we want to consider our students like our own children, and over time, that is a relationship that could possibly develop.

I can remember as a teacher and also as an assistant principal where I had students that called me mama. And it was because of how they looked up to me. Um, they knew that if they got in trouble, they were gonna get what they had coming to them, whatever consequence. But they also knew I was gonna be fair and hear them out. So making sure that we the way that we talk to our students, the tone that we use, you know, as a parent, we tell we can tell our children, and sometimes we we make sure we tell them, I brought you into this world and I can take you out.

As a teacher, we can't tell our students, I brought you into this class and I can take you out. We may want to say that, but that's not going to help us to build that connection with them. So making sure that how we talk to them, the tone of voice that we use, sometimes silence is so powerful. Silence can be a weapon. I can remember just standing in front of my class and after asking them to come um back to the discussion. I can remember standing and being just silent. After trying with my voice, and that did not work, I would just stand and be silent.

And I would watch as certain students would say, What's going on? What is going on? What is she doing? What is she doing? But silence can be powerful, and it's a tool that we have to use more often. Of course, having the appropriate wait time of silence when we're wanting to bring our students back to the discussion, you don't want to use too much time. And so we'll talk about that as well in other episodes. Avoiding power struggles. When you have a power struggle with your student, everyone else is watching.

All the other students in that class, they are watching. Power struggles do not help you to make connections, it doesn't help you have ties with the students. What it does is set you apart to where you are now looked at as a domineering individual. Um, you want to make sure that you avoid power struggles with your students. They know that you are the adult and they are the children. The students know this, and it's not something that you have to say and you have to keep in mind your audience, those other students are watching to see how you're going to handle the situation.

Another thing that I also would discourage teachers from doing is always listening to the information from the teacher the year before. And the reason I say this is just as you have the opportunity to grow and learn and improve upon yourself over the summer, so does that child. That student has the opportunity to improve his or herself. So many times if we listen to what others have experienced themselves, we allow that to be our truths. And we have to develop our truths with that student for that current year, not going by what happened the previous year or the previous years.

So keep in mind, make your connections by starting off the school year on the right foot. Yes, you may listen to what teachers have shared and they may want to give you information that will be helpful. For instance, it's helpful to know that a student lost his or her parent the year before or when he or she was smaller. That is information that is relevant and it's good to know, and it helps you as an educator and as that child's upcoming teacher. But anything that is dealing with negative behavior, you want to cast that to the side and start off the school year on a positive note, making connections and not holding things against them.

Will your students come in and hold information against you? Possibly. And the only way that you can debunk any ideas that they may have that are negative about you is to start the school year off on the right foot. So I encourage you to build your own information bank, build your own bank about that student as you are making those connections, building on those positive relationships. This is important in order to have a successful school year and in order to grow with your students. Learn your students.

You may say, Well, I teach a hundred students. How am I gonna learn them? You have 180 days to get to know your students. There is time, and you have to make the time, but because as educators, if we rush into wanting to set our students up to score high on an assessment, and we forget all about the students, they pick up on that. They pick up on the fact that they are just a statistic. Our students are not just a statistic, they're more than just that score on that ACT, on that end of course, on that state assessment.

They are more than just a score, and you have to let your students know that daily. Building positive relationships is not about giving hugs. Some people, that's just not their style. Getting to know the students, getting to know who they are, their interests. How can you help them to learn the material in your classroom? You have students coming to you that may not even like your subject. How will you get them interested in your subject? And again, going back to your planning, that's a whole nother episode, just talking about lesson plans and how plans should be in order to get your students actively engaged.

Your students should be actively engaged in your lesson from start to finish. But if we focus on building those connections and getting to know our students, we are on the road to an effective classroom environment. I thank you for listening and join me again for the next episode of The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. And again, my name is Lashanta. Have a good evening.