Students try harder in school when they like their teachers

2. Everybody needs a reliable source of personal support to learn. 3. Students can learn only once their emotional needs have been met.

4. Relationships support students in exercising the agency and initiative on which meaningful learning depends.

5. We should treat the formation of ethical interpersonal relationships as the primary purpose of schooling.

I do not begin with the assumption that these five statements are all true or astute, only that they capture important currents of thought and that riding those currents will get us somewhere. Nor do I mean to suggest that these five statements exhaust all the thinking I’ve encountered—or could encounter with further research—about the value of student- teacher relationships. They do, however, represent an instructive range of insights into the link between the quality of those relationships and the quality of students’ school experience. Despite the various points of overlap among the five statements, each one brings to the fore at least one distinctive idea for us to appreciate and interrogate.

1. Students try harder in school when they like their teachers

When I asked one of the advisors at MEC to explain the link between his school’s focus on relationships and its reputation for strong academic performance, he began by noting that “kids do more for you if they like you.” He then hastened to add another, more elaborate explanation of how a school-wide relational focus contributes to academic engagement. It was clear that he didn’t want to present the observation that “kids do more for you if they like you” as the sole or main reason to prioritize relationships. Yet there it was, the first thing that came to mind, an observation almost too obvious to mention and yet too obvious not to mention. Nor was he alone in mentioning it.

I can relate. In all of my various teaching roles, I have more than occasionally worried about how much my students liked me. The intuition that my ability to engage students depended crucially on their feelings about me personally has often felt inescapable. At times, gettingmy students to like me became a more or less conscious pedagogical strategy. I was aware on some level that this strategy could be counter-

productive—more on that soon—but it remained nonetheless a salient feature of my experience of the student-teacher relationship.

Its salience is not especially mysterious. “Kids do more for you if they like you” is on its face a theory of motivation, and teachers expend a great deal of energy trying to motivate their students to be more productive and attentive in their schoolwork. David K. Cohen calls this preoccupation one of the central “predicaments” of teaching. He observes that “all of a teacher’s pedagogical art and craft will be useless unless students embrace the purposes of instruction as their own and seek them with their own art and craft.”1 Yet students whose attendance at school is compulsory never voluntarily agreed to pursue the learning goals prescribed for them, and their cooperation cannot be taken for granted. Even to the extent that students embrace the value of those goals in the abstract, they may be reluctant at times to endure the frustration or tedium it takes to achieve them. Thus, as Cohen puts it, “mobilizing and sustaining” students’ commitment in the face of inevitable resistance becomes a “key task” for teachers.

The proposition that “kids do more if they like you” represents one response to the challenge of mobilizing student effort. It locates the source of motivation neither in a purely internal drive to learn, nor in a response to external incentives, but in the student’s desire for social connection.2 As such, it is a paradigmatic example of what we might call a relational theory of motivation. It posits a quality of interpersonal relationships (“liking” the teacher) that is supposed to reliably produce a particular motivational outcome (increased academic effort). The claim is not that students will learn only from those teachers they like, but that all else being equal, they will invest more of their energy into learning opportunities presented by people they like more. They might resist learning in a domain that would otherwise excite them because they find the teacher repellent, and they might choose to learn a subject or skill that would otherwise hold little interest for them because they are drawn in some way to the teacher. At both Eagle Rock and MEC, I heard claims like these again and again.

Although it seems intuitive that students might “do more” in school if they like their teachers, the mechanisms involved in that dynamic could be quite varied and are often ambiguous. Is it that students enjoy hanging out with teachers they like, and they see cooperation with a well-liked teacher’s learning agenda as the price of enjoying that

teacher’s company? Is it that we are all wired, thanks to some advantageous evolutionary adaptation, to value the things valued by the people we like? Is it that students want to please the people they like, and they perceive that their teachers will be pleased by their hard work? Or perhaps the idea is that disliking one’s teachers is distracting and demotivating, or that it motivates students to actively resist as a form of protest.

There is another ambiguity in the idea that “kids do more if they like you.” What do we mean, exactly, by “do more”? Do we mean that students will be more attentive in class? that they will put in extra time out of class? that they will ask more questions? that they will think more deeply? that their work will be of a higher quality? Are all of these outcomes equally tied to students’ liking of their teacher? And is “doing more” always positive, or might it sometimes entail compliance with a set of behavioral expectations that do not, in the long run, serve the student well?

To be clear, I don’t think anybody would suggest that it is undesirable for students to like their teachers. But the ambiguities I’ve just mentioned do point to some of the limitations and pitfalls of the notion that students do more for teachers they like. I want to spend just a little time discussing what might be the largest pitfall of all: the understandable—maybe even unavoidable—tendency of teachers to seek their students’ affection or approval.

It is unsurprising that teachers would look to their students for personal and professional validation. Herb Kohl notes that “almost every teacher is aware of being observed and judged by students.”3 The first years of teaching tend to be “particularly self-conscious times,” marked by “the specter of student revolt, or of personal failure to reach students.” Kohl tells the story of Joan, a new third-grade teacher who came to him distraught that her students “didn’t seem to like her, which made her feel that she was either too permissive or too stern.” After hearing Joan talk for a while about how her efforts to earn the favor of her students had backfired, Kohl asked her to describe her students one at a time—not in terms of their relationship with her, but as “people with lives independent of her and school.” Kohl then diagnosed the source of Joan’s frustration this way:

Her ego, her sense of self-esteem, of success and failure, was bound up with her relationship to the students. They weren’t people separate from her sense of self

at all, and this binding made it impossible to conceive of a way out of their mutual pain.

Kohl suggests that when teachers see their interactions with students as opportunities to win or test their students’ affection, they may miss opportunities to learn about their students’ “needs and strengths and consequently to help them use these strengths to meet their own needs.” Conversely, approaching their students with genuine curiosity and concern allows teachers to “release” or “suspend” their egos, which in turn enables a more productive focus on students and their growth. In Joan’s case, “by being less dependent upon and more aware of her students,” she was able to grow “much closer to them and much more effective as their teacher.”

Teachers’ determination to get students to like them might also be problematic insofar as it leads teachers to avoid any potential conflict with students. To see why a conflict-avoidance orientation, carried too far, could shortchange students, consider the most obvious option for eliminating conflict. If conflict in the student-teacher relationship generally stems from teachers’ making unwelcome demands on students’ time, attention, and energies, then one way to eliminate conflict is for teachers to make fewer (or no) unwanted demands on students. Particularly at the secondary level, scholars have documented a process of “bargaining” or “treaty-making,” through which teachers moderate their academic demands in exchange for a minimal level of cooperation from students.4 A hallmark of these classroom accords, according to scholars, is that teachers agree to accept mediocre academic work from students—i.e. work that can be accomplished with a minimum of effort (and learning).

It’s worth noting that not all accommodations students and teachers reach together are necessarily bad. In principle, the practice of negotiating a mutually acceptable set of goals, activities, and classroom norms—within reasonable institutional constraints— could signal precisely the sort of dynamic, sensitive, student-teacher relationship we hope to foster. Indeed, some of the demands and expectations teachers might remove or relax as part of the “treaty-making” process may have been misconceived and harmful to students. The worry here, though, is that teachers’ negotiating stance will be unduly influenced by their (well-intentioned) effort to be liked, with the result that many students will be allowed to fall short of their potential.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade, among others, suggests that this problem is particularly pervasive in schools serving poor and non-white students. In a 2007 case study, he quotes a teacher from one such school, who reported that

many [other teachers at the school] are so afraid that students won’t like them if they discipline them that they end up letting students do things they would never permit from their own children. They lower their standards and will take any old excuse from students for why they did not do their homework, or why they did not sit still in class or do their work.5

Duncan-Andrade argues that “highly effective urban educators” avoid this trap in part by “understanding the distinction between being liked and being loved by their students.” The difference, he explains, is that “the people that we love can demand levels of commitment from us that defy even our own notions of what we are capable of,” whereas “people that we like, but do not love, typically are not able to push the limits of our abilities.”

Duncan-Andrade clarifies, however, that in the cases of the teachers he studied, “the move from being liked to being loved did not happen because of the demands they made of students.” Rather, “it happened because of the love and support that accompanied those raised expectations.” He goes on to catalog the many forms of “personal support” these teachers offered students: “after-school and weekend tutoring, countless meals, rides home, phone/text messaging/email/instant messaging sessions, and endless prodding, cajoling, and all around positive harassment.” According to Duncan- Andrade, students must come to see such support as evidence that “everybody needs help along the way. And when that help is from someone that loves you, in spite of your shortcomings, you learn to trust that person.” This “trust,” in turn, makes it possible for a “loved” teacher to challenge students—and withstand occasional conflict with them— without damaging the relationship. Duncan-Andrade invokes “the approach successful parents take with their children” as a kind of model for the “loving” student-teacher relationship he has in mind.

Duncan-Andrade thus moves us beyond the conception of good student-teacher relationships as ones in which the student’s emotional response can be summarized as “liking” the teacher. It also moves us beyond conceptions of the value of student-teacher relationships that focus on students’ motivation—getting them to “do more.” Instead, it

points toward conceptions, like those explored in the next section, that focus on students’ access to the resources for learning that relationships with teachers can provide.