The Power of Personal Relationships

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D
ONTA stayed after class a few minutes to ask her
teacher for help. As she hurried to get to her next
class on time, her boyfriend cornered her and ques-
tioned her about a rumor he had heard involving
Donta and his best friend. She could not get away.
She was torn, because she had been late for this class
several times before and did not want to disappoint
her teacher again.
When Donta finally got to her class, she was obvi-
ously nervous. Her teacher simply said, “Donta, how
nice to see you. Come on in and take a seat.” Donta
smiled and felt relieved. She loved this class because
the teacher made her feel important. “Why couldn’t
all teachers treat kids this way?” she thought.
Donta had just experienced the power of personal-
relationship building. Her teacher could have demand-
ed a pass, interrogated her in front of the class, greeted
her with a sarcastic remark, or embarrassed her in some
other way. Instead, she made her feel welcome. Donta
was in a frame of mind ready to learn.
There are many children who make up their minds
on the first day of class whether they are going to suc-
Teachers and administrators are often directed to distance themselves from the children
in their charge. Despite the land mines that accompany personal relationships with students,
Mr. Mawhinney and Ms. Sagan argue that educators can still learn to build warm
and loving communities of learners.
BY THOMAS S. MAWHINNEY AND LAURA L. SAGAN
THOMAS S. MAWHINNEY is an associate professor at Touro Col-
lege in New York, N.Y. He is a former high school principal, an
education consultant, a teacher trainer, and the president of Lead-
ing for Learning, Inc., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. LAURA L. SAGAN is
the social studies coordinator for the Mohonasen Central School
District, Rotterdam, N.Y
., a part-time teacher trainer, and a for-
mer middle school principal.
The Power of Personal Relationships
460 PHI DELTA KAPPAN

ceed or fail — sometimes consciously and sometimes
not. How can this be, one might ask? Simply put, the
initial student/teacher encounter often determines how
well or poorly a child will perform throughout the school
year. Likewise, a positive teacher/student relationship
creates the classroom atmosphere necessary to maxi-
mize a student’s mental state of readiness.
Picture the teacher who, in an attempt to establish
control from the beginning, spends the first day de-
scribing classroom rules and routines and emphasizes
what will happen if they are not followed. Coercive class-
rooms are not conducive to learning, yet many teachers
continue to believe that a dominating relationship such
as that between a parent and child ensures student com-
pliance. How often have instructional leaders advised
the first-year teacher to be tough in the beginning and
loosen up later — that one can never do it in reverse?
Well, after that first day of toughness, many students
have “downshifted” into a fight-or-flight mode. In doing
so they have bypassed much of their capacity for higher-
order thinking or creative thought, and it is hard to learn
when your bodily functions are focused on survival. We
now understand that higher-level thinking is more like-
ly to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally
secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, up-
set, anxious, or stressed.
Researchers continue to report that the teacher has
a significant impact on student achievement. Based on
an extensive analysis of research, Robert and Jana Mar-
zano claim that “the quality of teacher-student relation-
ships is the keystone for all other aspects of classroom
management.”1As former secondary school principals,
we feel that personal-relationship building is one of the
most important skills a teacher can possess and continue
to refine. In this article, we intend to describe the many
dimensions of this skill.
PERSONAL-RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
We first encountered the term “personal-relation-
ship building” as the title of the shortest chapter in The
Skillful Teacher, by Jon Saphier and Robert Gower.2The
authors classify this skill under the broader category of
motivation and supply a two-part definition: “the vari-
ety of ways teachers have of contacting students’ per-
sonal worlds and the traits of teachers that seem to en-
gender affection and regard in a relationship.”3
We will use this framework in an attempt to paint
a clear picture of this powerful tool in a teacher’s peda-
gogical “bag of tricks.” We do not expect even great
teachers to have all the skills and characteristics we will
describe. Adding one or two to one’s repertoire each
year will put the self-renewing teacher on a path to can-
onization.
WAYS OF CONTACTING
STUDENTS’ PERSONAL WORLDS
A beginning teacher gets only one chance to make
a first impression. As we noted above, despite the ad-
vice commonly given to new teachers to be tough in
the beginning, one does not want to scare off the mar-
ginal students or those students who need a caring and
nurturing environment to survive and prosper. Teachers
can create such an environment by consciously engag-
ing in particular practices and behaviors.
Knowing your students and allowing them to know you.
Differentiating instruction — planning varied lessons
according to students’ interests — is an important skill.
Therefore we recommend that teachers spend the first
few days of the school year or new semester getting to
know their students by using interest surveys or other
activities to discover the ways in which each one of them
is unique.
We also support those teachers who allow their stu-
dents to know them. Teachers who offer their students
“genuineness and self-disclosure”4reveal “aspects of them-
selves that allow [the] image of authority figure to be tem-
pered by images of teacher-as-a-real-person.”5Steven
Wolk believes that “teachers need to allow students to
see them as complete people with emotions, opinions,
and lives outside of school. A good way for a teacher
to get students to treat him or her as a human being is
to act like one.”6
Two of our most beloved teachers are women who,
when faced with child-care problems, bring their young
children to school for short periods of time. Whenever
this happens, secondary and middle school students
flock to them. While some schools frown on teachers’
using the workplace as a backup day-care facility, we
find that the practice allows students to get a peek at
the other side of a teacher’s life. Not only does it im-
prove relationships, it forms a long-lasting bond between
the students and the teacher’s own children.
Reestablishing contact and high expectations. Reestab-
lishing contact with a student with whom one has had
a negative interaction is one of the most difficult things
a teacher can do. Yet if that student is ever to feel a sense
of belonging again, the teacher must somehow have a
positive interaction with the student around some other
FEBRUARY 2007 461

issue. No apology is needed, but the message that the
negative incident is in the past and that it is time to
move on must be clear. How often have you heard stu-
dents claim that they are doing poorly in a class be-
cause the teacher “hates” them? We believe that stu-
dents have an innate sense that adults hold grudges and
it is not clear to them when an incident of misbehavior
has been forgotten. Therefore, we feel that teachers —
and schools, for that matter — need to consciously ap-
ply techniques to bring closure to discipline problems,
so that students understand that “everyone makes mis-
takes. You need to learn from it, and move on.”
There is an abundance of research on the academic
benefits of high expectations for students. High expec-
tations are a crucial ingredient in personal-relationship
building. In our years of administrative experience, we
have seen the damage that low expectations can do even
before a student walks through the classroom door for
the first time. We fought in our respective schools for
heterogeneous grouping, yet many days we were butting
up against a wall of long-held teacher beliefs in the ef-
ficiency of sorting and separating students. We encoun-
tered one teacher who had special education students
coloring rather than participating in a writing assign-
ment with the rest of the class. You can imagine how
demeaned those children felt. We will leave it at this:
a student — especially a young person who has experi-
enced the negative effects of low expectations over time
— can sense when a teacher has high expectations for
all students.
Active and empathetic listening. Active listening not
only helps build personal relationships but is a power-
ful teaching strategy as well. James Stronge places this
practice under the more general category of caring.7We
feel that it deserves special mention, having observed
its effect on student participation in the classroom as
well as the expressions on the faces of those students
who are the recipients of this potent form of attention
from the teacher.
Active listening serves to:
• reaffirm to the speaker the content of his or her
remark;
•confirm to the students that they have been heard
in a nonjudgmental way;
• restate or infer the feeling state of the speaker; and,
most important,
• send a message to the students that their comments
or responses are important to the teacher.8
You can imagine the look on an insecure student’s
face when the teacher refers to an answer he or she gave
earlier in the class — “as Jimmy said at the beginning of
class, one of the main causes of the Civil War was. . . .”
Even using students’ names when repeating or rephras-
ing a comment is a powerful teaching and personal-rela-
tionship-building move. We cannot encourage teach-
ers enough to use active listening in their classrooms.
Involvement. For more than 30 years, first as teach-
ers and then as administrators, we have enjoyed being
involved with students, whether chaperoning a dance,
overseeing a field trip, or watching a school sporting or
other extracurricular event. School staff members who
appear at activities taking place outside the normal school
day are those with whom students most easily connect.
Many veteran teachers feel that they have paid their
dues with respect to this aspect of school life and pass
on such duties to their younger colleagues. Yet we find
that students appreciate the fact that any teacher at-
tends an event or chaperones an activity. We ourselves
showed up at so many events that students began to
ask why we were not at every activity — too much of
a good thing, perhaps?
TEACHER TRAITS THAT ENGENDER
AFFECTION AND REGARD
In addition to using particular practices, teachers who
successfully build personal relationships with students
exhibit certain attitudes and qualities.
Respect, courtesy, and fairness. One of the most re-
spected teachers that we have observed was a tradition-
al, veteran teacher. Year after year, students would affirm
that he was one of the best teachers they had ever had.
In his classroom, you had to pay particular attention to
understand why. He was courteous, always saying please
and thank you. He frequently gave students one last
chance to increase their grades on a quiz or exam. He
insisted that those who did not do well see him for help.
He never got mad or raised his voice. He used humor
but was never sarcastic. He was loyal to the absent, never
speaking of other students in front of their peers or with
his fellow teachers. He disciplined students privately;
he never did so publicly. He is our “poster child” for
462 PHI DELTA KAPPAN
Even using students’ names when repeating or rephrasing a comment
is a powerful teaching and personal-relationship-building move.

the category of respect, courtesy, and fairness.
We believe that these basic human qualities are often
lost in secondary schools. As adults, we bring to school
scripts that we learned, not from teacher training, but
from our experiences as parents and as children being
parented. Under pressure, we often revert to these scripts.
Take the example of a teacher we overheard when one
of her students walked out of her class in anger. The
teacher followed the student into the hall, asking, “Who
do you think you are?” How is the student supposed to
answer that question?
Respect, courtesy, and fairness cover a wide variety of
teacher behaviors. A teacher can demonstrate respect
by:
• using students’ interests in class activities,
•allowing students to express ideas without criticism,
• correcting errors without putdowns,
• balancing corrective feedback with recognition of
strengths,
• displaying student products, and
• using specific praise.9
According to students, fairness on the part of the
teacher includes:
• treating students as people,
• refraining from ridicule and from creating situa-
tions that cause students to lose the respect of their
peers,
• being consistent and giving students opportunities
to have input into the classroom, and
• providing opportunities for all students to partici-
pate and succeed.10
A teacher displays courtesy by:
• smiling often,
• being polite,
• not interrupting,
• exhibiting simple kindnesses such as picking up
a dropped item or holding a door, and
• greeting students when they arrive and wishing
them well when they leave.
Caring and understanding. Caring too much can be
dangerous for teachers. We all have heard stories of teach-
ers who have blurred the line between their professional
and personal lives. It is possible to develop unhealthy
relationships that are damaging to both the teacher and
the child. Yet not caring can be equally debilitating. How
often do youths who drop out of school complain that
no one cares about them or even cares if they exist?
We believe that the right kind of caring is the secret
to developing students’ motivation to achieve.
Nancy Hoffman asserts, “There is a great deal to be
done to make the caring work of teachers less elusive, to
name it among our expectations, to study how it works,
and to reward it as a substantial component of excel-
lence in teaching.”11 While teachers cannot possibly in-
volve themselves completely in the lives of all their stu-
dents, they can exhibit a burning interest in student
achievement by using effective praise and by showing
an almost parental pride in exceptional student work.
Hoffman uses the term “pedagogic caring,” which she
defines as a passion for learning that emanates from
the teacher. It is easy to gauge the level of this type of
caring by observing the display of student work in and
around a teacher’s room or office.
We think Peter Senge sums it up well: “When peo-
ple genuinely care, they are actively committed. They
are doing what they truly want to do. They are full of
energy and enthusiasm. They persevere, even in the
face of frustration and setbacks, because what they are
doing is what they must do. It is their work.”12
When we speak of “understanding” on the part of
teachers, we are referring primarily to empathy, de-
fined as “the ability to vicariously feel what another
person is feeling, to understand and connect where
that person is.”13 We agree with Arnold Goldstein that
this capacity to understand/empathize is positively as-
sociated with a broad range of prosocial behaviors, such
as cooperation, sociability, and interpersonal compe-
FEBRUARY 2007 463

tence, and negatively associated with aggressive behav-
ior.14 It is so important for the teacher to know that
each of her students is walking through the door with
a myriad of social experiences from neglect to overin-
dulgence. While we do not advocate for the lessening
of standards or expectations for students who may not
be having a good day, we do think that getting inside
a child’s head and empathizing with what is there will
go a long way toward fostering the kinds of relation-
ships that promote higher achievement.
Humor. According to Rita Dunn, students who are
global processors — those who see the big picture and
learn better through anecdotes — need humor to func-
tion more effectively.15 Roland Barth states that his per-
sonal vision of a great school is one that is characterized
by humor, and we concur.16 But teachers need to be
aware that there is a fine line between appropriate and
inappropriate humor. Poking fun at someone in an at-
tempt to win students’ favor is inappropriate. The abil-
ity to see humor in situations and to laugh at oneself
is key. Appropriate humor makes people smile, it cre-
ates warmth in a classroom, it relaxes students, and it
reverses the “fight-or-flight” response that many trou-
bled students take with them into every class they enter.
Love of children. It would seem obvious that all teach-
ers must possess this quality to work in education.
Unfortunately, we have encountered teachers and
other staff members who leave us scratching our heads,
wondering how and why these individuals ever chose —
and were hired — to work with children. There are adults
in our schools who do not like “other people’s children”
and do not like being around them. We absolutely have
to prevent these individuals from entering the profes-
sion, or, if we mistakenly hire them, we must have the
courage to weed them out.
RISKING CLOSENESS
Andy Hargreaves refers to the “emotional geographies
of teaching” — the patterns of closeness and distance
that shape the emotions we experience.17 In his discus-
sion of professional distance, he observes, “School teach-
ing has become an occupation with a feminine caring
ethic that is trapped within a rationalized and bureau-
cratic structure.” This is the problem for educators work-
ing in politically sensitive environments. Teachers and
administrators are often directed to distance themselves
from children in order to avoid the risks of personal re-
lationships. As Hargreaves notes, “The dilemma for teach-
ers is that although they are supposed to care for their
students, they are expected to do so in a clinical and de-
tached way — to mask their emotions.”18 We know there
is validity in establishing closeness, yet there are land
mines all about the countryside. We can be safe and ster-
ile or take a chance and create a warm, loving communi-
ty of learners.
We wrote this article because we deeply believe in
the concept of personal-relationship building. We wanted
to add to the knowledge base regarding this valuable
skill and to describe it in a way that makes it real — some-
thing you can see and feel, something that is coachable,
and, above all, something that plays a key role in the
teaching act. There used to be a myth that good teach-
ers are born, not made, and that there is nothing one
can do to help the unfortunate who do not have this
natural ability. We disagree and believe that “being skill-
ful means you can do something that can be seen; it
means different levels of skill may be displayed by dif-
ferent individuals; and it means, above all, that you can
learn how to do it and continue to improve at it.”19
1. Robert J. Marzano and Jana S. Marzano, “The Key to Classroom Man-
agement,” Educational Leadership, September 2003, p. 6.
2. Jon Saphier and Robert Gower, The Skillful Teacher: Building Your Teach-
ing Skills, 5th ed. (Acton, Mass.: Research for Better Teaching, 1997).
3. Ibid, p. 345.
4. Richard P. Dufour and Robert E. Eaker, Fulfilling the Promise of Ex-
cellence: A Practitioner’s Guide to School Improvement (Westbury, N.Y.:
J. L. Wilkerson, 1987), p. 144.
5. Saphier and Gower, p. 348.
6. Steven Wolk, “Hearts and Minds: Classroom Relationships and Learn-
ing Interact,” Educational Leadership, September 2003, p. 18.
7. James H. Stronge, Qualities of Effective Teachers (Alexandria, Va.: Asso-
ciation for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002).
8. Saphier and Gower, op. cit.
9. Ibid.
10. Stronge, op. cit.
11. Nancy Hoffman, “Toughness and Caring,” Education Week, 28 March
2001, p. 42.
12. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990),
p. 148.
13. David A. Levine, Teaching Empathy: A Social Skills Resource (Accord,
N.Y.: Blue Heron Press, 2000), p. 13.
14. Arnold P. Goldstein, The Prepare Curriculum: Teaching Prosocial Com-
petencies (Champaign, Ill.: Research Press, 1999).
15. Rita S. Dunn, “The Dunn and Dunn Learning-Style Model and Its
Theoretical Cornerstone,” in Rita S. Dunn and Shirley A. Griggs, eds.,
Synthesis of the Dunn and Dunn Learning-Style Model Research: Who, What,
When, Where, and So What? (Jamaica, N.Y.: St. John’s University, 2003).
16. Roland S. Barth, “A Personal Vision of a Good School,” Phi Delta Kap-
pan, March 1990, pp. 512-16.
17. Andy Hargreaves, “Emotional Geographies of Teaching,” Teachers
College Record, vol. 103, 2000, pp. 1056-80.
18. Ibid., p. 1069.
19. Saphier and Gower, p. 3.
K
464 PHI DELTA KAPPAN

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Thomas S. Mawhinney and Laura L. Sagan, The Power of Personal
Relationships, Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 88, No. 06, February 2007, pp.
460-464.
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