Our teachers work with the same students over multiple years, developing a deep understanding of each child’s strengths, challenges, and unique learning style.

Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teachers in a typical school year. That’s enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a student’s lifetime love of learning—and it’s enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails.

Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students.

“People sometimes mistake a kind of casual familiarity and friendliness for the promotion of really deep relationships that are about a child’s potential, their interests, their strengths, and weaknesses. A lot of teachers … have really strong abilities to engage socially with the students, but then it’s not enough. You have to go much deeper than that and actually start to engage with students around their curiosity, their interests, their habits of mind through understanding and approaching material to really be an effective teacher.”

…Continue reading at Education Week