Building relationships in the classroom supports better student outcomes – including higher performance and fewer instances of academic misconduct.
You’ve worked hard to establish a culture of academic integrity at your institution. How do you now build relationships in the classroom to foster trust, originality, integrity, and achievement? And what is the best approach in an online or hybrid environment?
Below you’ll find a range of strategies and tools to strengthen the student/teacher relationship – and focus on integrity as a part of this important connection.
Why is building relationships in the classroom important?
Building positive relationships in the classroom is highly beneficial. The need to belong is a universal human need, so it’s no surprise that students who feel known and valued in class enjoy better educational outcomes. Academic research has found that strong student-teacher relationships result in:
- Higher engagement and motivation for learning
- Improved attendance and participation
- Improved academic performance
- Better peer relationships
It also shapes the social and emotional development of learners – including developing personal resilience – and has a positive impact on teachers, as well – enhancing endurance and enthusiasm.
How building relationships in the classroom boosts academic integrity
Academic research highlights a correlation between building relationships in the classroom and reduced instances of academic misconduct. According to evergreen research from SA Sterns, when students have a high opinion of their teacher and a strong relationship with them, they’re less inclined to engage in academic misconduct.
There may be several reasons for this.
- Better student-teacher relationships provide learners with more support – and create a psychologically safe learning environment – which may reduce the perceived ‘need’ to cheat.
- Individual relationships with students help educators understand their personal learning style, challenges, and voice – which can make identifying and remediating misconduct easier.
- Positive classroom relationships increase student satisfaction with their learning environment, which is a key factor in the propensity toward academic misconduct (Bretag and Harper, 2019).
Building relationships in remote, hybrid, or large classrooms
Building relationships in the classroom is clearly beneficial for student outcomes. However, modern educational settings can make it more challenging – particularly large classroom sizes and remote learning environments.
Large classrooms can make it harder to provide personalized attention for every student – and to monitor and address the unique needs of every learner – which can result in academic misconduct going under the radar.
Furthermore, remote learning eliminates face-to-face relationships and makes it harder for educators to build rapport and pick up on non-verbal clues from their students, which can make relationship-building harder.
In these circumstances, educators may need to adopt additional strategies to build stronger student-teacher relationships. For example:
- Creating more opportunities for small-group work
- Encouraging struggling students to reach out directly
- Making more time for virtual office hours and 1-2-1s
- Using technology to support personalized feedback in larger cohorts
Six practical strategies for building relationships in the classroom
From something as simple as greeting students when they join your class, to engaging in reciprocal feedback, here are six ways to build better student-teacher relationships.
Greet students at the door (or as soon as they log in)
A simple but effective technique for building relationships in the classroom is to greet students as they arrive for class – rather than remaining at the front of the room or waiting silently on a Zoom call. This approach creates a welcoming environment, encourages communication, and makes students feel valued from the start.
In physical settings, stand by the door and greet students by name, check how they’re feeling, offer encouragement from the off, and introduce the topic of the day. In larger class settings, you could enroll student greeters to share the role and encourage peer-to-peer relationships too. In virtual settings, greet students by name as they log into class, and include an ice-breaker topic to get people chatting with you and others as their peers arrive.
Kickoff with a mood meter
Before launching into teaching and learning, check the mood of your learners, offer encouragement to anyone feeling low motivation, and engage higher-energy learners to help lift the mood. Provide a handout or share a visual to help learners identify their mood by color and reflect on how that might affect their learning. Ask students to share their mood with the group, to get support and ideas for overcoming any barriers. In remote settings, you could encourage students to share their mood in the chat and provide extra encouragement to students who are feeling less motivated.
Adopt a 2x10 strategy
Spending two minutes a day – for ten consecutive days – talking to challenging students about their interests can lead to significant improvements in behavior. It reassures students that you are interested in them and helps you understand how you might better engage them. Learn more about the 2x10 technique and the research behind it.
Offer meaningful feedback
Feedback builds trust in a vulnerable space, which in turn ensures students are open to guidance in strengthening their skills and understanding new concepts. Research shows that “students learned twice as fast when they received constructive feedback (specific comments on errors, suggestions to the students about how to improve, and at least one positive remark) than their peers who simply received a score on their math homework.”
A student receiving feedback on an assignment or exam trusts that the teacher recognizes their potential, sees areas for improvement, and can offer support that leads to growth. A teacher giving feedback is in the critical position of boosting a student in need, clarifying a key concept, and transforming a mistake into a teachable moment.
Seek feedback from your students
Feedback isn’t – and shouldn’t be – a one-way street. Seek feedback from your students to sharpen your professional practice – around teaching style, curriculum, relationships in the classroom, etc.
This not only provides insights into areas of improvement, but it also helps you truly understand the vulnerability around feedback – and the importance of a constructive feedback process.
The end of each term can be a perfect opportunity for instructors to seek feedback from their students, whether anonymously or not, to improve their lessons, feedback style, and overall approach to teaching the following term.
Ask questions and use active listening
Questions are the best way to connect with people – and active listening ensures you really hear what people say in response. Something simple like “How are you feeling today?” creates a human connection that can build trust, create emotional safety, and deepen student-teacher relationships.
Beyond simply fortifying a relationship, questions are essential for academic integrity. In a situation of suspected misconduct, educators must ask questions and have a conversation with the student before jumping to any conclusions. This protects the relationship if suspicions are unfounded – and provides a stronger foundation for remediation if suspicions are sadly proven correct.
Psychological techniques for building relationships in the classroom
Belonging, safety, resilience, trust, self-efficacy… These are some of the key concepts that underpin positive relationships in the classroom. Here’s how to harness positive psychology to boost your relationships with learners.
Develop your relationship-building competence
Classroom relationship-building techniques can be learned and developed – for example, emotional intelligence (see below), reflective practice, and conflict resolution – and institutions should support their educators to develop them through professional development opportunities, training, and mentoring.
Academic research provides a valuable pedagogical framework for relationship-building competencies including the ability to deal with negative emotions and conflict, as well as affective-motivational factors such as self-efficacy, proactivity, and resilience.
Be empathetic, respectful and non-prejudicial
Day-to-day interactions between students and educators are the most important in building relationships in the classroom. To engage in those effectively, teachers need ‘a basic attitude of empathy, respect, and non-prejudice’.
It’s clear how this can produce more positive responses from students. However, this attitude also makes educators less likely to ‘attribute negative relationship quality…to student characteristics’ and see themselves as able to improve student-teacher relationships. This proactively is highly beneficial. (Borremans, Koomen, and Split, 2024)
Practice mindfulness to develop your emotional intelligence
Research shows teacher mindfulness and emotional intelligence predict the quality of student-teacher classroom relationships.
“Teachers who practice mindfulness demonstrate a greater capacity to [...] experience emotions without judgment and foster the growth of emotional intelligence in their students. Emotional intelligence significantly influences the interactions between instructors and learners [...] Teachers with high emotional intelligence possess a valuable skillset for managing challenging situations and conflicts [...] and understanding their students’ emotional needs, ultimately fostering a positive learning environment” (Wang, 2023)
Consider incorporating mindfulness into your own daily practice – or introduce mindful moments in the classroom too, to support student wellbeing as well. You can also use reflective practices and role play to enhance your empathy and improve your conflict management.
Technology for building better classroom relationships
Provide more personalized feedback, even in large cohorts
In large classrooms, building 1-2-1 student-teacher relationships can be more challenging. In these instances, technology can be transformative. Tools like Gradescope allow educators to provide meaningful personalized feedback to students at scale, making large classrooms feel small again.
For example by using rubrics to easily assess questions and provide detailed feedback. And by making routine grading faster, to increase your time for personalized feedback with students.
Support academic integrity with data-informed insights
Conversations around academic integrity are are important but difficult. No one wants to make an accusation that proves false and undermines their relationship with a student – perhaps why many educators don’t follow up on suspected misconduct. For example, 67% of instructors say they may not act on suspicions of contract cheating due to insufficient evidence to support their claims.
The rise of AI writing tools has added another layer of complexity, making it even harder to distinguish between genuine student work and inappropriate AI use.
Solutions like Turnitin Feedback Studio’s paid add-on, Originality, help you assess the likelihood of individual academic misconduct and gather supporting evidence to guide those difficult discussions. It also provides students with formative feedback on their work, to help them address any unintended similarities with existing work and guide them to higher performance.