AJE Special Issue: Changing the Grammar of Schooling | Rethinking the Grammar of Student-Teacher Relationships by Hillary L. Greene Nolan

Full-length article “Rethinking the Grammar of Student-Teacher Relationships” by Greene Nolan published by the American Journal of Education available here.

When many of us think back on our educational experiences, what stands out so many years later is often the memory of a special relationship we had with “that one teacher.” It might have been a teacher who seemed like they really cared or “got” us, a teacher who helped us learn something that stuck with us, a teacher who we feel changed our trajectory, a teacher who made us feel seen and valued and known. For me, it was my high school volleyball coach, Jim, who not only coached my inexperienced team to state championships but also saw and brought out potential in me as a person. Jim exemplified the best mixture in a teacher: devotion to excellence in learning something together, in our case volleyball, but in perhaps a more enduring way, helping grow the person who was doing that learning—me.

In this special issue, we consider ways that schools might reimagine so many of the familiar, persistent grammars of schooling. One part of the educational experience that I argue carries its own grammar is the relationship between students and teachers—which I refer to as relational grammar. Although nobody disputes the importance of relationships to a child’s educational outcomes, there is some ambiguity in how scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders have defined the nature or purpose of those relationships. This qualitative case study begins to articulate a new relational grammar. I analyze 154 relationships between three teachers and their students in a school (“Lincoln”) where teachers are formally encouraged and supported to expand their idea of a teacher’s relational role.

First, I show how the existing relational grammar rests on an expectation that teachers and students connect for the primary purpose of academic learning since, for a number of reasons traced in the article, learning academic content has been established as the professional domain of teaching. As I demonstrate in the article, although caring, emotional support, empathy, a whole-child emphasis, and more are welcome in student-teacher encounters, the established relational grammar seems to put learning in a focal position. Relationships based on care but without learning do not seem to count.

I chose Lincoln, a public middle college serving high school-age students at a community college in the Midwest, as the site of this study because it operates under a revised relational grammar. Teachers formally serve two roles: academic teacher in a typical sense but also general advisor to a small cohort of students for all four years of their time at Lincoln. Teachers’ days are spent both in classrooms focused on academic learning with classes of students but also in offices coaching students in one-on-one meetings about their needs, their plans, their worries, their lives. The school leader is a former counselor, and the emphasis in professional development and faculty meetings is on holistic support. In one-on-one meetings with students who happen to be both their advisee and their academic student, the dual role of a Lincoln teacher is particularly clear when they frequently say things like, “As your teacher, I have a plan to help you study and improve on this assignment for next time,” and immediately after that, “Can I speak as your advisor now? As your advisor, I am so happy you asked your teacher for help on this!” The flexibility to work on, for instance, study skills with the student and then to work on the student with the student is key.

In the first part of my analysis, I examined what teachers knew about their students, speculating that if the Lincoln teachers really did operate under an expanded relational grammar, their knowledge of their students’ lives would reflect that. I found that, indeed, Lincoln teachers’ knowledge of students encompassed an array of topics about their students, of which academic learning was only one piece. I analyzed data from four interviews with me and two full-day faculty meetings where Lincoln teachers discussed all of their students together each semester (i.e., their progress, needs, challenges, successes)—which consisted of 154 instances of the three focal teachers discussing specific students. I found that current academic learning was discussed in half of these cases, meaning that the other half of the time that teachers were discussing students either with me or with their colleagues, they were focused on something about that student other than their current learning. Those topics included (in order of frequency): home lives, “soft skills” (part of a school-wide advising curriculum), personality, friendships/relationships, health, past school attended, interests, culture, future goals, special needs, and behavior (the latter two were very rare).

The next part of my analysis involved tactile interview activities with the three teachers to see how they thought about their students, speculating that their instinctive stream-of-consciousness musings about students would reveal something about their relational grammar. I gave each teacher about ten small slips of paper, each with one of their students’ names on it, and asked them to just group them however it made sense to them, offering no other guidance. I found that the teachers initially thought about the students as social beings (i.e., they grouped them in terms of who they were friends with, who they would enjoy being with, or how connected they, themselves, felt to each student) and after that in terms of academic abilities or needs.

After that, I asked teachers to write a list of everything they like to know about their students, in general—the lists are provided in the article. I then asked them to place the slips of paper with students’ names (from the previous activity) next to the piece of information most crucial to know for that student. These results were illuminating in that for students they saw as doing well overall, they wanted to know things like their interests and future goals. Yet for students who appeared to be struggling, teachers wanted to know mostly about their home lives and health. In this way, as I explain in the article, it seemed that solid students had access to a teacher with an expanded relational grammar—an academic coach, a helper towards the future, a caring adult now, a person with shared interests—while other students’ needs were so pressing that teachers made the practical decision to support their health and well-being, not spending as much time connecting with these students as an academic coach.

The last part of my analysis asked teachers directly about their priorities in their relationships with their students. Consistent with my observations of their flexibility in meeting students’ needs—academic or otherwise—the teachers each felt emotional, caring connections were primary. One teacher’s summary says it all: “I’m trying to help these people walk through the fire of adolescence and make it, and hopefully learn some cool things along the way.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding was that, when asked what relationship in life they would say is most analogous to that of teacher and student, none of the teachers was able to think of a clear example. I remember thinking they were almost confused by the question. The teachers’ inability to call their relationships with students anything other than teacher-student suggests that, as unconventional as their relational grammar is and as personal or non-academic as the relationships can be, teaching by definition encompasses all of it.

Taken altogether, this study suggests that the conventional relational grammar that defines student-teacher relationships as primarily existing for the purpose of academic learning is extremely limiting and potentially harmful to students who need more or different types of supports from their teachers. Lincoln teachers were given permission and support by their leadership to expand their relational grammar, which led to them knowing students along many dimensions and using that knowledge to either meet their diverse needs or connect them to further supports.

Undoubtedly, many teachers operate with a Lincoln-style relational grammar already, even without the permission or support to do so; perhaps these are the teachers we remember the most. This study suggests that, as a field of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and others, we must update our relational grammar so that all students have access to a teacher who can reach them in whatever ways they need to be reached.