Teacher: Does your mother let you bite?
Children: No.
Teacher: Does your father let you punch kids?
Children: No.
Teacher: Do you kick at home?
Children: No.
Teacher: You dont respect anyone, not the teachers who play with you or the adults that work upstairs. You need to respect adults, even people you see on the streets. You are taking good ways you learn at home and not bringing them to school. You are taking the bad ways you are learning at school and taking them home. You are not going to do this anymore. Do you want your parents to be ashamed of you?
Increasingly, showing care has become a major theme running throughout todays discussions of teacher-student relationships, which means that even as the emphasis has been on being research minded, there is at least a tacit recognition that good behavior and classroom management rests ultimately on something that is difficult to measure; namely, showing care. Showing care is difficult to measure for two main reasons. First, showing care refers not to a set of methods or behaviors but to an attitude and style of the teacher and an experience of the student. Second, showing care comes in many forms, and some of these forms may, at first, appear to be the opposite of showing care, as in the previous example of teachers showing care by being tough and demanding.
Throughout this chapter, and in subsequent chapters as well, we show how care is at the core of developing positive teacher-student relationships that matter deeply, not simply for the short term, but for the long term as well. To illustrate what we mean, here is one mans account of a caring incident that happened over 40 years ago, when he was in eighth grade:
It had been a rough grading period, especially in math, and a rough time at home. Then at recess one day, a teacher came up to me and said, Bill, I hear youre having a hard time in math. Im really sorryand then he walked away. I remember his saying this to me like it was yesterday because, I suppose, it meant a lot to me then, as it means a lot to me now.
Showing care, then, can have a powerful, positive, and lasting effect, as this example clearly shows.
Showing care can also be expressed by communicating positively. Communicating positively can mean something simple, such as making sure that when communicating with students, positive statements outnumber negative statements. The research shows that this matters (Becker, Engelmann, & Thomas, 1975). However, communicating positively has different meanings and different effects, including the effects of feeling known, understood, accepted, and supported.