Starting day one and on every day of school thereafter, you have two primary goals.  First, to make it crystal clear to students that you love having each one of them in your classroom and care about their individual learning and development.  Second, make it similarly clear that the academic content in your class is the most interesting, fascinating, and important stuff students could possibly be learning.  

I’m a firm believer in City et. al.’s conceptual theory of the Instructional Core.  The Instructional Core basically asserts that the student, teacher, and academic content comprise the basic variables that set the limits and possibilities to the quality and quantity of learning that can happen in a classroom.  Raise the level of teacher skill, student engagement, or curriculum quality, and you raise the possibilites for cognitive demand and critical thinking.  As classroom teachers soon learn, however, the three independent actors of students, teachers, and content really only exist in relationship to one another.  In other words, the possibilities for learning are completely mediated by the relationships in the classroom setting between students, teachers, and the content they are engaging together.  Relationships are not just a nice idea.  They are at the core of our practice as professional educators.  

So, with that little theoretical detour, it should be clear that taking time to build strong relationships with your students is at the heart of your work, as is initating students into a fascination and love for the stuff you are trying to teach about.  You should never, ever, ever, take those relationships for granted.  If you lean hard on the fact that students don’t have a choice but be in your classroom (either due to compusive education laws or graduation requirements), then you are undermining your ability to leverage two of the three essential relationships of the instructional core: student/teacher relationships and student/content relationships.  You might be okay in the third realm of the core, and sustain a healthy appreciation for the content you teach, but in my view that is the least important variable of the core.  We assume teachers know something about the subjects they teach.  

We simply know too much about how young people learn to continue with the belief that relationship building is extraneous or a waste of time.  Similarly, professional educators have to embrace the pedagogical work of integrating relationship-building instructional practices into their classrooms.  This is true even and especially for those classroom teachers who expect that students enter the classroom pre-wired with the social emotional skills necessary to decode the expectations of the teacher and willingly embrace the educational complex as a mechanism for furthering their personal interests.   Students come to school with a wide range of attitudes and expectations based on developmental differences and past experiences.  All of them have a right to learn in our classroom.  Part of being a reflective educator – a term the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards plasters all over it’s certification process – is being reflective enough to acknowledge our duty to proactively foster quality relationships with every student. 

That’s why all of those activities you do at the beginning of the year to get to know students and build relationships are not just a great way to start the school year, but can and should be extended throughout the year.  Of course at the beginning of the year, it is easy to be enthusiastic about instructional practices that strengthen relationships.  The novelty of the new school year can be a powerful ally to take advantage of the natural opportunity to connect with your students, and connect them to the content.  But then, throughout the year, find ways to loop back to those beginning of the year relationship-building practices.