Positive Relationships Help Kids Learn Better

As more and more people decide to home school their children we have had the opportunity of comparing home schooled students with those taught in our public schools. Where many thought home schooled students would do less well on national college admissions tests the results so far are just the opposite. Home schooled children, as a group, actually score higher. There might be many explanations for this including the idea that public schools have to take all students and their results are affected by the fact that many unmotivated students attend.

In my opinion this conclusion overlooks something. Because we traditionally think that academic learning is mostly a function of mental abilities, it does not occur to many of us that the reason home schooled children often do better is because of the high quality relationships which exist in the home school. To dramatize this idea I could also add that typically the best teachers in public or private schools are those that are qualified in their subject area, but in addition, are very competent interpersonally.

I find that to be very interesting. If the activity of learning is purely individual and depends exclusively on one’s mental abilities then we could assume that social abilities or relationships with others is less important in learning environments. Yet high quality relationships between teacher and learner and among learners appear connected to the speed and depth of learning. The most obvious conclusion for this is that good relationships are motivational and bad relationships are not. While that may be true it is not a complete picture.

Let’s suppose the activity of learning is connected to many other parts of the human brain and personality. When the right type of sociality exists brains function better. When the positive emotions of good relationships are present then interest is more likely to be sustained and persistence to complete tasks is also greater. When firmness is connected to respect more information can be processed. When relationships between people are positive there is less anxiety, more security, and greater willingness to risk failure in order to learn something new.

If all the forgoing is true, and I believe it to be, then preparing children to learn well requires more than good mental abilities. Teaching children to respect, admire, love, befriend, cooperate, encourage, compliment, belong, and help others belong may be essential elements of remarkable learning, at least for young children. The question we should consider is whether teacher-student relationships are receiving enough attention in our efforts to improve education.

What does this mean? For one thing any effort to improve education, and improve learning, should include searching for socially competent teachers. Further, it should include helping children, who are young and growing, acquire high quality social and other emotional skills which permit them to develop high quality relationships with people. Failing this, I believe, we are missing an essential element in our search for methods to improve educational opportunities for our children.

David Johnson, from the University of Minnesota, conducted research comparing cooperative and competitive educational approaches. He wrote that in most cases cooperative approaches were more effective than competition. This is interesting since most classroom environments employ competition as a motivational strategy.

Does this mean that competition is bad? No. It is further evidence that children derive some motivational or mental enhancement when certain types of relationships exist. This is because “relationships” form the context for learning. For those who wish their children to learn well, we have a couple of choices. We can teach subject matter or mental abilities alone or mental abilities and subject matter connected to positive relationship skills. Teaching positive social skills may be the means of enhancing mental abilities and improving learning.