T&L Blog W1- Bitesize Research: Building connections at the start of the year

By Jaya Carrier

Dear WA,

Welcome back everyone! For anyone new to the WA community, Bitesize Research is a weekly WA blog article which looks to take some emerging education research and summarise the findings in an easy and digestible way. So, to get us started, I was interested to see an Edutopia article about research-backed methods that support building connections with students at the start of a school year.

Objectives: To consider evidence-informed strategies for building connections with students at the start of a school year.

Summary: 

• The article suggests 6 tips to support building connections with students at the start of the year:

• 1) Begin with a clean slate - allow students to start afresh, particularly if in previous years they may have demonstrated challenging behaviours. 

• 2) Tackle start of the year nerves directly - sharing common fears that students might face at the beginning of the school year, and how students before them have tackled these, can support students to put their fears into perspective. Allowing students to undertake some oral or written reflection using questions such as ‘What plans do you have for making friends?’ or ‘How do you plan to handle a busy timetable?’ might be helpful for this.

• 3) Check your classroom environment and resources - ensuring that displays or resources are as diverse and inclusive as possible can help students feel a sense of belonging.

• 4) Spend active time building relationships - there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that students will go the extra mile academically if they have an excellent relationship with their teacher. As such, considering how to actively build relationships at the start of the academic year is likely to be helpful in the long term for student progress.

• 5) Create Partnership Agreements - these are co-constructed, coaching-style agreements of how to ‘be’ together, and ensure that you can hold everyone accountable as the year progresses. At WA, we create these with all tutor groups - consider making one with your classes too.

• 6) Remain calm - using trauma-informed approaches to remain calm is likely to be the best strategy when students may try to test the waters. It can be helpful to actively prepare for times like this and consider different challenging scenarios and how you would respond to these.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• What is important to me about working with students at the start of an academic year?

• What strategies might I try to support forging good relationships in academic year 2023-24?

• Which strategies appear to be clear to me? Which might I need more support to implement?

• When I create the Partnership Agreement with my tutor group, what do I want in there and how will we hold each other accountable to the agreement?