learning and working in a world full of people with whom relationships can be life-changing. In other words, relationships should come first in the classroom, the staff room, and the board room. The goal should be to prepare our students for making lasting connections throughout their lives.
Maslow Before Bloom
"You can't take care of the Bloom stuff until you take care of the Maslow stuff!" says Alan Beck (1994), founder of Advantage Academy. Beck was born into poverty, but with the help of various teachers along the way, he became a successful student, attained a PhD, and pursued a successful career in education that eventually led to opening the academy. He pledged to teach students in a way that provides hope for the future.
Beck's comment about Bloom and Maslow refers to the work of Benjamin Bloom (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) and Abraham Maslow (1998). Most teachers have a basic knowledge of the work of Abraham Maslow, who created a hierarchy of human needs. They also are aware of the push to use Bloom's taxonomy, a hierarchy of learning objectives classified into levels of complexity. Bloom's work is usually presented only in the cognitive domain, leaving out the affective and sensory domains. However, getting our students up the scale of Bloom's taxonomy is impossible without first meeting their basic needs. Too often our traditional approach to education has focused on levels of cognitive learning, leading up to higher-order thinking and largely ignoring students' needs.
Today, many schools and organizations are focusing on Maslow's hierarchy. But in my most recent book on memory, How to Teach So Students Remember (Sprenger, 2018), I offer a comparison between Maslow's hierarchy and the hierarchy presented by Matthew Lieberman (2013), who believes that Maslow had it wrong. Maslow's hierarchy arranges basic needs this way: physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Lieberman, in contrast, believes that we should begin with belonging and love. He argues that it is relationships that provide us with our physiological needs and safety needs. Think of an infant who needs food or a diaper change or warmth. The infant obtains those things through crying to get the attention of a caregiver. Following Lieberman's view, I like to present the argument that our students hold their social needs above some of their physiological needs. (Think of the 7th grade girl who almost wets her pants rather than run to the restroom because teams are being chosen for volleyball.) Belonging comes first! (I describe Lieberman's research on social pain, a related concept, in Chapter 5.)
Getting back to the quote from Alan Beck, social-emotional learning gives students the opportunity to deal with stress and anxiety, so they will be able to focus on higher-level thinking. Maslow before Bloom!
Relationships in the Brain
When studying the brain, neuroscientists look at both structures and chemical reactions. The frontal lobe houses the structures where most brain activity occurs when people care about each other, trust each other, and want to be friends. The limbic system houses the amygdala, the seat of emotion. The limbic system is loaded with receptors for chemicals for two different hormonal systems: the stress-response system and the trust/love system (Cantor, 2019). (See Figure 1.1.) When we are stressed, cortisol is released, triggering the stress response. By contrast, when we care about and trust someone, oxytocin is released and we feel connected.
Figure 1.1. Relationships in the Brain
A true connection goes deeper than casual acquaintance. Rather, it involves someone who offers motivation, excitement, or even comfort. When we begin a relationship, the brain releases dopamine, noradrenaline, and, as just mentioned, oxytocin (Pearce, Wlodarski, Machin, & Dunbar, 2017). The limbic system is stimulated and the reticular activating system (the brain's first filter) in the brain stem is relaxed, which allows new information to enter the brain in a calm way and make its way up to the limbic system. Dopamine is the brain's "seeking" chemical (Davis & Montag, 2019); it keeps us working toward a goal and stimulates our brain's reward system. When we connect with others, we feel good about ourselves and the other person. Noradrenaline is an excitatory chemical. Oxytocin, as noted, is released when we feel an attachment. Once a relationship is established with someone, even thinking about that person can cause the release of oxytocin and dopamine.
Strategies for Building Teacher-Student Relationships
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, I created the word selebrate to stand for "social-emotional learning elicits brain responses appropriate to experience." Many researchers (including Nadine Burke Harris, Bruce Perry, Marc Hackett, Eric Jensen, and David Sousa) tell us that a single relationship with an adult can change the course of a student's life. Classroom teachers probably spend more time with students than any other adults. This is an opportunity to model appropriate social interactions, show students that we care for them, and support them in their endeavors. These may sound like parental responsibilities, but our children—our future citizens—are everyone's responsibility. We can positively affect our students' brains. Educational consultant and author Horatio Sanchez (2015) says, "For the brain to do anything, chemical movements have to occur. Health is the ability to manage all the different chemicals the brain produces within a normative range at all times." This ability creates a kind of homeostasis—a state of internal balance and stability among interdependent elements. The following strategies are intended to help teachers help their students reach this level of balance and stability.
Display Vulnerability
Researcher, author, and public speaker Brené Brown (2018) has addressed the need for displaying vulnerability in our lives and in our relationships. We need to model for students that we are willing to be vulnerable (which includes being honest and transparent) and create a safe space for them to do so, too. Displaying vulnerability ranges from admitting you are feeling tired and irritated after an all-nighter with a sick child to acknowledging that you grabbed the wrong assessment from your file and, as a result, students were asked some questions that had not been discussed in class. For students, it can range from attempting to answer a question when they are not sure they are correct to admitting they overreacted to a remark from another student. When our students show up, put forth effort, and fail, it's important to let them know that we all have those experiences and it's OK. We understand one another, and we keep going.
One of my favorite Brené Brown suggestions is to say, "This is the story I am telling myself right now …" and then explain how you are feeling about what is happening. For instance, "The story I am telling myself right now is that you are upset with me or someone in the class, and that is driving the behavior I am seeing. Is my story correct?" From this point, you can usually lead students to tell their story.
Greet Students at the Door
A recent study suggests that greeting and welcoming students each morning increased achievement by 20 percent and lowered disruptive behaviors by 9 percent (Cook, Fiat, & Larson, 2018). The study included the following suggestions for teachers:
Say the student's name.
Make eye contact.
Use a friendly nonverbal greeting, such as a handshake, high five, or thumbs-up.
Give a few words of encouragement.
Ask
