Good Student-Teacher Relationships Spiked During COVID.

How to get them back

By Hunter Gehlbach & Li Li

Given people’s forced isolation during COVID, the middle of the pandemic seems like the last place to find positive lessons about improving relationships. Yet, new data illuminates a social bright spot from the nation’s schools. The data, from Panorama Education — a company that helps school districts understand the perspectives and experiences of their students, families and teachers — found that students in grades 3 to 12 felt unusually positively toward their teachers in 2020, a year when nearly all indicators of student success were in freefall.

These findings, taken from a sample of almost 1.9 million students, parallel a Panorama analysis that tracked students over recent years. Given the tremendous stress and constrained interpersonal interactions that teachers faced in 2020, the pandemic bump shown below seems remarkable (particularly for middle and high school students). Just as noteworthy: When the pandemic receded, the improved relationships disappeared as quickly as they had emerged.

What might have caused these improved relationships? Why didn’t they last? And how might educators reproduce and sustain them in the future?