There’s a scene near the beginning of “Small Change” (also known as “Pocket Money”), François Truffaut’s charming movie about children of all ages, in which a teacher makes each of her students recite a passage from a Molière play—a test of both memory and dramatic skill. The teacher is especially tough on one boy who chants the lines in a leaden monotone: She stands next to his desk and threatens to keep making him do it until his performance is to her liking. Abruptly, though, she is called away, and the moment she’s gone, the boy comes to life. He stands up and wanders around the room while delivering the monologue with remarkable passion and spontaneity, revealing to his peers his considerable talents as an actor.
Truffaut is pointedly reminding us that there’s much we don’t know about our kids and what they’re capable of doing. It’s a troubling observation that should prompt us to reflect on why this is so.
People of any age are more likely to open up to those with whom they feel safe, those who care about them and want to know them. Education researchers have consistently found that supportive relationships with teachers are crucial to promoting students’ emotional, social, and academic growth. A 2025 study, for example, found that across multiple populations of kindergartners, a close connection to a teacher in a given year continued to be beneficial several years later.
Years of research backed by classroom experience suggest that the kind of connection that helps kids to flourish is one in which the adult is warm and trusting, who does more (empathic) listening than talking, communicates unconditional acceptance, gives the student opportunities to make decisions, tries to see things from their point of view, and looks upon troubling behavior more as an opportunity for problem-solving than for exerting control.
Much of the research on this topic has looked at younger children, but middle and high school reformers have realized that the quality of education for adolescents, too, can hinge on their relationships with adults. That’s why a common feature of reform efforts is to set up advisory groups in which a teacher meets regularly with a small number of students not only to help with practical problems but to create a safe space and caring connections.
The more traditional the setup of the school, the more vital it is to contrive arrangements like advisories in order to overcome structural barriers to knowing kids well. It’s not easy to connect with them when classes are large, let alone when you see them for less than an hour a day. (The move toward departmentalizing instruction in middle school and even in upper-elementary grades similarly contributes to the weakening of relationships.)
There's much we don't know about our kids and what they are capable of doing.
But sometimes, traditional attitudes, too, interfere with relationships, the result being that students hesitate to share themselves with us. That was a lesson I learned many years ago when I was teaching high school. I gave a ride one day to a 15-year-old student of mine who had no apparent interest in anything that I—or, from what I could gather, any of my colleagues—was teaching.
Awkward and taciturn as usual that afternoon, she spoke only to ask if I would turn on the car radio, at which point she proceeded to sing along with every song that came on for the duration of the ride, displaying not only more enthusiasm than I had thought possible but also an astonishing gift for recall.
Thinking back on this incident, I’m struck not only by what she did but by how I reacted. In relating the event to my colleagues the following day, I shook my head and smiled condescendingly at how this kid, a washout in the classroom, had evidently taken the time to learn pop lyrics to perfection. I mean, talk about misplaced priorities!
Only much later did it dawn on me that this student had something to teach me—about why her talent surprised me and also about motivation and its relationship to achievement. If I (and her other teachers) had never seen her steel-trap memory in action or witnessed the look of total absorption I glimpsed in the car, that was undoubtedly because we hadn’t taken enough time or shown enough interest so that she felt sufficiently safe to reveal who she was and what mattered to her.
And why wasn’t she engaged in the classroom? Well, people tend to become more enthusiastic and proficient when they have some say about what they’re doing. How much choice had she been given about her schooling—not only the broad curriculum but the daily details of classroom life? Indeed, in that stage of my career, I was still relying on grades to induce students to do what I hadn’t been able to help them find meaningful in its own right.
This student had chosen to learn those songs; no one promised her an A for doing so or threatened her with an F for messing up. Her impressive achievement didn’t require carrots and sticks. In fact, it probably required their absence.
It was particularly disconcerting for me to realize that when the priorities of adults and kids diverge, we simply assume that ours ought to displace theirs. Stop wasting your time learning song lyrics when you could be doing important stuff—namely, whatever is in our lesson plans: solving for x or using apostrophes correctly or memorizing details about the Crimean War. We tell more than we ask; we direct more than we listen; we use our power to pressure or even punish students whose interests don’t align with ours.
That, in short, is a lesson in how not to create supportive relationships. The results can include not only a diminution of both self-confidence and interest in learning on the part of students but also an understandable choice to keep the important parts of themselves hidden from us. That’s a shame in its own right, and it also prevents us from being the best teachers to them that we can be.
