As we enter Spring Break season, surely plenty of educators are starting to reflect back on the first part of the semester and the year as a whole. What’s going well in your classroom? What could be improved? Are you managing your class and your classroom effectively? If you feel like your classroom management could use improvement, experts recommend starting by focusing on building better relationships with your students. Education researchers Jana and Robert Marzano, for example, have found that when teachers build “high-quality relationships” with the members of their classroom, those students experience over 30% fewer disciplinary issues, and studies have found that adolescents are less likely to turn to substance abuse or engage in violent behavior when they feel “cared for” in the classroom.

For decades and decades, the fundamental cultural structure of the classroom has remained fairly steady. Psychologist Carl Rogers described it as a place where “The teachers are the possessors of knowledge, the students the expected recipients; the teachers are the possessors of power, the students the ones who obey.” In essence, teachers are an authority to be listened to without question, and students are passive receptacles of knowledge and understanding. But how does that fit in with what we’re actually trying to teach our children in a free, democratic society? Sure, facts and figures are important, but part of the schooling process is building an understanding in our youth of how they’re expected to act and behave in the “real world” outside of the school building. Proud parents, informed citizens, and successful teachers are those that embrace problem solving and critical thinking skills, yet the way we structure our classrooms is often entirely the opposite–a culture of total obedience and narrow-minded compliance.