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RELATIONSHIPS
By Lon Woodbury
lon@woodbury.com
Success in every human activity eventually
seems to boil down to relationships. In any business organization,
the person who gets ahead is usually the one who builds positive
and constructive relationships with their colleagues and clients.
Successful parenting, marriages and functional
families occur because at least some of the people in them
are successful in building positive relationships. Children
lucky enough to have a positive adult mentor relationship
while living in very dysfunctional situations, often surprise
people by maturing in ways that overcome their background.
In education, students often respond best to a teacher they
trust and who inspires them, in other words, a teacher who
develops good relationships with their students. Mental health
research continues to conclude that a good relationship between
a therapist and client is a more important factor leading
to healing than any other aspect of theory, technique or credential.
Unfortunately, the only body of literature that
emphasizes the importance of relationships for success is
in the personal development or self-improvement field. A common
theme is the concept that in order to be successful, you first
have to be able to get along with people. The assertion is
that if you cannot do that very well, then even if you accumulate
a lot of money, it is unlikely you will ever make a lasting
contribution in any field. In every other field, good relationships
tend to be overlooked, assumed, minimized or taken for granted.
For example, in the medical profession, as
medical technology improved over the 20th century, medical
doctors began to see themselves as "scientists."
They began to distain the concept of "bedside manner,"
which is basically developing human relationships with their
patients. Everything except scientific fact was gradually
dismissed as of little value. Fortunately, the medical profession
is rethinking that and starting to accept that how the Doctor
relates to patients is vital to healing even though it might
be "unscientific."
Another example is the mental health field,
which evolved its foundational concepts from the scientific
basis of the medical field. Mental health literature is full
of discussions regarding the advantages of one theoretical
approach over another, or the variety of treatments for specific
diagnoses, or developing accurate diagnoses, or specific techniques,
or the advantages of specific training resulting in accepted
credentials etc. It is only lately that an alternative view
started to emerge in the literature. A view that is based
on research showing how healing is more successful when the
therapist builds a good relationship with their patients,
regardless of therapeutic orientation.
The literature in the field of education is
similar. The usual focus is on topics such as the advantages
of various curriculums, or how to develop tests that more
accurately measure progress. This is so the teacher can work
on areas of weakness, or the advantages of various classroom
and school facilities, and of course the importance of teachers
having proper credentials. In mainstream education, the importance
of relationships are simply assumed, or taken for granted,
while alternative educators have always been aware of the
importance of teacher-student relations, and several private
schools have practiced this for years.
Even though the importance of developing relationships
was not emphasized in either mental health or education training,
good professionals in those fields always intuitively understood
their success was dependent on the importance of working to
develop good relationships. When you find a good teacher,
you have someone with the ability to develop good relationships
with their students, at least one that commands respect and
inspiration. The same is true in the mental health field.
When you find a good therapist, you have a professional that
puts developing good relationships with their clients of prime
importance.
If top quality professionals in the fields of
mental health and education intuitively understand the importance
of developing good working relationships with their students
or clients, and that their career success depends on developing
those good relationships, then why don't their professional
publications, associations and training put relationship building
as a top priority? In my opinion, it's a function of convenience,
administrative control and measurement.
Trying to understand the specifics of relationship
building is very vague and nebulous. Predicting how two people
will relate is very difficult. It is an art much more than
a science. There are too many variables that could be important.
We all know couples with long-term happy marriages that everybody
predicted would never last. At the same time, we all know
couples who seemed perfectly matched, yet whose relationship
never got off the ground. The same goes for teacher-student
relationships, and therapist-client relationships. The only
predictor of value would be experience, and the track record
of the teacher or therapist. And, even using a person's track
record would still be tricky. For example, a teacher who is
very successful in inspiring the students in a suburban school
might be a miserable failure teaching in an inner city school,
and vice versa. Decision making by administrators based on
ability to develop relationships would be hard work, and not
very convenient, especially in this era of mass education
with single schools numbering in the thousands.
However, if you can convert all the variables
to numbers, or to specific measurable factors like credentials,
and just assume positive relationships without paying much
attention to them, then administrative decision-making for
any one situation is a snap. If a student is suicidal, then
just assign a therapist trained in that. Easy! Nothing to
it! If a student has a learning difference, no problem! Give
them to a teacher trained in special education. If you want
to find out how much a student has learned, calculate how
many days he or she has spent in the classroom, probably measured
by how many credits he or she has earned where attendance
is a major factor. Or, to double check that, provide some
easily administered and scored tests that an authoritative
source assures you will accurately measure the amount of learning
the student has done.
To hire staff, you screen out all those without
the best credentials, have a brief interview and order a background
check, and if they seem pleasant enough, hire them. To succeed
in this approach, all an administrator needs to do is manipulate
numbers, check if the credentials are properly earned, and
keep the paper trail moving. This approach is rather more
convenient than focusing on the quality of relationships an
applicant might be able to develop.
An alternative approach is to base a school
on the ability of staff to develop good relationships. Administration
of this model is harder work, and more time consuming. But
if done right, and with intuitive insight (an art more than
science), the school will be much more effective since the
focus will be on building relationships that inspire. Many
of the best emotional growth/ therapeutic boarding schools
hire staff and enroll students this way. In these schools,
staff interviews are multi-day events, giving a chance for
the administration to watch how the applicant and students
interact. Some enroll students the same way, giving administrators
the chance to see how the student behaves in the school environment,
and the chance to watch for any tendencies that the school
is not prepared to work with. Paper credentials can be as
important or unimportant as the administration wants them
to be in the application process, but the focus remains on
how effective the applicant is in developing relationships
with the students.
Unfortunately, in this era of mass public education
and mass services, dictated to by distant legislators, and
emphasizing the economies of scale, it is very difficult,
if not impossible, to develop a relationship-based school
culture. The importance of fostering school relationships
is one of the main reasons the best emotional growth/ therapeutic
schools and programs are small, usually with fewer than 200
students. The de-emphasizing of the importance of relationship
building in favor of mass administration is also a major reason
public education, as it is now constituted, will continue
to struggle with bullying, alienated students and high drop-out
rates. Those problems will decrease only when schools learn
how to build school communities that foster relationships.
Copyright ©
2005, Woodbury Reports, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
(This article may not be reproduced without written approval
of the publisher.)
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