TEACHER-STUDENT BOUNDARIES 

Schools are committed to providing learning environments that are trauma informed, developmentally appropriate, and culturally responsive. These interrelated commitments are profound for creating supportive conditions for students, and they are not easy to enact. School policies, practices, curricula, and facility layout and decor all play a role in building and maintaining such environments, but a great deal of the work lies in the relationships between students and educators. Drawing on a mixture of scholarly publications and advice from practitioners, this set of resources is intended to help spark collegial conversations and individual reflection around how to nurture strong, supportive, well-bounded relationships with students.  

Most educators understand that a key factor in supporting student achievement is the quality of relationships that exist between students and teachers, but very few of us receive adequate (or any) formal training or instruction about how to conduct those relationships. In the absence of such preparation, we are left largely to our own best judgments or the prevailing culture of our contexts. The way we treat our students may be shaped by our observation of colleagues, by our memories of how we ourselves were treated in school, by our ideological, religious, and cultural backgrounds, and by the experiences we accumulate over time as we grow in our teaching practice.


For many, caring relationships with our students are the very essence of the joy of teaching, and our ability to form and nurture these relationships remains one of the few areas of the profession left relatively untouched by the encroachment of standardization, state and federal mandates, and ever-shifting curricular initiatives. Our ability to connect with our students on a human level is not something that can or should be legislated or systematized. 


At the same time, many teachers recognize the challenge of working successfully with students who have an array of needs. Within schools, a growing recognition of the imperative to provide trauma sensitive, developmentally appropriate, culturally-responsive environments can be complicated by an increasingly fraught social and political landscape to which schools are not immune. Many educators yearn for useful guidance about how to form and maintain caring, safe, and well-bounded relationships with students, especially in the secondary (7-12) grades. 

TEACHER-STUDENT BOUNDARIES & RELATIONAL PRACTICES: 

 A Trauma Informed, Developmentally Appropriate, 

 Culturally Responsive Guide For Secondary Educators     


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This starter kit can help get you started, but it is best used with support from experienced facilitators and researchers. Reach out to us if you would like to explore this option.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jonathan Brody, LICSW

Jonathan Brody is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker with almost twenty years of experience specializing in the treatment of adolescents and adults struggling with stress, anxiety, trauma, depression and bipolar, autism-spectrum experiences, psychosis and substance use. He uses strengths and evidenced--based approaches grounded in psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, narrative and motivational models in his work. 

Mark Jackson, MEd  

For more than 25 years, Mark Jackson has led schools with a professional commitment to ensure that schools fulfill their historic mission of improving the life chances of all students. As an experienced high school and middle school administrator, his primary interests are in supporting capacity building among administrators and school-based teams to effect significant school improvement. With CES, Mark serves as a coach and mentor for both individual leaders and leadership teams. 

Rebecca Mazur, PhD (Lead author)

Rebecca Mazur is an educational researcher and evaluator, and a former high school librarian. She has designed and conducted studies investigating a variety of educational phenomena including system factors that support or constrain student learning outcomes, teacher support networks, instructional interventions for adolescent learners, and organizational collaboration. Her scholarship has been published in a number of respected peer-reviewed journals including Educational Administration Quarterly, Evaluation and Program Planning, and Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

A NOTE FROM THE LEAD AUTHOR

Compiling this document was an exercise in humility. As I read the literature that this resource draws on, feelings of self-judgment and even shame came up as I thought back to my own past behavior. As a teacher, I certainly had a number of “well-meaning minor transgressions” (see the quote on page 8) and remember having regular feelings of uncertainty about whether or not I was doing the “right” thing. In many ways, this document represents the kind of information I wish I had known as a new educator. Mark, Jonathan and I offer this work in the hope that it will be supportive of educators’ ongoing professional growth, their capacity to talk honestly with each other about their practice, and their ability to have joyful, trusting, safe relationships with students. — Rebecca Mazur, August 2024

AI USE STATEMENT

AI was not used in any part of creating this resource.

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Teacher-Student Boundaries & Relational Practices: A Guide for Secondary Educators by Collaborative for Educational Services is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.


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