Effective Teaching Is...Affective Teaching

In 1994, English professor Jeffrey Berman published Diaries to an English Professor, a study of fifteen years' worth of the ungraded, introspective journals his students had kept in his literature courses at the University at Albany. Buried in that book is a line that has inspired this post: effective teaching is... affective teaching.

It's a small play on words with a large claim. Berman wasn't arguing that content doesn't matter, or that rigor is optional. He was arguing something more specific: that the intellectual transformation we want for our students – the kind that actually sticks – depends on an emotional and relational foundation first. He'd go on to build an entire pedagogy around this idea, which he later called "empathic teaching": the belief that students take intellectual risks, sit with difficult material, and do their most honest thinking only when they trust that the person guiding them will respond with understanding rather than judgment.

Thirty years later, I don't think that claim has aged out. In fact, I think it's the most important thing I have learned about teaching in my over 20 years of experience doing so.

There's a persistent idea in education that relationship-building is the nice part of teaching, the part you do before or around the real work of instruction. The lucky outcome. I've come to think that it is the necessary input.

Every experienced teacher has watched the same student produce wildly different work depending on who is asking for it. The essay that comes back flat and dutiful for one teacher arrives, a semester later, genuinely inspired for another. That's not a coincidence, and I don’t think we can attribute it wholly to teaching style. Like Berman, I’d say it's about whether the student believes the adult in front of them understands them, respects them, and believes in them.

True, Berman was writing from inside literature classrooms, working with journals and diaries, not running randomized trials. But the empirical research has been quietly catching up. Robert Pianta, from my alma mater, UVA, found in his long-running work on teacher-student relationships that the quality of that relationship in the earliest grades predicts academic and behavioral trajectories years later – sometimes more powerfully than measures of instructional quality alone. John Hattie, in his work Visible Learning, ranks teacher-student relationships among the higher-leverage factors influencing achievement, well above many of the things schools spend the most money and attention on. And psychologist David Yeager's more recent research on adolescent motivation, summarized in his "mentor mindset" framework, found that teenagers respond best not to teachers who are simply warm, and not to teachers who are simply demanding, but to the narrow combination of both: high standards paired with high support. Yeager's research suggests this isn't a nice bonus – it's the specific stance that makes adolescents willing to be held to a high bar at all, because they've decided the person doing the holding is trustworthy.

I've built a redo policy into my own classroom that I think of as a direct, practical expression of this idea, even though I didn't set out to make it a statement about relationships. The premise is simple: a single test or essay score shouldn't be the final word on what a student actually knows. A bad grade might reflect a bad week, an idea that hadn't clicked yet, or a first attempt that just needed another pass, not a ceiling on ability.

But a redo policy only works, pedagogically, if it isn't just a second chance to guess better. Mine requires genuine reflection and a real conversation with me about what went wrong and why, which means it only functions at all if the student trusts that the conversation is a collaboration, not an interrogation. Strip out the relationship and the exact same policy becomes something else entirely: a loophole to be gamed, or a hoop to resent or, even worse, avoided. For a student to take me up on the opportunity to improve their writing, it matters that the student believes I'm actually in their corner.

I see the same principle at work in how I build a reading list. Twenty years of teaching across very different cultural contexts taught me that students engage with difficult, canonical, sometimes uncomfortable material not because the text is important in the abstract, but because they trust that I chose it for a reason that includes them: so they might see themselves, or someone they know, somewhere in it. The literary-analysis skills are the same wherever you teach them. I suggest that what determines whether a student leans in or performs compliance is almost never the rigor of the assignment. It's the foundational relationship underneath it.

If I had to name the single strongest predictor of whether a student will do their best thinking in my classroom, it would not be their prior grades, nor even their stated interest in the subject. It would be whether they believe I believe in them, and whether they believe I'll hold them to something worth reaching for because I actually want them to get there.

While this seems like a soft metric, it's the mechanism that makes the hard stuff possible. Berman named it thirty years ago with a pun good enough to survive three decades of education research trying, in its own more clinical language, to say the same thing: you cannot reliably teach a mind you have not first reached. I am sure there is a pithy catchphrase in there somewhere...