Student‐teacher relationships are associated with the social and emotional climate of a school, a key domain of the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Model. Few interventions target student‐teacher relationships during the critical transition to high school, or incorporate strategies for enhancing equitable relationships. We conducted a mixed‐methods feasibility study of a student‐teacher relationship intervention, called Equity‐Explicit Establish‐Maintain‐Restore (E‐EMR).
We tested whether students (N = 133) whose teachers received E‐EMR training demonstrated improved relationship quality, school belonging, motivation, behavior, and academic outcomes from pre‐ to post‐test, and whether these differences were moderated by race. We also examined how teachers (N = 16) integrated a focus on equity into their implementation of the intervention.
Relative to white students, students of the color showed greater improvement on belongingness, behavior, motivation, and GPA. Teachers described how they incorporated a focus on race/ethnicity, culture, and bias into E‐EMR practices, and situated their relationships with students within the contexts of their own identity, the classroom/school context, and broader systems of power and privilege.