Trusting What You Know

Download or read book Trusting What You Know written by Miriam Raider-Roth and published by Jossey-Bass. This book was released on 2005-03-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trusting What You Know School culture shapes and is shaped by the quality of relationships contained within its walls. But how do relationships among students and teachers affect student learning? Trusting What You Know shows that building genuine trustworthy relationships between teachers and students is pivotal in students' capacity to learn. Based on an extended research study by Miriam Raider-Roth—an educational researcher and former elementary school teacher—Trusting What You Know reveals what students think about their relationships in the classroom and how these relationships shape their ability to learn. The book includes guiding principles for teachers, researchers, educators, and parents who want to understand the ways that human relationships at school fundamentally influence what children learn, know, and trust. Trusting What You Know introduces us to a small group of sixth-grade students who reveal the complexity and power inherent in the relationships of school. While they talk about many school relationships, they focus mainly on their relationships with their teachers. In these conversations, they describe their keen capacity to see and name both their internal and psychological processes as well as the interpersonal complexities they experience in school. The book highlights four students—José, Maya, Sharon, Gabe—and their candid interviews reveal the issues central to building trustworthy relationships in school: connection, mutuality, confidence, and meaning-making. The students recount how they construct confidence in themselves, one another, and their teachers in order to support their process of knowing and explain how their everyday classroom interactions can support confidence and instill trust. The students also describe the forces and circumstances that can lead them to disconnect when they feel trust in themselves and others is at risk. This vital resource shows how important it is to pay attention to relationships in school because relationships form the very foundation of learning.