What Counts Episode 4: The web of relationships
[Transcript]
Danielle LeCourt
In a recent group call Adrian Baytops Paul, Assistant Director for Impact Florida's Solving With Students cadre, shared a story.
Claire Riddell
Adrian shared a story yesterday about one of our participants who created a set of norms around way kids would respond to each other, and when someone shares a solution or a strategy and they co created them, and then a kid shared an answer, and like, a couple kids laughed, and the teacher paused, and, like, recentered on the norm. Adrian and I were talking about, like, the power of her, not like reprimanding that kid in the moment, but recentering what the class agreed to. Adrian, what would you add to that story?
Adrienne Baytops Paul
The teacher didn't reprimand the student in front of everyone, and then, as a result of the way, she brought attention to the norms, the class as a community, said, oh, yeah, that's right, you're not supposed to do that. And the student kind of had a one of those, like a reflective moment at that time, and was like, yeah, it wasn't cool. And then the teacher was able to go on with the lesson, versus making it a big thing. She said she didn't even look at the students when she was referring to the norms, because she didn't want to call them out in that way. But the community did that as a result of them caring about each other and bringing to these norms.
Danielle LeCourt
I love that idea of it's almost like a collective correction, like a kind maybe collective correction.
Celena Crews
I really like that too, because reprimanding a student in the moment often it tears down your relationship, right? It's the exact opposite of what we're going for. That story is a fantastic example of how to do that in a positive way that you know that doesn't mess up the relationship piece.
Danielle LeCourt
Celena is right, those moments aren't small. They're what turn classroom management into classroom culture. When teachers create the conditions for students to care about one another, the tone shifts from control to community.
Claire Riddell
It starts with the teacher. It can be easy for teachers to say, well, that's a them problem. They don't know how to get along. And I can work on my relationships, but I can't affect theirs. And what we've seen is teachers are the moderators, the facilitators of those rooms, and they do have a lot of power about the way kids interact with each other and with them.
Danielle LeCourt
When relationships run deep, something shifts, and the classroom starts to hold itself. Moments of trust ripple outward until connection becomes shared responsibility, and what begins as a teacher's care becomes a culture of care, one that students carry together.
Danielle LeCourt
This is What Counts, a podcast presented by Impact Florida and produced by De LeCourt as part of the Math Narrative Project. I'm Danielle LeCourt. So far in What Counts, we've focused on the relationships between teachers and students--those one-on-one connections that help kids feel seen, supported, and capable in math. But classrooms don't exist in isolation. They're ecosystems. Every student carries a whole world into that room that includes their peers, their teachers, and the lives they live beyond the school grounds. And those dynamic relationships shape the culture just as much as anything a teacher says or does. So in this episode, we're widening the lens. Because when connection becomes collective, that's when culture changes. This is exactly what Celena Crews started noticing in her classroom.
Celena Crews
School is an incredibly social situation for kids, and you know, learning is a social situation as well. What I find is if you can change the social environment in the classroom, you will get some students talking that wouldn't otherwise, and you can find, you know, students will ask questions in that setting where they will not ask questions during lessons.
Danielle LeCourt
You've heard from Celena before. She's the North Florida math teacher who first reminded us that relationships aren't extra they're the foundation of learning. Over her years of teaching, she's learned that relationships don't just shape how students feel about math. They shape how they feel about themselves and each other.
Celena Crews
What really hit home for me was that first period class my Math for College Algebra kids who wanted nothing to do with math. I said, you know, there were some things I wanted to know more about, like, why are you not comfortable sharing your thoughts and opinions? And I learned that I had some students in that class who were incredibly anxious about looking a certain way in front of their classmates. They told me they were the kids who were getting. Anything is wrong. They were not comfortable opening up or answering a question because they didn't want to look dumb in front of their classmates. And that thing right there, I don't want to look dumb in front of my classmates was repeated over and over and over again.
Danielle LeCourt
That fear of being embarrassed in front of their classmates came up again and again, but when Selena brought it to her students, something shifted.
Celena Crews
So you know, I really grabbed on to that and talked about that in class. And I think for them, hearing that it wasn't just them, but most of their classmates felt the same way. You could almost see like a collective sigh in the group when we talked about that, and then so funny. Remember these two girls? They're like, they would remind each other of that, like, when I would ask a question, they'd be like, Okay, you answer this one. I'll answer the next one for her, right? Like they were actively working on she wants us to talk to her. She wants us to answer questions. She doesn't want us to feel dumb. She wants us to feel like you know, we can have these conversations and it's okay to be wrong.
Danielle LeCourt
And she's not the only one who found that allowing students to help shape their classroom made a difference. Here's Kary Workman, a middle school math teacher in Florida.
Kary Workman
The reasons that they didn't feel comfortable sharing is number one, a lot of them really didn't know each other, which was kind of mind boggling to me, because we live in a very small community, and my middle school only has two elementary schools that feed into it, so I just kind of assumed that they all knew each other because they'd been together at this point since kindergarten, most of them, but they really didn't. So they didn't want to talk because they didn't know people.
Danielle LeCourt
Even in small communities, connection can't be assumed. It has to be built for this teacher, realizing that simple truth changed the way she thought about participation.
Kary Workman
And so when we started talking about, like, how can we fix that, it really came back to they just wanted time to talk to each other, which I know kind of sounded like I was like, Oh, you guys are trying to snow me a little bit. But honestly, I gave it a try.
Danielle LeCourt
So she did. On Mondays, she began class with five minutes of open talk time. No math, no agenda, just conversation. As students grew more comfortable, she eased in short math discussions. Then made one more shift. She let students give input on their seating, who they worked well with and who they didn't. Small changes, but they worked. Students talked more, they took more risks, and they showed up differently. The thread running through all of these stories is the idea of connection by design to see what that looks like across a whole classroom culture. Let's turn again to Kayla Fulghum, the veteran algebra and geometry teacher we met in episode two.
Kayla Fulghum
We start the year just getting to know each other, so we don't even do math, probably for two, three weeks. And some math teachers are like, how do you do that? And it's like, you don't understand if they don't connect or find some way that they connect with a fellow classmate, how can you ask them to sit there and solve problems and learn for the rest of the year?
Danielle LeCourt
That's culture work. Before content, she builds the web. So when mistakes happen, students don't brace for judgment. They reach for each other.
Kayla Fulghum
Math is a very hard subject that's hard to understand. We have to make mistakes in order to learn math, and this has to be a safe environment to make mistakes in. I like to show them that I make mistakes so they can see that I'm human and I make mistakes all the time, and I tell them I'm not the best person for math. I was a C level student who I really, you know, focused on sports and I focused on my friend relationships in school.
Danielle LeCourt
In her room, safety isn't about perfection. It's about participation. Less performance, more practice. It's vulnerable and unguarded and human.
Kayla Fulghum
So you just really want to be good humans and show them that this is an area of I think just being kind to each other in the classroom, we have a community where we're going to come together. We're going to make mistakes together. I make mistakes, and when they see me making these mistakes, and they know this is a safe spot where somebody makes a mistake, I get so excited. I'm like, Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, please tell me again. Okay, come here. And they're like, it's wrong, though. And I was like, No, this is how we're gonna learn not to do this again. They laugh at me a lot, and they think I'm a big dark but I think that's my job. So it's like, I'm not trying to create friends or anything. I'm trying to be a safe spot for them to learn math.
Danielle LeCourt
None of this is extra it's structure, clear, expectations, shared vulnerability and Grace where it matters, the result is a room that starts to hold itself. And as one teacher pointed out in our last episode, this practice isn't a one and done kind of thing.
Derrick Frazier
Building relationships. It goes beyond the first two weeks of school. It's like usually we just set aside. Sometimes, and we deal to these team building exercise, and then week three, week four, we get into the heart of the content. But that shouldn't be the case. It's like relationship building is an ongoing like adventure.
Danielle LeCourt
Relationship building isn't a phase. It's a web, one that expands and strengthens with every interaction, and in that web of connection, participation looks different for everyone. While some voices are loud and others are quiet, all are vital. So recognizing and planning for those differences is what turns a classroom into a community.
Claire Riddell
If we say, plan with your students in mind, you have to know who your students are, right? But not just any students, your students. So how do you know who they are as people and as math learners, and plan with them in mind? And then how do you also know the ways they want to participate? So when are we at our solving with students, teachers together in June, I had them do an individual reflection. And the one word that came up so many times was shy, and so when I took it back to the group, and I said, there are people in this room who don't want to lend their voice to the whole collective, but I see you, and sometimes listening is a form of participation, and that's okay, and I see you and I honor what you're bringing to this space, even if you don't want to lend your voice to the whole room.
Danielle LeCourt
That idea, that listening itself is participation, reframes what it means to be part of a classroom community. It's not just about speaking up. It's about showing up in whatever way each person can and for teachers, designing those opportunities to show up is part of the work, the structures they create, the way students sit, collaborate and share, can quietly redefine what belonging feels like. And for Sergio Luya, a simple shift in how he group students transformed the culture of his room.
Sergio Luya
I used to always view groups as something strategic that I had to do like, oh, I have to put a higher level student with the lower level students, and I have to group them this way.
Danielle LeCourt
Sergio Luya always assumed that grouping students was about balance and control. But what he tried next an idea he got from the book, building thinking classrooms in mathematics. Up ended that idea entirely.
Sergio Luya
He just said, random groups every single day. And you just go with it. And I'm like, you say that to any teacher, and that goes completely against everything we learned in our teaching classes. It goes completely against the norm of what most teachers imagine making groups is when I implemented that, it changed everything.
Danielle LeCourt
At first, students waited anxiously to see if they'd land beside a friend, but when every group was random, every day, something surprising happened.
Sergio Luya
The culture of the classroom. They all suddenly get along with each other, maybe not at first. It takes some time. I would say, week six seems to be like the magic. I don't know. I've just noticed after a month and a half that students suddenly start getting what we're doing, and it clicks for them. But yeah, there comes a point where all of them get along with each other, and all of them know each other. And sometimes they even say, like, oh, I actually didn't realize that he was sitting next to me in my English class.
Danielle LeCourt
What began as a small structural change became a cultural one. Random groups didn't just mix up seating. They mixed up assumptions.
Sergio Luya
If you put a group of students that they notice that they're never being mixed in with the rest of the class in your mind, you're like, Oh, well, I'm being strategic. I'm giving them, putting them into a group where, you know, I'm making sure that they work collaboratively. Because I know, you know, in your head, you did that with a purpose, and the purpose is so that they get the most out of that lesson. In their head, they're viewing that as, oh, I'm he put me here because I'm with the stupid group that right there is damaging to them. They view themselves that way, and then they're never going to come out of that mentality of that I'm not a math person. Oh, he put me in this group because I'm not one of the math people, and I need extra help or something like that. You also have to follow it up with them too. Like, whenever they say, like, but mister, I don't know if I can be in this group, because I feel like that person will help me. You have to respond back to that student and say, Listen, I think you're more than capable, and I trust you to be in any group that I put you in and still be successful.
Danielle LeCourt
What Celena, Kary, Kayla, and Sergio all show is that connection takes work, not the kind you can measure in test scores or pacing calendars, but emotional work, and for many teachers, that work happens inside systems that weren't built to make it easy. It often means unlearning what the system often rewards, and moving from control to connection, compliance to care.
Celena Crews
We have people coming into math classrooms all the time that really don't have a. Math background. We're just filling classrooms with who we can find. So a lot of teachers, I feel like are in crisis mode trying to figure it out. What does it mean to be a teacher? Like, how do I manage a classroom? I have to learn the math, and then I have to teach the math, and then I have to test the kids on the math. And I feel like that relationship piece sometimes builds itself based on the person.
Danielle LeCourt
Even for veteran teachers, that pressure never really goes away.
Adrienne Baytops Paul
I want to encourage you all to make sure you don't make the listeners feel like what you're asking or what we're expecting teachers to do is easy, because developing those relationships really knowing what to do beyond those handshakes that Claire and I have been talking about, it's hard, it's emotional, develop these relationships with students and stay the course with them through an entire year, because you will have to constantly mold yourself to whatever they're bringing in each day, along with whatever else you're dealing with. As an educator, however, we can do hard things, so I hope that it's somewhere that message kind of is aligned with this is challenging work. This is difficult, but it's possible and it's necessary,
Danielle LeCourt
And it's worth it. Because when teachers keep showing up for that kind of work, the ripple effects can be extraordinary, and as we'll see in our next episode, sometimes the impact of that culture of care reaches farther than anyone could have imagined. This series is produced by De LeCourt. I'm Danielle LeCourt. Thanks for listening.
