Building Relationships with Students: The Wild Card, Part 1
Building positive relationships with students is an important part of effective classroom management, alongside clear rules, routines, and consistent expectations. Research from the Australian Education Research Organization shows that trust between teacher and student supports calmer, more productive classrooms and makes behavioral expectations easier to hold.
Part 1 of 5. Follow this series for the story of how one principal watched classrooms change as teachers put the ideas from The Wild Card by Hope and Wade King into practice.
A discipline chart on the wall isn't what makes kids sit up. Trusting the adult running the room is a big part of it, alongside knowing what's expected. That's the idea at the center of The Wild Card, and it's shaped how I've thought about classroom culture for years, both as a teacher and later as a K-6 principal walking in and out of other people's classrooms.
The Pinochle Night That Started This
A few years back, some friends and I sat down to play poker in Seeley Lake, Montana. Chips split evenly, buy-in stored away, everyone dealt in. The first hand, every single player went all-in. When the cards turned over: full house, full house, full house, all the way around the table. Mathematically, that doesn't happen in a real deck.
Turned out we'd been playing with a Pinochle deck the whole time, stacked with extra face cards. Once we figured that out, the laughing didn't stop for the rest of the night. It got me thinking: what if you played a real game with a stacked deck on purpose? Everyone's odds go up. It's a win-win.
Can we build that same win-win into our classrooms? The Wild Card, much of it built on the work of Ron Clark, argues we can, by giving teachers permission to change the game instead of running the same hand every year.
The teacher is the Wild Card.
Over the next four installments in this series, we'll look at ways to shake up your instructional game, drawing from The Wild Card and a few other sources. The goal isn't to throw out everything that works. It's to bring some creativity, and a little of the strange and unusual, into a classroom that might be running on autopilot. I use "PHUN" instead of "fun" on purpose: there's more than one way to spell it if you're willing to be creative, and that's the same rationale behind this whole guide.
What Compliance-Based Management Gets Wrong
I still remember sitting in Mrs. Smith's second grade classroom in rows back in 1984. Three checks next to your name on the chalkboard meant a call home and a trip to Principal Gorder's office. I liked the guy, and I know he liked me, but I also knew what was coming. My school was on the edge of dropping corporal punishment (Montana's legislature repealed it in public schools in 1989), so by second and third grade I'd traded getting swatted for long stretches in detention and missed recesses.
Every teacher in that building ran on the same philosophy, though I didn't have a name for it at the time: Lee and Marlene Canter's Assertive Discipline, introduced in 1976 and, for decades, one of the most influential and widely used classroom-management approaches in American schools. The model called for a teacher to set clear, firm limits and follow through on them consistently, paired with positive reinforcement and warmth rather than consequences alone.
The problem was what teachers did with that. A lot of us went overboard on compliance and doled out consequences without building the one thing that made the Canters' own approach work: trust. When a teacher commands respect rather than earns it, kids comply because they have to, not because they want to.
What Relationship-Based Management Looks Like
Most people who went through school in the 1980s remember the teachers who commanded respect. We also remember, separately, the teachers we loved. Those were the classrooms built on a relationship, not a rulebook. Kathy Buckingham was one of mine. When she said "Jon Lee," the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I listened right away, not because she scared me, but because she had high expectations for me and I knew she meant it. Decades later, she's still on Facebook, still connected to students from every year she taught.
That's not just a nice story. The Australian Education Research Organisation's research summary on teacher-student relationships lists the same small, repeatable moves Kathy made without ever calling them a strategy: greet students by name, follow through consistently, and hold high expectations while still showing you're on their side. Building relationships with students this way doesn't require a bigger budget or more planning time. It just requires doing it every day.
You Are the Wild Card is the first entry in a series meant to get you rethinking your own classroom. The goal isn't to overhaul everything you do. It's to find small places to bring in some creativity, and a little of the strange and unexpected, and see what changes.
Bringing PHUN Into Your Own Classroom
Last week I walked into our kindergarten classrooms and found students in sunglasses, beach towels spread across the floor, working through reading and writing lessons. It was "V is for Vacation to the Beach" day, part of the countdown to summer that the kinders run through the alphabet. Every letter gets its own theme.
Why should kindergartners get all the sun and PHUN? The teachers had rearranged the whole room around it. Kids carried their beach towels to recess, to music, and tied them around their necks like capes for PE. I spent part of my Friday at the beach without leaving the building.
Take that same idea, at almost no cost, and try it at any grade level in your own school.
Continue the series with the second installment, where Jon Konen walks through seven concrete ways to bring PHUN into a tired unit. If the Wild Card idea sticks with you, 53 reasons to lean into being a Wild Card teacher makes the case in more detail.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is relationship-based classroom management?
It's an approach that treats trust between teacher and student as a core part of classroom management, alongside clear rules and consistent follow-through. Teachers still set and enforce expectations, but the relationship makes students more willing to meet them.
How is it different from compliance-based discipline like Assertive Discipline?
Assertive Discipline, introduced by Lee and Marlene Canter in 1976, uses clearly stated behavioral expectations, positive reinforcement, and consistent consequences, with teachers expected to set and follow through on firm limits. Relationship-based management shares the same firm, consistent expectations but places greater weight on the trust between teacher and student as part of what makes them work.
Do students still need rules and consequences under this approach?
Yes. Relationship-building doesn't replace clear expectations or consistent follow-through. It works alongside them: a trusting relationship makes those same expectations easier for students to accept and easier for a teacher to hold consistently.
How do I start building relationships with students without adding a lot of extra time to my day?
Start with what already fits into a normal day: learn names quickly and use them, follow through on what you say you'll do, and hold high expectations while making clear you're on the student's side. Those moves cost nothing but consistency.
What does "PHUN" mean in this series?
It's the author's deliberate misspelling of "fun," meant to signal there's more than one way to bring creativity into a classroom. The series uses it as shorthand for small, low-cost changes to routine that build classroom culture.
- Trust is part of what makes classroom management work: alongside clear rules and consistent follow-through, a trusting relationship makes students more likely to meet expectations.
- Assertive Discipline was never just about consequences: Lee and Marlene Canter's 1976 framework paired firm, consistent limits with positive reinforcement and warmth, though it's easy to run it as if it were consequences alone.
- The relationship-building moves are small and repeatable: using names, following through, and holding high expectations cost time, not money.
- Culture-building doesn't require a big budget: a beach-towel theme day changed how a whole kindergarten team's classrooms felt for a week, at almost no cost.
- This is Part 1 of a five-part series: each installment covers a different low-cost way to bring more creativity into an existing classroom.
Rethinking classroom culture is one piece of a bigger decision some readers are still working through: whether teaching is the right fit at all. The programs featured here include options designed for people already working in schools who want to advance in the profession.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
- Learning How to Say No and Set Boundaries with Parents - November 21, 2022
- How to Implement a Check-In, Check-Out (CICO) Behavior System - September 26, 2022
- Teacher Core Values: 7 Strategies for Living Your Code - August 15, 2022
