The Importance of Professor-Student Rapport

January 16, 2025

If you’re like me, you might find yourself scrambling to get your spring classes up and running—where did the time go?! In the hustle and bustle of a new semester, remember to consider how you plan to build relationships and a positive climate for a new batch of students. Rapport is an idea that seems critical for successful outcomes in a wide range of disciplines. For people in business, building rapport with their team is the cornerstone of many leadership philosophies. For law enforcement officers, building rapport with their counterpart is tantamount for successful negotiation during a crisis situation. For health care professionals, building rapport with their clients is essential for effective and accessible health care. And for educators? Building positive rapport with their students is considered a core characteristic that directly influences learning outcomes.  

The start of a semester is an ideal time to think intentionally about creating a positive rapport, but what exactly is it? In higher education, student-teacher rapport is conceptualized as the positive emotional connection among students, teacher, and subject matter (Buskist & Saville, 2001; Wilson & Ryan, 2013). Other ways of thinking about student-teacher rapport is how well-connected students feel to their teachers, how much they like and feel welcomed by them, and students’ perception of how much their teachers understand them (Mattanah et al., 2024). 

Do we really need to bother spending time building rapport with our students in order for them to learn? Wouldn’t this time be better spent on all the content we have to cover? According to literature on the topic, student learning outcomes are negatively impacted when positive rapport is not established, regardless of how excellent the teaching is otherwise. When students do not feel rapport with the instructor, they are less motivated, less likely to attend class, less engaged in and outside of class, more stressed, and get worse grades (Dickinson & Kreitmair, 2021; Wilson & Ryan, 2013). So, in my opinion at least, I think perhaps we should bother.

When I first started teaching my ultra-large, 300-student classes, I wasn’t sure I could build rapport, or that it would be a good use of my time. As it turns out, building rapport took less effort than I thought. And the strategies used in one class to build rapport can easily transfer to other classes, regardless of enrollment size or modality. You might already be doing a lot to build rapport; one way to explore what you are already doing and the degree of positive rapport you are building with students in your classes is through a peer observation and/or teaching consultation with the CFI. You can also do a self-assessment or ask your students for feedback using the Professor-Student Rapport Scale.

Another good place to start is by thinking about how you do or how you could address two specific components that are critical for establishing rapport (Broom et al., 2022). The first is how much your students think you care about their success and well-being. The second is how much your students perceive the learning environment to be safe, welcoming, and conducive to engaging and learning. Rapport isn’t built with a single action, but rather consistent behaviors that elicit positive emotions across course policies and delivery. Some common behaviors that promote rapport may include (visit this website for a comprehensive list):

• Send a welcome email to students a few days prior to the start of the semester.
• Spend time chatting with students before/after class about their social/personal lives.
• Use a warm tone on the syllabus (also see here) and make explicit inclusivity statements there.
• Play music (perhaps related to the day’s topic) before class.
• Send a structured weekly reminder email or Canvas announcement about upcoming deadlines and include something personal (e.g., funny stories about your kids, a joke, funny meme).
• Answer emails with a warm tone; end with a friendly salutation.
• Consider using platforms like GroupMe (provide guidelines for group or direct messaging, disrespectful language or images, etc.). It gives students safe access to each other to ask questions when the space is maintained by instructors. My Teaching Assistants and I keep an active presence to help facilitate a respectful space, figure out what kinds of questions there are and to help answer them. 
• Use appropriate humor, jokes, or personal stories to illustrate concepts or lighten the mood on exams. What is funny and how to use humor respectfully is another can of worms, but these summaries offer a place to start if you are interested: here, here and here.
• Get to know student names and use names during class. For large classes, divide it into sections and try to learn one name per section per week. You don’t have to know them all, and you don’t even have to know any at all (you can use name-tents with the same general effect on rapport - it’s the effort that counts).
• Spend time on ice-breakers and interactive activities. Here are some examples for icebreakers that may not relate to course content, but you can also think of low-stakes, interactive activities that do relate to the content of the day. 
• Ask for student feedback at the end of each unit, and address the feedback with them.

Some of these items, especially for more introverted folks like me, may feel a bit daunting. For instance, I initially dreaded spending the 10 minutes before class talking to students. What could I possibly talk about that would be meaningful, authentic, and effective in that short period of time? What helped me was having some questions in place ahead of time that I felt genuinely interested in knowing (How is the homework going for you? Do you have any big plans for the holiday? Do you do any clubs? What do you want to do after college?). I borrowed some questions from the Fast Friends procedure and random trivia questions, popped them into a word-cloud style poll, and had that up as students came into the room; we used them as conversation starters. It adds a lot of positive energy to a time when it’s usually silent, with students glued to a device rather than interacting. 

Being thoughtful about building rapport with your students is mutually beneficial. When I have rapport with students, I can feel a different kind of energy in the room and in myself—I feel comfortable and more authentic. When students feel safe and genuinely cared about, they are more excited to be in class and are more engaged; our conversations are deeper and more meaningful. As a result, I think we all feel more invigorated and motivated. As we plan for Spring, it might be worth taking the time to assess your instructor-student rapport as carefully as you do other aspects of your teaching repertoire. Building rapport may be the most important but overlooked aspect of masterful teaching.