Building Positive Teacher-student Relationships for Success in Mathematics: A Math Teacher's Reflection

Creating an atmosphere that promotes warmth, structure, autonomy, and support from a systems perspective helps students to take action to reach their goals. Thus, it is necessary to build relationships with the class as a whole and individual students. This reflection of an eight-year mathematics teaching experience highlights the journey in teaching and shares three stories that demonstrated success in mathematics that can be achieved by building positive teacher-student relationships. It was concluded that it is important to foster positive teacher-student relationships to engage students and have them maximize their potential to reach their learning goals. Keywords: Teacher-student relationship, success in mathematics, case study, motivational storytelling, Jamaica