And then I met Hunter Gehlbach, associate professor of education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and director of research at Panorama Education. During an education conference lunch break, I overhead Gehlbach discussing his new study, “Creating Birds of Similar Feathers: Leveraging Similarity to Improve Teacher-Student Relationships and Academic Achievement.” I couldn’t help it; I jumped in and hijacked his conversation.

Gehlbach explained that his research is primarily concerned with social perspective-taking, or the ability to understand the what drives the people around us. As he explained, “My focus is classrooms and so social perspective taking—figuring out the thoughts and feelings of others seems key. We want teachers to be able to engage in this process and figure out the thought processes of students as much as possible, in order to understand where and why they are making mistakes.” At the prompting of his colleague, Maureen Brinkworth, Gehlbach resolved to find out how, and to what extent, student teacher-relationships influence learning and educational outcomes.

Gehlbach and his colleagues gave 315 ninth grade students and 25 teachers in a large, diverse high school a “get-to-know-you” survey of 30 items at the beginning of a school year. The researchers matched and cherry-picked similarities in the teacher and student responses, then revealed those similarities to the teachers and students. Five weeks later, the researchers returned to administer a more in-depth survey of both students and teachers, and measure students’ and teachers’ perceptions of their relationships and the classroom experience as a whole.

This second survey revealed that when teachers and students know they have five things in common, relationships and educational outcomes both improve. Teachers and students who had been informed about five things they had in common with each other perceived themselves as being more similar; teachers reported that they interacted more frequently with the students who shared certain qualities or interests, and teachers who knew about similarities with students rated their relationships with those students as being more positive. Finally, the investigators found that when teachers knew they shared similarities with a particular student, those students finished the quarter with higher grades.

Perhaps most interestingly, this study highlights the power of student-teacher relationships in reducing the achievement gap between underserved (primarily Latino and Black) and well-served (White and Asian) students. The researchers found that establishing similarities between teacher and student reduced the achievement gap between these populations by 65 percent. In other words, knowledge of interpersonal similarities helped teachers connect with their underserved students, and that translated into a significant increase in academic success.