What are the ways in which a teacher can represent a community worker and address the barriers that prevent learning within a school environment?

Forging stronger interpersonal relationships with students is one way a teacher can be a community worker while simultaneously addressing barriers to learning within a school environment.

Teachers can be community workers through constructing meaningful relationships with students.  When teachers are willing to be there for students outside of the classroom, they move from solely providing instruction and extending into the community. This can take on different forms.  When teachers attend activities that their students are involved in such as recitals, athletic contests, or fundraisers, relationships are formed.  These connections develop because teachers show that they care about a student's world outside of the classroom.  In this process, teachers create the groundwork for being community workers.

Research indicates that academic achievement increases when teachers create relationships with students predicated upon high expectations and partnership.  When teachers forge these relationships by extending themselves into the lives of their students, they become members of the students' communities.  With this integration, a significant barrier to student learning is reduced. A greater chance of academic achievement emerges because students feel that a trust in their teachers.  They will work, if nothing else, to sustain that relationship.  When teachers represent community workers by ingratiating themselves into their students' worlds, a culture of achievement is embraced because the relationship has extended beyond the classroom.