90 minutes improves teachers’ understanding of students Professional learning focused on teachers’ social perspective taking — “understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others” — can improve teacher-student relationships, according to a recent study. About 100 teachers from a K-9 charter school network participated in two 90-minute sessions to learn about cognitive biases and social perspective and apply it to “their most vexing and perplexing students.” Teachers worked in pairs to practice taking the perspective of a challenging student, coming up with hypotheses about why the student engaged in challenging behaviors, reflecting, and planning for collaborating with students proactively. The study found significant increases in teachers’ efforts to understand these students and improvements in teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their relationships with one another and students’