Abstract
Positive teacher-student relationships can have long-lasting beneficial social, academic, and mental health effects on a child’s human development. Many teachers see relations and interactions with the students as the most difficult aspect of teaching, and they experience that their teacher training does not prepare them sufficiently for these aspects of the teaching profession. Many Western nations are experiencing difficulties attracting new teachers and retaining them once they are in the profession. By incorporating the teaching of relational competences to new teachers in Denmark, new teachers have seen an increase in recognizing the pre-challenges and pre-conditions that students bring with them into the classroom. Further research is needed to determine if new teachers within the United States believe they have the relational competences needed to develop relationships with students from poverty as they interact in a dynamic ecological system.|Keywords: Ecological Systems Theory, relational competences, new teachers, attrition, at-risk adolescents