Relationships: From Lip Service to Leg Work

So much talk about how relationships matter. So. Much. Talk.

If you're an educator and you've been paying attention lately, you are no doubt familiar with the push to improve relationships between teachers and students. Relationships will get students to behave better, be more engaged, learn more, be more emotionally intelligent, and so much more.

I recall a training I was at about a year ago. The training was supposed to be about teaching students who come from poverty. But for a training that was a couple of hours long, the overwhelming majority of the training was about defining poverty, characteristics of students living in poverty, and other things of that nature. At the very end, literally only the last few minutes, it was suggested that the way to reach students from poverty was to build, you guessed it, relationships.

The Twitterverse and Blogosphere are much the same. Relationships are everything. They're the future. They'll fix all of your classroom problems. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

But for as much as everyone seems to be claiming that relationships are the key to reaching students of all backgrounds, no one seems to be talking about how to actually go about building those relationships. Are they just giving it lip-service or do they actually have experience? If so, share that.

I've been working on this for a few years now. And I will be the first to admit that 1) I am no expert on how to build authentic, effective relationships with students, and 2) I do not spend hours a day on Twitter or reading blogs so maybe I'm missing the people who are addressing this need. But I am willing to share the ideas and strategies that I have found to work.

Everyone Gets a Ticket

This is nonnegotiable. We cannot play favorites. If we're going to try to have positive relationships with our students we have to try with all of them, even the difficult ones. We don't know ahead of time who will benefit the most from our efforts. We can be sure that if a student feels we aren't trying with them like we are with others, we will lose them even faster. We may never be able to get them back. Tickets aren't just for students in our classes, either. If a student introduces us to one of their friends, their friend gets a ticket too. If a students drops your class, their ticket is still valid. Tickets don't expire.

Be Genuine

Students will know when we're being fake. Let's not pretend that they won't. We know better. When we ask a student how they are doing, we need to ask because we want to know and not because we're just trying to make small talk. If the student wants to tell us something that happened during the day, we should listen. We should ask questions. We shouldn't just act interested. We need to be interested. If we have wronged a student and need to apologize, we ought to do so. Being genuine with students goes a long way toward helping the students realize that the relationship is real and not just something their teacher feels they have to do.

Do Things For Them

Do you have a bunch of extra Halloween candy left? Bring some in. Do you think it would be nice to bring everyone chocolates for Christmas? Do it! Did you accidentally make way too much bacon over the weekend? Surprise students in class by passing it out. Did you see a YouTube video that you think one of your students will like? Send them the link. When we do the little things like this, the things that don't really have anything to do with class or instruction, our students will know that we care about them as people and not just as students in our classes.

Trust Them

Our students will make mistakes. And if we want them to learn from their mistakes, we'll have to address them. If we want to know whether they have learned from their mistakes, we have to give them another opportunity to make the same mistake. Will some of them disappoint us? Almost certainly. Will others make us proud? Of course. But in the end, if our students don't feel that we trust them, we haven't built a relationship with them at all.

Don't Assume

I have a student who I occasionally see drift off in class. At first it was a little irritating, but I didn't want to make a big deal out of it because the student does fine in class. Even though I try not to lecture often, it is sometimes necessary and I get that listening to someone talk about math isn't the most engaging thing for students to do in class. A few years ago I would have stopped class to ask the student to wake up and pay attention, or worse. Don't worry, I didn't do that. Instead, I used an opportunity a few days later to start a conversation with the student about the sleeping. It was during this conversation that I found out the student suffers from insomnia. As a coping mechanism, they do homework at night when they can't sleep and then sleep at school when they can. The student wasn't being rude or disrespectful. They were just trying to cope with a sleeping disorder. 

Some Students Need More

Let's be honest. Some kids come to us in need of much more help than others and we may not even know it. If the student, their parent, or their friend doesn't tell us, they could come and go from our lives and we would be none the wiser. If we have the opportunity and ability to help a student who needs significant help, we need to take advantage of the opportunity. First, if that student needs real help, we can't be certain that the other adults in their life know it. We may be the only one who knows what's going on and how to help. Help could be as simple as a phone call to someone who is better able to meet the student's needs. Help may just be the willingness to listen. Second, if our student needs our help and we are able to help them and don't, what kind of a relationship have we built with that student? The fact of the matter is that some of our students will be so deep into the muck that we will not be able to help them out unless we are first willing to get in it with them.

These are the strategies that I have used to build relationships with my students. Has it helped classroom management? Yes. Has it helped engagement? Yes. Is that why I do it? No. I do it because I care about my students and I want them to know that I care about them. This includes caring about their academic progress, but it always includes caring about them as people.