Focus on Relationships

Focus on Relationships

When I was teaching in the College of Education for Niagara University in Toronto, I used to tell my students that, in many ways, teachers are like the pied piper.  We lead the way and our students follow us if we are doing our job properly.  Often my students would refer to me as a great teacher and I would remind them that it takes good students to make a good teacher. In many ways, those are two ways of looking at the crucial relationship between each teacher and student. I was reminded of this today while reading the notes from SmartBrief from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. These are compendia that I get daily into my Inbox about items of interest to teachers and administrators. I actually get three different lists but there are always items of interest in one or the other of the briefs that I get. Today, there were actually two.  One of them referred to an article written in a blog by a principal from a school in Washington State. The other was commenting on a study conducted by teachers of Special Education when surveyed about their work online given the needs of the pandemic. In the latter, the study reported that teacher confirmed that it was important to understand the family environment because the teacher is actually a guest in the home of his or her students and cultural expectations and awareness are crucial.  As an example, I remember vividly when I went as a teenager to stay with a family in New York City that my parents had met and who had a teenaged girl my age.  They asked me we lived in igloos in the winter time. These were people living in Brooklyn, NY in the early '60s.  What did they know about Canada, but I knew that the comment was ignorant. If I had been a student, my relationship with that adult would never have been the same.  I would not have been likely to follow that leader.  In the former, it is self-evident to many that if we don't have relationships with our students, how can we help them when they are having trouble.  Students are individuals and even more today, we know that acquiring knowledge, mastering skills and adopting values that we attempt to pass on will none of them happen if we don't know our students as individuals.   How can we reach out to them? How can we help them if we don't know where their pitfalls are or what makes them tick as humans.  Similarly, online it is even more important to use strategies that will shed light on the student behind the camera or the text posted online. I used to encourage my students to write a paragraph about themselves as a way of introduction, asking them to tell me and their fellow students what they think we should know about them. Students in general are very open.  We need to capitalize on that openness right away to sense who they are and how we can find that hook that will enable us to play the pied piper, to lead them in the direction we want them to go. Pronounce their names the right way, purposefully, as a show of respect.  Ask them what they want you to call them, whether a formal name or a nickname and so forth.  Whatever you do, you should look for things on a regular basis that helps you to check in with them, and to watch them carefully enough so you recognize the signs of boredom, happiness, frustration, sadness and so forth.  Whatever you do, try to KNOW them and respond to that knowledge all the time.  It makes you focus on the relationships.