Adventure Specialists' Advice
September 23, 2016
Six Ways to Successfully Build Relationships with Your Students
It is all about relationships when it comes to education. This is probably something that you have heard a million times, but have you really stopped to think about the true effect relationships have on your students? Study after study has shown that a classroom teacher is the number one contributor to student achievement, even above the parent, peers, the entire school, or poverty.
Here are some ways you can start building a solid foundation when it comes to relationships with your students.
1. You Have to Believe
For starters, you have to believe that you make an impact. Just like in the movie Field of Dreams, you have to believe in order for it to become reality. You have to do the same with your students. As an educator, you must believe that you can energize, engage, and connect with your students.
2. You Must Adapt
“Students these days!” Sometimes I hear teachers say that they can’t relate to their students and if they were like the students they had 10 years ago, their relationship would be better. This is just an excuse. Times change and so do you. In fact, education is always changing, and, as an educator, you need to remain nimble to respond to parents, schools, and students. If you aren’t constantly pushing yourself to get better, you are falling behind.
Connect First as a Person
In his recent book, Poor Student, Rich Teaching, Eric Jensen talks about the importance of connecting with your students. He encourages you to always connect first as a person and then as an educator. As you move through the school year, I encourage you to reflect on how you put students first, how you connect with students on a daily basis, and how you show you care—not only about their school successes but also their home successes.
4. Personalize Learning
If you want to keep students in school, you have to build the relationships and make learning personalized for them. Start with greeting students at the door and welcoming them into your room. Always call them by name and pronounce their names accurately. Nothing is worse than having your name butchered every day. This strategy seems very simple, but you would be surprised how often it is overlooked.
5. Get Your Students Interacting
Students connect by talking to and interacting with one another. Often, educators feel the pressure to plow through the curriculum and standards, usually by way of a lecture, as they believe it is the fastest and most efficient method. We have to stop this. We must create environments were students engage with one other and us as they learn and experiment with their research, theories, and applications of the content. Jensen recently recommended the 50/50 rule—50 percent of class time should be structured in a manner that fosters social interaction while the other 50 percent should be for individual work. Although the time spent on each might vary from day to day, by end of the week, students should have spent roughly equal amounts of time in both settings.
6. Relationships Mean the Most to At-Risk Students
Yes, relationships are important, but they are the most important to at-risk students. Often, students that come from a poverty background only come to school for the connections they have with the other students and staff. I was recently working with a school district that shared with me that for students who had experienced some form of adverse childhood experience, the number one thing that helped them pull through and graduate high school was a strong, caring relationship with someone outside of their parents. This was usually someone in the school community, but it could have also been someone affiliated with a church or community organization.
To learn more about how to engage students in learning by building caring, respectful relationships with them, check out the September 2016 issue of Educational Leadership, “Relationships Matter!”
Important Dates
Sept. 27: PD Meeting, 4:00 - bring your computer
October 4: MS Concert, 7 PM (Grades 7 and 8 only)
October 5: End of Q1
October 6: Last Day of Q1 X blocks
October 7: MS Drama (During All MS Activities)
October 10: Grades verified by 8 AM
October 10: Combined Staff, 4 PM
October 10-14: School Safety Week
October 12: Parent-Teacher conferences; Students dismissed at 12:30
October 15-23: Mid-Semester Break
Active Thinking Tasks Part 2
We’ve been talking about how true learning takes place: by giving students the opportunity to engage in thinking tasks that will help them process what they’re learning from you. These thinking tasks are the formative assessment tools needed for students to integrate what you’re teaching them and to prepare them for the summative assessment(s) coming. Based on how well your students do with these thinking tasks, you will then have an idea of how well they are learning what you’re teaching, and you’ll need to adapt and adjust what you’re doing in order to meet the needs in your classroom.
This week I spent some time researching more ways to integrate creative, active thinking tasks into the classroom. I found some awesome websites that correlate active thinking tasks according to the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. I was so inspired by what I found that I think I’d like to use these resources to develop a new section for the Active Learning Manual, but until I have that ready, I’d like to highly recommend two of the best sites I found. I hope these inspire you with some great ideas for your classroom. These can be used for both formative and summative assessment, so enjoy finding new ways to get your students learning!
Great Activities for Every Level of Bloom’s Taxonomy
Planning tool for using Bloom’s Taxonomy
Susan Allen