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STRATEGY
What Your Relationship with Your Students Should Be
As a first-year teacher, you may struggle to determine the relationship you want to have with your students.
How friendly should you be?
What if your students don't like you?
What if they won't listen to you?
How strict is too strict?
As a teacher, you are responsible for just about anything that can happen in a class.
You will determine the relationship you have with each student.
While this is a daunting responsibility, it is also empowering.
If the type of relationship you have with your class is under your control, then you can make it a strong bond.
This will take deliberate planning on your part.
Inspiring teachers who have positive relationships with their students have characteristics that you should develop as quickly as possible.
Here are brief descriptions of five of these characteristics:
You should show that you care about your students. Your students want you to like them and to approve of them, even when they misbehave.
Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of this when you have so many demands on your time.
It is crucial that your students feel that they are important to you and that you care about their welfare.
Get to know them as people as well as pupils you have to instruct.
Do not be afraid to let your students know you are interested in how they think and feel.
You should have a thorough knowledge of your subject matter. Knowing your subject matter may not seem to have much to do with developing a successful relationship wtih your students, but it does.
If you are not prepared for class, you will focus on what you do not know instead of what your students need to know.
The worst result of a faulty knowledge of your subject matter is that your students will lose respect for you and no longer trust your judgment.
Be prepared for class each day.
You should take command of the class. If you do not assume a leadership role in your class, others will.
Often there will be a continuing struggle as students try to dominate each other.
While you should not be overberaing, you should be in command of the class.
You can and should allow your students as many options and as strong a voice in the class as possible, but never lose sight of your role as the classroom leader.
Your students won't.
You should act in a mature manner all of the time.
This does not mean that you cannot have fun with your students; however, if having fun with your students means indulging in playful insults, then you are not acting in a mature manner.
Here are a few of the other immature behaviors that will destroy your relationship with your students:
- Being sarcastic
- Losing your temper
- Being untruthful
- Being unprepared for class
- Ignoring students
- Playing favorites
You should maintain some emotional distance from your students.
Being a teacher is much more than being a friend to your students; they have peers for friends.
You are a teacher and not a peer.
The emotional distance you keep between yourself and your students will enable you to make choices based on what students need instead of what they want.
Excerpted from Section Six, "Connect With Your Students," of The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide, by Julia G. Thompson. Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Thank you, Julia G. Thompson and Jossey Bass, for contributing this month's strategies!
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