Journal #4 - Being Involved

What it means to be an effective teacher.

           

            Creating, maintaining, and constantly working on relationships with students is one of the most important aspects of being an effective teacher.  Not only has this been shown to effectively help in classroom management, but it also enables teachers to get to know their students on a more personal level and vice versa.  I’ve already spoken to the point on how showing students that you are there for them and creating an environment which promotes open communication is an essential part of being an effective teacher, but I also think that it takes a teacher to want to be aware and find out how their students are doing outside of their classroom in order to establish strong relationships with their students inside of their classroom. 

            Another aspect of forming student-teacher relationships is about being aware of what is going on in your students’ lives, or being “in-the-know” about what is going on in the school.  This information can be as simple as knowing about which students are playing afterschool in an extra-curricular soccer game and knowing which students are involved in the art at the school this weekend.  Simply by asking those seeming unimportant questions like “how did the game go yesterday, I heard you guys won?”, or “how did the show go this weekend, did you learn a lot?”, you are helping to forge new relationships and expand old ones with your students.

Just recently I had a personal experience with this when I was teaching at St. Michael’s University School in February, 2012.  Of course coming into a boy’s grade ten physical education class for only three days was quite intimidating for my first teaching experience in a high school; it’s difficult to form good relationships with your students in such a short period of time.  Needless to say, the first class could have gone better as far as classroom management is concerned.  However, from my own experiences I knew how important it was for me to try and form some sort of relationship with these boys if I wanted to have a lesson run smoothly, whether it was just letting them know that I’m interested in what they’re doing or simply by acknowledging that, as a teacher, I see them as an individual and not simply as just another student.  Luckily for me, there were about nine boys in the class of fifteen that played on the basketball team that happened to be playing that night.  The next day I came into the class with slightly more confidence and a whole new game-plan.  I let the boys have the first ten minutes of the class as a “free play” time where they could do what they wanted in the gym, then I began going over to each small group and asking them about their game the previous night.  The response I got from the students was incredible!  They could see that I was taking an interest in what they were doing outside of the class simply because I wanted to and that made all of the different to them; the lesson that day ran much more smoothly than it had the previous day.  On the final day of my student teaching I actually had some of the boys come into class early!  I had five boys, all of whom the first day I had labelled as the “trouble makers” of the class, actually willingly come to the gym and play around with me until the rest of the class joined.  We chatted about their upcoming basketball game, the school rugby trip that was over Spring Break, and what they each had planned for the weekend.  My third and final lesson could not have run better.  The change in the classroom management, enjoyment, and overall tone of class changed dramatically over only three simple lessons; I couldn’t believe what a difference it had made in just three days. 

I think that although being aware of the simple things going on in your students’ lives is incredibly important in forming and maintaining relationships with your students it’s also essential to be aware of the more serious issues that some of your students may be facing outside of your classroom, such as bullying, a parents’ divorce, a death in the family, or others.  Sometime this information might be more difficult to come by so that’s why it’s also important to have two of the previous characteristics I spoke to, availability and accommodation, in order to provide students with a safe environment which they feel they can come and speak with you as a teacher. 

I think that it’s important to remember that your students want to be treated as individuals and not just as “another student” in your classroom.  By showing students interest your allowing them to see that you appreciate that they are an individual person who you care about; this also shows students that you are a teacher are also an individual and not simply “just a teacher”.  By taking the initiative to form relationships with your students you are helping to create a more comfortable and enjoyable classroom setting and learning environment for everyone.