Category: Building Relationships
Reaching Students
Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don't, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I've completely ...
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Mingling before Class
Maryellen Weimer
January 27, 2015
The worst time for me in a workshop or presentation are those five or 10 minutes before the start time when the faculty participants are arriving. My stomach is in knots. I'm wishing I were ...
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Teaching as Storytelling
Dale Tracy
November 7, 2014
When learning is presented as a story, students are more likely to understand the material as relevant to their lives. I incorporate the person in teaching and learning, making flexible but structured space for students ...
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The Silent Professor
As college faculty, we put tremendous pressure on ourselves to talk. We want to cover the course content and thoroughly explain our assignments. We want to sound smart, share what we know, and communicate convincingly ...
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Understanding Student Resistance
It's often unexpected and usually something of an affront: The teacher has devoted time and energy to preparing a new activity (or series of activities) for students. The teacher has opted to use the activities ...
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Teacher Support that Increases Student Autonomy
Maryellen Weimer
November 1, 2013
Students need to be able to make decisions about learning on their own. Are there instructional behaviors teachers can use that move students in that direction? There are, and the research highlighted here offers one ...
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Whose Classroom Is It Anyway?
Most would agree that the classroom is a place for discourse, reflection, and learning. But whose class is it? Who's doing the learning? The teacher or the students? We submit it's both—teacher and students learning ...
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Relationships with Students Are What Matter Most
In our experiences, we have moved from teaching face-to-face to working in front of a computer with headsets to ditching the headsets in favor of classes taught in a totally asynchronous manner. We can see ...
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Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don't, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I've completely forgotten that I wish I'd remembered. Case in point: an insightful piece offering a series of lessons learned after the first five years of teaching (it's in the February 2009 issue). I love the piece for its honesty. Some of the most important lessons about teaching are those most of us have had to learn the hard way.
Author Graham Broad writes: “At some point in the past year I decided that my initial belief that I could ‘reach' all students, and that all teaching problems could be resolved through correct pedagogy, wasn't optimism, it was egotism. Some students, I have come to understand, just aren't that into me.”
Reaching students means connecting with them, and even the seasoned among us sometimes forget just how strongly students do identify with us as persons. If you need a reminder, take a look at the piece in this issue that reports on the results of a qualitative analysis of comments on the Rate My Professor site. We could attribute the value students place on having “nice” professors to immaturity. We could point out that our job descriptions don't stipulate that students have to like us. And we would be correct. However, if students don't feel some sort of rapport with the teacher, that gets in the way of learning, especially when students aren't intrinsically motivated by our content.
That said, Broad's insight reveals another important point about connecting with students. It makes sense, and maybe we even have a professional responsibility to try to reach all students, but we are destined to fail with some, and it's egotistical to imagine otherwise. Students and teachers are all unique human beings. We wear our individuality in different ways. Some of those ways are meaningful to some students and not to others. Part of the maturity we need includes an acceptance of the fact that who we are and how we teach may be genuine and authentic, but that we will still not connect with certain students. Now, if we regularly don't connect with significant numbers of students, that is an issue, but not for now.
We don't always think about how diverse the college experience is for students. They take courses with diverse content, all (or most) taught by different teachers. Chances are good that students will connect with a teacher, maybe even several. It doesn't take a connection with every teacher to make a potent educational experience. How many of us have those favorite stories of that one encounter with a teacher that changed the direction of our lives? So, when we've got one (or several) of those students who don't respond to our attempts to connect, we don't take it personally, we don't give up with that student, and we keep our fingers crossed that in some other course with some other professor that student will make one of those connections that shifts their educational experience into higher gear.