The Handbook for Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen
(1) connect early, (2) connect late, and (3) connect with students’ home lives.
Connect Early
During the first few minutes of class (or before it starts), make the rounds with students. Assess how students are doing on the opening activity, and take a moment to check in with them emotionally. You can build rapport, connect, and show empathy even with brief conversations. This is also a great way to complete your Three in Thirty worksheet (refer to figure 3.4). Use figure 3.6 as a list of common conversation starters; use the empty spaces in the reproducible version to add some of your own ideas based on what you know about your students individually and as a class.
Figure 3.6: Conversation starters.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Some teachers will engage in friendly small talk with students (for example, about their favorite sports team and if that team lost or won). You may politely compliment a student on his or her new hair style or new shoes or ask about an upcoming community event or a family activity. Use the first three to seven minutes to see if anyone is struggling academically and needs extra help.
Connect Late
When students are leaving class, check their body language. Often their nonverbal signals will indicate their emotional state without you even needing to ask. See figure 3.7 (page 32) for a feelings poster for students. You can laminate the poster and have students circle the face that represents how they feel. Students can use this poster upon entering and exiting the class and during instruction.
Figure 3.7: Feelings poster.
For example, if a student is dragging himself out of class, maybe he or she does not want to go to his next class, maybe the student does not understand how to do homework, or maybe he or she is sorting out a big emotional issue. On his feelings poster, the teacher notices he circled frustrated all class period. This is the time to check in. Ask, as a student leaves, “Have you got a second?” Then say, “You know I’m always here for you, right? If something’s going on, maybe I can help things move along a little easier.” Your student will either talk or he or she won’t. At least you reached out, and you planted that seed. Maybe next time you say that, he or she will open up.
Many high-performing schools, especially secondary, use the last school period for an all-student homework hour. Although research on the value of homework is mixed, at the secondary level, the effect size is strong—0.64 (Hattie, 2009). You can use this time to show students empathy. Each day, select a different student to invest a few minutes with—to not just help with homework but to listen and let him or her know you care. See figure 3.8. If your school does not have this valuable option in place, use classroom seatwork time to connect.
Connect With Students’ Home Lives
There are many ways to widen your relationships with students outside the classroom. Because the time you invest to build relationships with your students is critical, do things early in the year or semester to show you care. On a deeper level, learn about your students’ lives (without any judgments) in ways that help foster insights and different ways of thinking, acting, and feeling, as well as an appreciation of where they’re coming from. This comes from quality time. Use the tool in figure 3.9 to keep track of the things you learn from your conversations with each of your students.
Figure 3.8: Invest in your students.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Figure 3.9: Track your interactions with students.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
You might attend something that students do after school, such as go to a sporting event, the mall, a movie, a concert, a pick-up basketball game, a funeral, or an activity in the park. Understanding their home lives allows you to show that you really do care. This may seem like asking a lot, but remember, investing one to two hours early in the year (or semester) can have a bigtime payback the rest of the year and throughout students’ lives.
Quick Consolidation: Show Empathy
Something shifts when another gets you. We feel special, more important, and more connected when another gives us a moment of empathy. Remember, empathy does not mean letting a student off the hook for a bad behavior. It means you care about the student. It means you want to help him or her get better so that he or she knows better options for next time. It is about you being an ally for how your students feel as much as how they behave. When you can consistently demonstrate empathy toward your students, you’ve just added another good reason for them to come to school, especially to your class. Answer the following reflection questions as you consider your next steps on the journey to connecting with your students using empathy.
1. What did you learn about the importance of empathy that you didn’t know when you started this chapter? What differentiates empathy from sympathy?
2. What will you do or say the next time a student comes to you with a difficult problem to show that your first concern is for his or her safety?
3. Which of this chapter’s quick-connect tools will you use to build empathy with your students? How could you adapt the tool to work even better for your teaching style and classroom culture?
4. How could you change your beginning-of-class and end-of-class routines to make time to get to know your students better?
5. What can you do to get to know your students better outside the classroom?
Reflect on the Relational Mindset
All meaningful and lasting change starts with a mirror. Now that you understand the concept of the relational mindset and have strategies to foster its growth in your classroom, it’s time to self-assess and reflect on what comes next. Use the following questions to accomplish this.
1. What can you do to bring a stronger relational mindset into your class every day?
2. What evidence do you expect to see to let you know that you’re improving your students’ chances of succeeding academically?
3. What strategy could you use or adapt from part one in your very next class to start building a relational mindset with your students or with specific students in need?
4. What challenges do you expect to encounter as you adopt this strategy? How will you react to and overcome these challenges?
5. What benefits can you envision when you find success building stronger relationships with your students? How will you benefit? How will your students benefit?
Your decision to help students grow means that you generate a new narrative that includes the relational mindset. Begin with a fierce urgency, and choose one of the chapters’ strategies to get started with better relationships. Encourage colleagues to help, and set goals for progress. Once the message is in your heart, and you’ve built the activities into your lessons, the mindset will