“If you do not know ten things about a child, you can’t teach them. If they do not know ten things about you, they won’t learn from you.”, stated Donald Graves, the father of Writing Workshop. Kids do not learn from people they do not like. When the teaching staff of your institution fails to build a positive teacher-student relationship, student performance suffers resulting in a dip in the enrollment scenarios.
So, to sum it up, you must focus on building a healthy teacher-student relationship in your institution to stand out from the competitors.
This blog will help you strategize your planning. Dive deep:
What Is Positive Teacher-Student Relationship
For years, we have seen how society has put our teachers on a pedestal making them a hard-to-touch entity.
“You cannot ask questions that make you look stupid.” “You must be very formal with your teacher and abide by every word they say.”
These are some of the stereotypes about a teacher-student relationship.
On the contrary, institutions gauge teachers’ performance by the standards of students’ success or failure. They expect a teacher to multitask and juggle all the administrative tasks, lesson plans, and student handling.
Eliminate these predetermined concepts now and bridge the gaps between teachers and students. A positive teacher-student relationship is an uninterrupted connection of trust, collaboration, and growth. The basics of a positive teacher-student relationship include:
Believe in Each Other
Teachers must believe that every student is unique and achieve their goals differently. For example, students grasp concepts through text, audio, and visuals. There are eleven unique methods to teach students. All they need to do is break the age-old 1:40 teaching concept and know their students.
Whenever teachers start believing in their students, they cross the first boundary of hesitation and reach out to you with their concerns. They also believe that the teacher has their back, no matter what.
Both-Way Learning
Our faith in an overpowering concept of teachers makes us forget that teachers are nothing but life-long learners. They still have to study before a class and make notes to present before the students. Every teacher needs to acknowledge that they are learning as well as teaching. Think what a broad worldview every classroom will offer when teachers and students share a collaborative approach instead of an authoritative one!
For example, the teacher can suggest students books, movies, or YouTube channels to follow. Similarly, students can share their experiences from their latest tours or a recently watched movie. Here are some book suggestions from Classe365 that help build cognitive thought processes in children:
Think Like a Detective by David Pakman
Subject matter: Inspires children to question everyday phenomena
Amazon: 4.6/5 | Goodreads: 4/5
Critical Thinking Activities for Kids: Fun and Challenging Games to Boost Brain Power by Taylor Lang
Subject matter: Packed with puzzles for brain exercise
Amazon: 4.7/5
Dale Carnegie For Children by Dale Carnegie
Subject matter: Sparkled with stories and simple super-tips, carefully selected for young readers
Amazon: 4.6/5 | Goodreads: 4.7/5
Going Places by Paul Reynolds and Peter H. Reynolds
Subject matter: A book that fosters teamwork and the power of imagination
Amazon: 4.8/5 | Goodreads: 4.2/5
Personal Connection
Teachers shoulder the responsibility of changing the world by touching lives. How can one touch lives without unfolding their experiences before the world? Teachers must build connections with their students where children feel at home. This is only possible when the teacher also narrates their experiences or shows some glimpses of their daily lives. The foundation of a positive student-teacher relationship builds on mutual respect and quality time spent together.
How to Build a Positive Teacher-Student Relationship
The seed of every relationship is sown very carefully. A teacher must cover these steps regularly to foster a positive relationship with the students:
Break the Ice
The biggest concern of the teachers on their first day with a new class is breaking the ice. Every new batch is different from another. Students grow together and know their classmates. But, the teachers are often new.
If a teacher enters the class and starts talking about lessons, they cannot connect with the young minds. Keeping all conversations around the lesson drains out the creative ideas and all the students’ thought process proceeds in a particular direction.
Teachers must open branches of their thoughts from the very first day. They may start with questions that will reveal something about the student’s personality through the answers. Here are some questions to start with:
Share Your Stories
It’s a natural human tendency to dig deeper. Once the students start liking the teacher, they will be interested to learn more about the teacher.
The teacher can connect them personally with their student-life stories. They can tell the students how they overcame certain challenges that they find difficult now.
It will show the young minds a way forward and help them believe in possibilities.
Plan Lessons Considering Everyone’s Needs
The teacher, close to the students, knows every student does not learn similarly. Some connect with text while others engage with audio or visuals. Creating a lesson plan seems difficult when the teacher doesn’t know the students. Thus, they cannot find a connection between the action plan and the outcome. Once they can connect those dots, creating a lesson plan becomes fun. Resources like this guide to improve learning outcomes can help teachers better understand and plan their lessons.
Connect, Influence, Empower
A teacher can engage with their students following these three steps. But, the ultimate goal is to empower them.
Children can be empowered only when they find their true abilities and stop comparing themselves with others. The teacher must believe that every student is unique and that everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are distinctive.
Have you heard of a dumb boy’s story who became the world’s most influential motivational speaker? If you haven’t, listen to his story now! Share these glimpses with your teaching staff. With these motivational stories, they can make the students believe that whatever they are blessed with will contribute to this world.
Empowerment of students can be a USP of your institution. Forbes selects their top 10 schools/colleges according to how confident, empowered, and influential the students are.
Share Your Students’ Stories
Documenting your students’ journey is important. Influence your teachers to write a journal on their social media platforms sharing the students’ wins, challenges, and how they overcame those difficulties. Keep your institution’s LinkedIn active. Nowadays, many teachers are popular on social platforms for voicing up on behalf of their students.
Remember one thing. Prohibit teachers from accepting friend requests from the students or letting them enter the teachers’ private space. This will lead to biases and partialities. It will affect the overall growth of a classroom.
How Positive Teacher-Student Relationships Directly Impact Your Institutional Growth
If you think positive teacher-student relationships only contribute to their personal growth, consider thinking again. Research shows institutions fostering a culture of innovation over orthodox learning processes, excel more and attract students from different paths.
For example, institutions that banned gadgets are likely to experience stagnation in the next two years. While, on the contrary, institutions that stepped forward to train their teaching and admin staff to handle gadgets and technology ethically and teach their students to do the same, are slowly acquiring a leadership position. Here you can find out how.
Dive deep into how a positive student-teacher relationship directly impacts your institutional growth:
Reduced Drop-out Rate
A transparent relationship between teachers and students drastically reduces the drop-out rate. A survey conducted by the National Education Society of the USA showed that student drop-out rates are high in institutions where teachers do not encourage students for extracurricular activities.
Extracurricular activities increase student-teacher interaction. Thus, teachers get quality time with students to understand their psychological sphere. Eventually, teachers become a resort for the students and can tell them anything. The drop-out rates automatically decrease when the teachers, in collaboration with the authorities and parents, can solve the students’ issues.
Increase Enrollments
How can a positive teacher-student relationship directly contribute to increased enrollment? Here is how:
Your students are your biggest advocates even when they become alumni. Here’s how alumni connections affect your institutional growth.
Reduced Grievances
When students share a positive relationship with their teachers, they can come and tell their grievances against the institution to their teachers. Your operational and technical team can address them better.
Suppose they have issues regarding their LMSes and cannot figure out a particular feature, they can tell their teachers instead of drafting a grievance mail.
Crave for Knowledge, Authentic Content
In the age of AI, students are massively taking assistance from generative AI. Research by Forbes says that PhD students are also writing their thesis in assistance with AI.
This is the high time we take action. Otherwise, after ten years, nothing will be human-generated and authentic.
Therefore, focusing on a positive student-teacher relationship is important. The more inclined students are to their teachers, the more they crave knowledge. In this age of AI, it’s a true win for teachers if they can influence young minds to read and produce authentic research papers or project ideas.
Classe365 makes the process easier by including a plagiarism detector in their AI module. Students copying things from ChatGPT or other generative AI tools are easily detected. Get your free trial of the app here.
A positive student-teacher relationship is like one solution to many problems. The real challenge lies in establishing the system. Your institutional responsibility is to free up the teaching staff for a better engagement with the students apart from their administrative tasks.
Set up a seamless workflow for the teaching and admin staff. Thus, they can spend more time strategizing without hampering the regular data organization tasks. To do that, you need better interoperability.