"To raise achievement, schools may need to work as hard on the social-emotional aspect of learning as they do on the academic aspect." -Deborah D. Brennan
The start of the school year is also when educators
everywhere annually proclaim their job is about “building relationships”. It is true!
A teacher that doesn’t love students and do what they can to get to know
them is in the business for the wrong reasons.
However, getting to know them isn’t enough. From a teaching standpoint, the whole purpose
of building relationships is so that we can figure out what makes a kid “tick”. How can we teach them better? How might we design our classrooms and our
lessons to make them more engaging and fulfilling for our students? Building a relationship with a student should
be the very first formative assessment of the year. The question remains, just like with any
other formative assessment, what will you do with the information about the
student once you have it? With so many
kids and so many styles, it is difficult to know them all. It takes time, experience, and
expertise. It also takes a teacher that
is willing to change the way they do things when needed.
Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University,
created a great video about a student he referred to as “The Sleeper”. This student made him question the way he
taught his class, and it also taught him a lesson in building relationships
with student.
Watch and see….the student didn’t change until the teacher’s
classroom changed! Nobody said teaching would be easy….but it is worth it! Get to know your kids and then use it to make
their learning experience dynamic!!
So true! The change must begin with the student in mind. We ask our students as they create product and present real world products to always consider the audience. As educators we have a responsibility to do the same, but even more essential, how do we design a learning community and culture with experiences that make students the owners of the learning? So we move not to just consider the audience but how do we make them the lead learner in the experience? I have ideas but no real answers... except that it must first start with building relationships and then moving beyond that... purposefully and differently.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much! I couldn't agree with your comments more!
DeleteMy favorite part of this video is when the stick teacher walks up to the sleeping kid and you just know he's going to raise his fist in the air demanding justice for "his lesson" but instead asks, "Do you want to go to lunch?" I love the idea of framing the beginning of school as a formative assessment. Instead of spending so much energy trying to guess what will engage our kids, watch them...talk with them...listen to them...partner with them and our jobs get easier and a lot more joyful!! Good blog!
ReplyDeleteI agree! I love the idea that the relationship building that occurs within the first few weeks/months of school can be thought of as a formative assessment. It brings more of a tactile function to the duty teachers must complete in order to be successful and I think this could be very useful! If I was apart of a grade level team I would certainly share this idea in the hopes of creating excellent classroom environments and require all members to take note of the relationships, characteristics, and preferences they observe so they can be reviewed in later discussion.The hope would be that those discussions would turn into a plethora of ideas and strategies in order to reach each student on a personal level and later result in great growth over the remainder of the year. Great post!
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