I know who they are, but who am I?
In your efforts to build relationships with your students, be sure to maintain your status as their teacher.
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- The First Year
- Essays on the author's experiences in her first year of teaching: the mistakes she made, what she learned from them, and how she used them to become a better teacher — and how other first-year teachers can, too.
- Page 3.10
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- Getting to know them: Getting to know your students as real people makes your classroom a more effective learning environment.
Related topics
- Learn more about authority, communication, professionalism, relationships, relationships with students, and respect.
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I have written a lot about the importance of building relationships with students. What I haven’t told you is that some of my earliest attempts to establish those relationships were absolutely unsuccessful. The truth is that a teacher trying to connect might be completely rebuffed.
I haven’t told you about the words I heard from Amanda — or what I learned as a result.
Before introducing her, allow me to defend my intentions. I was a new teacher, determined to connect with my students. I wanted to show those students that I respected them and their perspectives. I wanted them to recognize my attempts to relate to their experiences in school.
In an effort to accomplish those goals — and to establish camaraderie with students — I decided to refuse several privileges afforded only to faculty. I used the student restroom instead of the much nicer teacher facilities. I graded in green ink, determined to avoid the authoritarian stigma associated with a teacher’s hated red pen.
I thought my students would see these efforts as attempts to connect with them and their experience in our school community. I thought they would appreciate someone who acted less like a teacher and more like an advocate — one who cared about both their education and their personal perspectives on school.
But Amanda didn’t see things that way. I overheard her words to a classmate as I was leaving the student restroom one day after third period. “It’s bad enough that we have to be with those teachers four periods a day — five days a week — in their classrooms. Can’t we at least go to the bathroom in our own personal space?”
Oops. Not my intention.
Amanda and her classmates wanted me to use the faculty restroom. Many wanted me to grade in red like all of the other teachers so they could resume writing with their favorite green pens.1 In other words, they wanted me to be the adult, in an adult role, with an adult’s sense of personal boundaries. I was their teacher. It was insulting of me to imply that I could completely share their perspective. They needed an authority who listened, not one who denied her real position in an effort to be more like the students. They needed a teacher, not a pseudo-friend.
In words that stung, Amanda reminded me that students are most comfortable with teachers who have a clear sense of their own professional identities. To build a relationship with her and her classmates, I needed to acknowledge who I was and the limits of our connection. I was a teacher, with all of the associated roles and responsibilities. I would be contacting parents and guardians about misbehavior. I would be assigning homework. I would be calculating course grades. I would be making some decisions that were unpopular, but were — from my adult perspective — in the best interest of each of my students. If I presented myself sincerely, acknowledging that actions in each of those realms would be conducted in a fair manner with each student’s perspective in mind, we could begin building relationships. Those relationships would grow when I demonstrated that as a teacher — and in appropriate ways as a person — I would listen and care.
Relationships that start out rocky can be recovered. Amanda and I connected later that semester — after I established myself as a teacher who acknowledged both my role and my limitations and accepted her as a student whose experience needed to be heard and respected rather than shared.
But as teachers, we must tread a fine line between professional status and personal relationships with the individuals in our classes. When deciding how much of your students’ worlds to enter, keep in mind that they benefit from the guidance that comes from your world perspective. Connect in ways that allow you to listen, and on occasion, engage with their experience. But remember that while your relationships benefit from those moments of association, they also benefit from acknowledgement that you are different people, with different outlooks and different roles.
In other words, as teachers, we have to remember two things when building relationships with students in our classes. We must remember to respect them for who they are and who are on their way to becoming. And we must remember to respect our role as their teacher — an established adult who still listens and cares.
