Do you remember your favorite teacher or teachers from school or university?
Did that teacher go out of the way to make you feel special?
Did that teacher challenge you to grow beyond what you thought was possible?
Didn’t seem like that teacher cared about you not only as a student, but also as a person?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It’s one thing to be a teacher at a school or university; you represent the institution you work for, and you have a community of other teachers that you can collaborate with.
If you’re teaching freelance, you don’t have that institution. It could be easy to do the minimum and skate by while collecting people’s hard-earned money, especially without a boss overseeing your work and holding you to specific standards. It can be challenging to be sure that you’re being the best teacher you can for your students.
Before sharing some ideas, it’s important to know your students, their culture, and any boundaries that might exist. I’ve found that in Chile most of my students are open about talking about their families and friends. In addition, here it is acceptable to spend time with students in social settings such as birthday parties and barbecues. The openness of Chilean culture makes developing these relationships easier for me compared to other cultures.
Some of these ideas might seem like common sense, but they can be easy to forget if we get caught up in lesson planning. Here they are:
Get to know your students as people.
This sounds so obvious that I almost didn’t want to include it as an idea, but there’s actually a lot you can do in this area. This includes getting to know their likes and dislikes, any pets they have, their job, when their birthday is, what they usually do on the weekend, where they’ve traveled to, what type of food they like, and if pineapple belongs on pizza. (Maybe that last point is optional, depending on how strongly you feel one way or another.) You can always add other topics that you find relevant.
By getting to know your students, you can find things that you have in common. This can help you find things to talk about that aren’t directly related to learning English, which helps build that relationship and keep the affective filter low. This leads to the next idea, which is to
Incorporate your students’ interests into class.
Once you know your students as people, this makes it easier to include their interests in class. Here are some ways to do so:
- Watch an episode or clip of a show (or listen to a podcast) they’re interested in together and create a class or activity appropriate to their level and goals. I’ve done this with Rick and Morty, The 100, Freakonomics, Planet Money, and more. This can also be done as homework assuming your students have the appropriate level to watch or listen independently in English.
- When learning about physical appearance or personality, include characters from TV shows or movies or family members or friends. I have a deck of cards of The Simpsons, and it works well for most students. For another student that didn’t like The Simpsons I prepared cards based on the characters from Sex In The City. I didn’t know much about the characters, so I let her teach me about them.
- Include foods, companies, or topics that students like in grammar or vocabulary exercises. A student of mine really likes Mountain Dew, so I will mention it in conversation. I had a group of students that really liked technology, so when they were learning comparatives and superlatives I created a lesson comparing an I-pad, Kindle Fire, and some other tablet. (It was so long ago that I don’t remember the specifics.)
- Allow for students to write and speak about their interests in class. When I worked with a student learning business English, I created a PowerPoint presentation about the history of Nintendo. The student loves cars, and he created a PowerPoint about the history of Volkswagen.
Make your students feel special.
This sounds really broad, and it’s going to depend on each student’s personality to do so effectively. Here are some ideas:
- Send them a birthday greeting on their birthday, or if they have class on their birthday, sing in class. I’ve done this in group classes, and it creates a great sense of community. For individual classes it’s a nice way of recognizing students on their special day.
- If you read something online or find a video that they would like, send it to them. It’s a nice way of showing that you’re thinking of your students outside of class and are paying attention to their interests.
- Create a special class that they will remember. I have baked cookies with young students in class, carved pumpkins, prepared a gringo breakfast with young students for their families, played games completely in English with both young and adult students, and eaten breakfast at Dennys (back when it was in Santiago) as a way to introduce a student to a US restaurant before his honeymoon to the United States. All of these things are fun activities, and incorporating English into them helps make the language relevant and enjoyable.
- Be generous with your time. If they have an extra few minutes from time to time and you haven’t finished what you had planned, it’s a nice way to wrap up a lesson properly and show that you’re not focused strictly on the clock. Sometimes students need to cancel a class with less than 24 hours notice, and they have a legit reason to do so but not serious enough to be considered an emergency to warrant an exception. If that happens, I will try to find a way to go over by about five minutes a few times to compensate for a bit of the lost class.
Conclusion
There are many other things you can do to help build positive and powerful relationships with your students, so don’t feel limited by these ideas.
I remember once reading that people won’t always remember the exact words you say, but they will always remember the way you made them feel. I’ve found that to be true with people that have made me feel good as well as not so good about myself.
Do you have any other ideas about how to develop relationships with students? If so, share your thoughts in a comment below.
