Developing Positive Teacher-Student Relationships (Weinstein ch.3)

The chapter by Weinstein is one that is very dear to my heart as an educator. Developing positive relationships with your students is part of my own teaching philosophy. I believe that in order to make an impact, students need to feel like they can respect you, feel safe with you and that you have something to say that will help them grow academically. For me, if teachers do not feel like making deeper relationships with their students is important, then they do not understand the power of having such relationships and in my opinion shouldn't be teachers. Even though teachers may have many students, you have a whole year to learn each of them individually! This is why we become teacher; to impact individual lives and the only way to do that is to establish real relationships with students.

What I have always understood is that young people can just smell when you aren't being genuine with them. In the text, it speaks about being a real person to your students. Showing students that you have a life outside of being a teacher shows that you are a r eal person and they will feel more comfortable with you. The importance of this is showing things that show to the students that you are more alike than different and that you too are human and make mistakes. You can't encourage students to take risks and make mistake if you seem like the "always perfect and always right" teacher who works more like a computer rather than a living being. For me, I think this is a very easy task for me to do with people and young students as well. I like to show that I am imperfect and growing just as they are. I also like to share with them my outside activities and what makes me creative and different. I can see my classroom as a space in which I would put up my own artwork, let my students see some of my dance performances, but also be a place for students to do the same.

Two other points that stuck out to me would be to learn about students' lives and to be sensitive to children's concerns. An easy and effective way of initially doing so is to play icebreaker games with the students in which they share interesting things aboutthemselves to the class. Doing student interest surverys is the way I have done it in my own internship because it takes upless time but still makes the students feel like you want to get to know them. Of course, teachers shouold grow upon that and get to know thepm more in depth as the year goes on. Being sensitive to your students concerns involves keeping things that would make them feel embarrassed or less than. The text explains that ino order to be sensitive, one must put themselves in the other person's position. In a classroom setting, this would include not sharing test grades, allowing student grading, or reprimanding a child in front of their peers. I don't think it's any teachers' intention to humiliate their students, but understanding that even the worst behaved students are sensitive can help us be more mindful of how we treat them. No one want to be the teacher that student remembers in a negative way. The way we treat students now do have long term affects on them in the future.

The last point that I want to note in this chapter is to be humorous. I make it my mission to make at least one student smile regularly. this eases the tension and pressure that some students may feel in a classroom setting and it tell them that once again, you are a human too. Elementary students are silly by nature, and showing them that you can be too when the time is right makes them more comfortable with you. I can say that it does have positive and negative affects. In my intership last year, I could tell that some of the students felt to lax with me because they saw me as they "fun" teacher. I had to explain to them quickly that even though I do not mind playing with them when the timing was right, they still needed to show me respect and listen to what I had to say. On the other hand, because I showed the kids my humorous side, played with them during P.E., and ate with them during lunch on occassion, a lot of the students came to me and asked if I would be their teacher next year in the 5th grade. To me that is the highest compliment because it says that students feel like they can communicate with me, respect me enough to learn from me again, and see me as not only a teacher but a positive adult in their life.

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