structure: Rules should be fair and apply to all; having consistent expectations for every student is key.
Offering choice: Students, particularly teens, seek autonomy, and when possible, they need to be involved in decisions that are going to affect them personally.
Showing interest: Discovering information about their lives, asking questions about their music, and attending their athletic events (or at least knowing the scores) are ways to demonstrate your interest.
Being optimistic: Express to students through speech and actions that you believe in their ability to succeed.
Acknowledging their feelings: Show emotional support and help them process their feelings.
Keeping these things in mind, let's consider middle to high school students. Their schedules don't allow for a lot of one-on-one time. In addition, teachers who have five or six different classes each day have less time to build relationships. Nevertheless, making the effort to do so is well worth it.
Write Notes to Students
Keep envelopes with each student's name in your desk and occasionally write notes to students. Let students know what you appreciate about them or how you liked some of their work. You might keep the envelopes in a file, and after you give a student a letter, put that student's envelope at the back of the bunch. This way you can be certain to reach out to every student.
Stick It to Them
In a variation of the note-writing strategy, keep a stack of sticky notes handy, and whenever a student does something that you want to point out, write it on a sticky note and put the note on the student's desk, locker, or notebook. The note can be anything from "You played a great game last night!" to "I saw you helping the new student, and I'm sure he appreciated it!"
Be a Name-Caller
Self-improvement author and lecturer Dale Carnegie once said, "A person's name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language." Be the person who knows students' names. In some cases, be their "person." One of my favorite television shows was Grey's Anatomy. What attracted me most were the relationships among the doctors and how they built those relationships. The first time I heard one doctor say to her friend, "You're my person," I was instantly struck by the emotion I felt. I know that serotonin and oxytocin were released in my brain—the first to calm my body and make me feel good, and the second to make me feel connected to these characters and to remind me who "my person" was at varying times in my life. In an issue of Educational Leadership with the theme "What Teens Need from Schools," a column by Fisher and Frey (2019) features a video showing Demetrius Davenport, dean of students at Health Sciences High and Middle College, who clearly is one of those educators who goes out of his way to know all the students' names and tries to speak to them daily.
Pat Wolfe, author of Brain Matters (2010), often talked about the "cocktail party effect" during her presentations. This phenomenon refers to the brain's ability to block out chatter in situations such as a cocktail party, where many conversations are occurring at the same time and the brain has the ability to filter out talk that is not important. However, the moment that you hear your name, your brain instantly begins to focus on the conversation that included your name.
This effect has been studied for decades, and as a result neuroscience is getting closer to identifying the exact areas that react to our name being mentioned. The fact is that we are attracted to the sound of our name on many levels. The reticular activating system in the brain stem, which is associated with instincts and controls breathing and other vital functions, responds to our name because survival may be involved. Perhaps our name is going to be followed by a warning to "watch out!" The survival brain does not want to miss the opportunity to save us. And the emotional brain is going to respond to this "name calling" because it may represent the beginning of a compliment, a reprimand, or a pleasurable realization that someone important to you knows your name. Our names are so powerful that even patients in vegetative states show brain activation when their names are spoken (Carmody & Lewis, 2006; NameCoach, 2017). Imagine how important it is for students to hear their own names—pronounced correctly, with a positive connotation! Let's encourage, motivate, and connect with our students in the most basic way by learning and remembering to use their names when speaking to or about them. "Candace, I see that you finished your project, and I can't wait to listen to your presentation!" "Hakim, you look like you have an idea to add to our list. We'd like to hear it!"
Simple statements help us connect to the people around us, so let's use our "name-calling" abilities to build relationships. You will be helping to create a feeling of belonging that can make a world of difference to your students.
Call on Each Student Regularly
If we want to build strong relationships with students, we have to be fair in how we show them that we care. We all have students who want to be called on all the time. They know the answers; they ask the questions. We'd like to have a whole classroom full of "those" kids. And then we have the students who never want to be called on. They may not know the answers, may not be interested, or are just embarrassed to be singled out. So from the beginning, we have to show students that we are trying to be fair. Here are two helpful strategies:
Popsicle Stick, or Equity Stick: Write each student's name on a Popsicle stick, place the sticks in a cup, and draw one name each time you ask a question. Have a second cup to put the sticks in after you ask a question.
Stack the Deck: This strategy involves writing each student's name on an index card. You begin calling on students by picking off the top of the deck each time you ask a question. Once in a while, you can "stack" the deck by putting more than one card in for some students who need the opportunity to speak.
For both these strategies, you may want to drop the stack of cards or spill the Popsicle sticks occasionally. You can then say, "Oops! I guess we're starting over!" Doing this keeps students on their toes even though they have already been called on.
Go the Extra Mile
We can go the extra mile in a number of ways. When I was teaching in high-crime urban areas, it was sometimes scary to attend events in the evening, but together my colleagues and I tried to attend athletic events, debates, reader's theater, and class plays to show our support for our students.
Often when we join a staff at a school, we are asked to take on an extracurricular activity. Doing so can be a great way to build relationships with students. Even if the activity involves only a small number of the students you teach, it's a beginning. Sometimes you may be able to ask students to join your group to let them know that you care and believe in their ability to take on whatever responsibility is involved.
Other ways to go the extra mile include the following:
Riding the bus with a student who is fearful of other students or doesn't know where to get off
Sending positive notes home
Making home visits
Calling a student
