Start the Year Right – Make Connections with Your Students

I am in the final stages of writing and editing a book about education, based on my career in teaching and my life experiences. It is focused on STEM education in middle and high school, but any educator should find it helpful. Its primary purpose is to give the new teacher, especially one who teaches a STEM subject in middle school or high school, a systematic approach to help all students reach their full potential without going through all the growing pains of a typical first-year teacher.

Here are some tips from my book to help you right now:

Building personal connections with students is the most important thing a teacher can do to improve every aspect of student learning. Students naturally will learn better in a classroom where they feel a connection with the teacher.

What does it mean for a teacher to be personally connected with a student? It means that these two people have connected in an appropriate manner so that they both understand and trust each another, and they like being together and working together. It doesn’t mean the teacher and students are “friends” or in any sort of inappropriate relationship.

Instead, it means there is a deeper relationship between the teacher and the student than is typical in a traditional school setting. By personally connecting with your students, you begin to see each student as an individual child with their own personality, interests, and abilities. 

Here are some concrete steps you can take to help you be more effective in connecting with your students:

• Greet your students by name every day. 
• Make an organized effort to talk to every student every week besides just greeting them. Find out what sports they play, what their interests are, what they like in school, what they don’t like, or anything else that may help you connect with them.
• Based on what you found about your students from talking to them, set up a schedule in your own personal planner to visit sports games, musical concerts, and any other school or extracurricular event where your students are playing or performing. Try to visit one such event every week, if possible, and let your students know when you visit.
• Look for opportunities to mentor students in extracurricular activities.
• Set up a schedule to email your students’ parents/guardians every month about what you are doing in each class, what special events are happening, and what assessments are coming up.
• Set up a schedule to email or call every month the individual parents/guardians of students who excelled in major class projects or assessments or who excelled in some special way. Post the work of these students on the space for student work in your classroom.

For more about the book and to access lots of free resources, including email templates for the last two tips I just gave, go to my author website at  https://bryanholmesauthor.com .