Instructions:
As we learned in this lesson, research conducted by Dr. Hunter Gehlbach’s show that when students and teachers discover things they have in common, they’re more likely to foster a positive relationship. This can improve student performance and reduce achievement gaps. In the spirit of this research, you will have an opportunity to develop a brief activity that fosters the critical connection between you and your students.
There are 2 options for this activity:
Option One: STUDENT SURVEYS(in which you learn about your students)
Option Two: “REVERSE ENGINEERING” (in which your students learn about you)
Choose one of the surveys provided in the course (or use one that you find on your own) and create a “Get to Know You” survey using the tips and guidelines provided in the course. Share and discuss the results with your class, inserting your own opinions/answers to the survey questions as a way to have a fun classroom discussion about the areas everyone has in common. Or use James Sturdevant’s “reverse engineering” technique to share with students a personal anecdote or timely story, ideally complemented by photos or personal artifacts that bring it to life.
Next, document the results of this activity in your Learning Results Portfolio, either describing the survey that you used or inserting a screenshot of the actual survey. Include a brief summary of the impact it had the classroom environment and whether you were able to find common ground with your students. Or, if you chose the “reverse engineering” method and focused on sharing things about yourself with your students, compose a brief description of the personal anecdotes or stories you shared with your class, and the reactions/impact it had on the classroom environment, as well as the impact such disclosure had on you, as an educator.
* Please keep in mind while writing this assignment: Here is some background information on me- I am a 34 year old Italian- American who currently teaches in a special education elementary school bridge class (K-3rd grade) in a predominantly African American neighborhood/school.
Here are the readings:
Strategy Four: Find Common Ground
* If you would prefer to listen to this lesson, rather than read it, please just click the play button below. As a reminder, there are plenty of links and videos to explore throughout this page.
Strategy 4.mp3
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“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.”
Sound familiar? What if I were to tell you that this was the rant of the Greek poet Hesiod, in 700 B.C.? This illustrates that generation gaps date back millennia, and probably even farther. Some of you might only be a decade older than those you are tasked with educating, but I bet you’ve had a moment where you caught yourself uttering, “Kids today, man…” The important thing is to expect that gap to be there, and rather than treating it as a barrier, build a bridge over it.
Remember James Sturtevant, the Ohio teacher I introduced you to in Module 1? In his recent book, You’ve Gotta Connect, he introduces the concept of “nostalgia” as a problem for educators:
“When nostalgia takes you away from the students that you have been blessed with the power to influence, it is far from harmless. This moment is all we ever have with each student. Nostalgia can absolutely detour efforts to accept a student for what she or he is in this moment.”
Nostalgia for the past — even if just for the time before students on smartphones — turns toxic when it makes us feel contempt for how someone is acting in the present. And that toxicity can be poisonous in the educational setting. If we judge students for their irritating sense of entitlement or tsk-tsk their over-sharing on social media to a colleague, we can find ourselves on a slippery slope to confirmation bias (which is when we look for what confirms our belief about something and ignore the relevance of anything that contradicts it).
Granted, it’s hard to keep keeping up with the trends of today and those that will be here next week — the popular lingo, the culture, the memes — but it’s necessary if we want to connect with students and thrive in this profession.
Sturtevant has a novel method for inspiring awareness of the tendency we have to judge young people based on nostalgia, and he believes it goes a long way toward mitigating the problem: When presenting to a group of educators, he has them write down a list of everything about the present generation that they find distasteful. (No one, he says, has ever had a problem filling up that list — some even ask for more paper.) He then challenges each member of the audience to go through their list and eliminate each item that they don’t have a lot of control over. Almost without fail, most lists dwindle down to just about nothing. And the things near the top that got eliminated the fastest, he points out, are often the things we all complain about the most.
His point? If we can recognize those things (like generation gaps) that we have no control over, we can eliminate those things from our gimme-a-break list and start making connections with all of our students (even the overly entitled ones).
Because, as we’re discovering, building strong relationships with students is the most important factor in their success and our job satisfaction. When we decide that “these kids over here” have this undesirable trait compared with “those kids over there,” we prevent ourselves from really getting to know those students over there as individuals — after all, they’re not very likely to make the first approach. That’s usually going to be up to us.
Sturtevant has a workaround to this, which he refers to as “reverse-engineering.” He suggests you become familiar to your students, and the best way is to tell stories about yourself. Know what? Kids today are super-receptive to it. This is the generation that grew up on social media — they aren’t living if they haven’t informed their friends (and the entire online world, for that matter) whom they’re attracted to, what TV shows and music they’re streaming, what viral videos everyone will be talking about on Twitter tomorrow, and all while posting selfies from every bathroom mirror they encounter.
Want Sturtevant’s advice? Walk into class and put up an image of what you made for dinner last night, or a screenshot of an achievement on your fitness app, or your cat getting a bath — he promises that students who have never spoken to you before will approach you later on and want to show you a picture of their pet or the meal they posed next to the night before. Once they start to come to you that first time, he adds, then you’ve pulled them out of their shell and you can get to learn about them.
Another way to manage our bias is something we’ve already covered in Strategy One — mindfulness. When you pay close attention to exactly what’s in front of you, take it in without judging it as good or bad; simply notice and accept things as they are.
Now that you’ve curbed your pesky penchants for nostalgia and judgment, it’s time to actively find common ground with your students and establish rapport.
Connection is a product of mastering the skill of being present. It is the ability to observe, interact, and affect the individuals with whom you co-exist. It is empathy, sincerity and understanding put into action.
As an educator, you connect because you are aware you need to be emotionally available to the children in your school. The relationship between a teacher and students should be authentic. It should offer them a sense of safety and elicit trust. It should, in turn, result in teaching methods that are full of precision and purpose. What you are witnessing is the snowball effect of exercised awareness.
The mental, emotional and professional investment you make in your students becomes more real when you enhance the connection between yourself and them, moving up from your role as a purveyor of information and into a legitimate stakeholder in each child’s future. That connection also facilitates a bridge to the people who care about a student most — their family. Your relationship with each student is a portal to their resources at home. Concerns over the child’s learning style, your pride in his or her strengths, talents, and areas of unfocused potential — all can and should be communicated. But it starts with that first, in-school connection. Working to include parents or guardians in a child’s education completes the academic triangle. In essence, your observations of a student inform your practice, which informs those who are continuing your teaching outside of the classroom.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
– Stephen R. Covey
Unknown Knowns (Or, Learning About Your Students)
Approaching a student with curiosity can take many forms and rewards you in multitudes. Little by little, make an effort to discover who the kids you spend your day with are as people, not just personalities. Finding out can be as simple as standing by the door each day as they file into the classroom, and greeting them individually. Sure. it may take awhile to determine what makes each one of them tick — you may have to just settle for learning their basic interests or the name of a pet. But being present, asking questions, and fomenting sincere curiosity about our students will not only make them feel valued and special, it will make your job more meaningful.
Find out their hobbies. Initiate conversations with them about sports, TV, or school activities — heck, sometimes just complimenting a particularly groovy T-shirt coaxes a kid out of his shell (though you probably shouldn’t use the word “groovy”). As your students begin to open up to your gentle prodding, trust your sincere interest in their lives, and feel safe enough to engage with you, you not only just formed a bond that will blossom throughout the school year, but you’ve opened up a valuable line of communication that will strengthen that child’s chances for academic achievement.
For the more pragmatic among us, it’s also a means of building up goodwill. No matter how many high-fives you get today, you’re going to get just as many sullen faces and folded arms tomorrow (at least with some students, anyway). The nature of the educational setting means that you have to be the non-parental authoritarian on occasion. Having a history of positive interactions with a student you must correct or discipline can go a long way toward mitigating the blow (and the blowback).
And yet another benefit of expending the effort to get kids to open up to you is that the things you don’t know could be hurting them in class — and if you don’t ask and they don’t feel they have an open line of communication with you, you can’t help them. Some of the lives children live outside of school can be downright heartbreaking. If a student in your first period class is repeatedly falling asleep at his desk or overly disruptive, perhaps he doesn’t get breakfast at home; perhaps you could guide him to the appropriate school resources he wouldn’t otherwise access on his own. That good student who suddenly starts “losing” her homework and doing poorly on tests? Maybe her mother is chronically ill and now she has no one to go over schoolwork with; maybe that person is you, but you won’t know unless she opens up.
Here’s how one innovative educator, Kyle Schwartz, managed to open all lines of communication with her students at once:
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Failure to Communicate
“You can still be a good teacher if you’re only marginally connected with your students, but not a great one. Students who remember the amazing educators who turned them on to an area of study or changed their life in some magical way remember the relationship most, not the lectures; they remember the personal comments you took the time to write on their paper, not the letter grade.”
But what if you can’t quite seem to form that coveted bond with a student? Does that affect the education that child receives? Moreover, is there an efficient, effective way to “hack” a connection in order to forge a relationship?
These are the sorts of questions that fascinate Prof. Hunter Gehlbach and his colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Their seminal work on the subject is encapsulated in the recent study, Creating Birds of Similar Feather: Leveraging similarity to improve teacher-student relationships and academic achievement. Essentially, they posit, when people perceive themselves as similar to others, greater liking and closer relationships typically result.
The experiment at its core was fairly simple: Gehlbach and his team visited a local high school and asked a group of 315 ninth-graders and their 25 teachers to fill out surveys with questions about their values and interests — things like what they thought the most important quality in a friend was and what they would do if the principal announced they had a day off. Out of these 28 questions, the Harvard team found five items each student had in common with his or her teacher and half of the teachers what they had in common with those students. Then, they informed those students and teachers of the common interests they shared. Half of each group was told nothing. After that, the researchers sat back and waited.
A few months later, both groups acknowledged feeling more similar to one another, and the teachers reported seeing themselves as having a better relationship with their students. In addition, the grades of those students who shared interests with their teachers saw an across-the-board bump. Boom! According to Gehlbach, the study handily illustrated that this type of simple intervention helps create entry points for more meaningful relationships in the classroom. It also turned out that, on the whole, the teachers spent more time working with the students, suggesting that the notable academic improvements were probably more a function of learning than liking.
The similarities-survey feedback proved to be an effective way for teachers to gain hold of a few levers that connected them with previously unreachable students and, in turn, fostered a greater sense of relationship — and, as you know by now, that can make all the difference.
The surveys, it proved, were just the nudge needed to get students and teachers in a position to see their interactions in a more positive way, which, research tells us, can lead to greater academic achievement.
One additional takeaway was that the actual questions in the survey seemed to matter. Gehlbach and his colleagues noted that in their previous attempts running this experiment — which proved unsuccessful — they ran a similar intervention but used superficial commonalities, like favorite pizza toppings and peanut-butter consistency preferences, as opposed to the common values and interests of the current study.
“When we find we have things in common with someone else that are actually meaningful,” Gehlbach surmised, “we have a sense we’re going to have our values and sense of self affirmed by spending time with this person.”
Given the outcome, this simple concept of ferreting out commonalities with students when none are obvious underscored for the researchers that fostering connections with other humans triggers intrinsic social motivation. It also points to a promising approach to cultivating individual perceptions of similarity that can be used as a means to promote a sense of relatedness between student and teacher. For students — particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds — forming this connection can mean everything from greater happiness and better health to increased engagement in school and a closing of the achievement gap. For teachers, well, I’ll let you fill in the blank.
The theory behind this avenue of research is that interacting with similar others supports one’s sense of self, one’s values, and one’s core identity. As for Gehlbach, he was so impressed with the results that he helped launch, and now directs, Panorama Ed, a web-based organization that offers educators free surveys and data analytics to help districts improve through enhancing teacher-student connections.
“If you look through the social psych literature on similarity, it’s really bordering on the absurd,” he said in recent interview. “Small, silly, superficial little similarities seem to produce real differences and real outcomes.”
Strategy Four Classroom Assignment: “Finding Common Ground”
For this course activity, I applied a reverse engineering technique to establish a common ground with my K-3rd grade students and forge a bond that would foster a mutually beneficial relationship. The reverse engineering technique entailed sharing a personal anecdote with the students to help them learn about me and possibly understand things we shared in common. An important aspect I considered before applying this technique was the classroom context; I teach special education elementary school bridge class (K-3rd grade) in a predominantly African American neighborhood and school. All the students in the classroom are eager to learn; however, they all have special needs that should be met individually to develop their reading and writing skills. Therefore, for this particular activity, I decided to bring along some of my old photos and films my mother took of me as a young kid. These materials told a story of the challenges I encountered at a young age as I began school, my parents’ support while doing my homework and how I slowly became a top achiever, as reflected in photos of me receiving awards.
By the end of this activity, the classroom was highly interactive, with even the most silent students sharing their experiences with school work and how their parents helped them go over their homework. The students’ reaction reflected results from literature which show that teachers’ use of oral stories can mark proximity to pupils and serve as a means to manage the classroom’s interaction order (Christensson, 2021). In this case, I shared an authentic personal story that the students could relate to and reinforced it with visuals to help establish a common ground and build rapport for open communication and classroom interaction. Besides the interaction, I noticed a significant improvement in my student’s academic performance. This improvement reinforced the premise that teacher-student relationships improve students’ learning and educational outcomes (Agyekum, 2019). Apart from the students’ academic advancement and enhanced interaction, I was also delighted with the socially and emotionally enhanced classroom environment and students’ motivation to share and learn.
References
Agyekum, S. (2019). Teacher-student relationships: The impact on high school students. In Journal of Education and Practice, 10(14), 121–122. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED595084.pdf
Christensson, J. (2021). Resemiotized experience in classroom interaction: A student teacher’s interactional use of personal stories during teaching placement. Multimodality & Society, 1(4), 497–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349795211059095
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