It is Spring Break in my part of the world, which means teachers and students have some time to reconnect and relax. My wife and I have even had a little time to get away and enjoy the beautiful Alberta Rocky Mountains.
While on our getaway, she shared a story of working with some clients that needed some extra help. People who were having a difficult time and were struggling to ensure their family was safe. She needed to evaluate how she might best help and in the end she was able to assist them. Afterwards, the clients expressed how thankful they were and how they felt cared for.
What her story reminded me of was that people need kindness, care and love. Her clients were grateful for the help, but they also needed a caring relationship.
I believe this to be a universal truth. I believe that we are all looking for some kindness, caring and compassion. I believe we are looking for a little love.
I say this because it is my belief that at the core of teaching are the relationships that we develop with our students and community. Teaching and learning is about relationships. The progress we make is increased when our students feel cared for and loved. All great teachers and school leaders know this and constantly work to develop the relationships that they have with the people they serve.
We can espouse the virtues of self-reported grades as one of Hattie’s top strategies until we are blue in the face (and trust me I do… I am a huge Hattie fan), but the reality is that if a student doesn’t trust you they won’t give you their true vision of their capacity. In fact, when looking at a list of the most effective teaching strategies almost all are much more powerful when a strong relationship exists.
This idea also reinforces a truth that has been circulating among educators some time. The idea that we serve people and that people should drive our decisions. This idea relies on data and information, but always circles back to the individuals that we serve.
Have you ever been in a meeting of teachers and someone pulls out the Visible Learning strategy list and says something like “Alright, let’s start at the top and work our way down”? This would be the opposite of human driven decision making. By blindly starting at the top of the list we forget that the students we serve have individual needs and priorities. We need to let both the data and the people guide us.
Notice how I did not say, “forget all the data stuff and just be kind to the students”. There is a bit of a Maslow’s hierarchy going on here with interplay between the levels. At the base is the love we show and the relationship that we develop with students. If we stay at this level, learning will not be effective. We need to ensure that we are leveraging the relationship and the knowledge we have of our students to move them forward in their learning by using effective teaching practice and refining our strategies all the time.
We need to be effective teachers, but this is done more easily when we show our students a little love.
Corey Haley 