Post 228: Show students you care--that's the key to success in teaching--online or face to face

Post 228: Show students you care

One of the most important components of successful teaching is that you have to show students you care about them before they care about what you are teaching.

When I first started teaching, all I cared about was getting through the lesson so that I could keep up with the curriculum of the other teachers.

I did not bother to learn about my students. Instead, I spent the entire class period lecturing about the lesson and I wanted to make sure I got each and every point I had planned for that class into my lecture.

I was annoyed that the students would not listen to me. Instead, students would talk among themselves and pretty much ignore me.

I  thought my students were not respecting the fact how much work had gone into the planning of my lesson.  At that time, I didn't even think to learn the names of my student, or to call on my students.

So, the situation got worse. The students got louder. Teachers from other classrooms began to complain that my classroom was too loud.

Finally, they had a senior teacher come in to observe my class to ascertain how she could resolve this problem.

The senior teacher said to me, "Do you care about your students each and every one of them? Do you know them personally?"

I stared at my senior teacher as if she were craxy and said, "I have 50 students in my class, how can I get to know all of them and besides I have so little time I need to focus on my lesson."

She said, "Teaching is not about 'getting through the lesson' or 'keeping up with the curriculum', it is about caring for the students." She then asked me, "Yvonne, why did you even get into teaching?"

This question made me stop in my tracks, as I remembered why I got into teaching I said, "I want to pass on what I know to my students. I want them to succeed."

She said, "So you see, you got into teaching because you care about your students. Now you have to show them you care, and it is not about just teaching a lesson, show them you care by getting to know them, what are their interests? their hobbies? Relationships is what counts like in any business. Once you get to know your students, then they will care about your lesson. "

I thought about what she said and in the following weeks, I spent less time on my lesson and did my dialoguing back and forth with the students and to my surprise, I had fun getting to know my students, their names, their lives, their life goals, their dreams and aspirations. Once I bonded with them, we had trust and it was out of that trust that students learned to care about the lesson.

Since that time, I have always thought about my students first, lesson second.  I have always made an effort to get to know my students as people and to have them get to know me as a person.  In an online environment, they call getting to know the teacher as Social Presence. They call the teacher knowing the hopes and aspirations of their students, Cognitive Presence. And teaching a well designed class--Teaching Presence. In time, I managed to have all three.