CHAPTER 5
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SOF T TAC TICS FOR LIKABILIT Y
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any teachers discount the importance of having their teachers like them. In her TED Talk, Rita Pierson (2013), a veteran teacher who began her career in the 1970s, nicely sums up her thoughts about such thinking as she relates a conversation she had with a teacher colleague: A colleague said to me one time, “They don’t pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it—they should learn it. Case closed!” Well, I said to her, “You know, kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” She said to me, “That’s just a bunch of hooey.” I said to her, “Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear.” Needless to say, it was.
The bedrock of teaching is the relationship between you and the students you are attempting to teach. The more challenging or at risk the students, the more critical it is to have an effective teacher-student relationship if you are to have any hope of being successful teaching them. While the teacher-student relationship can have elements that are also found in a parent-child relationship, or even in some small ways elements of a relationship
that a student may have with their friends, the teacherstudent relationship is unique. First, it typically has a start and end date. It usually begins at the start of the school year or semester, and it normally ends to a large degree when that term is over (unless a student takes multiple secondary-level classes in a teacher’s subject area). Thus, you have a relatively short window of opportunity in which to build an effective working relationship with your students. Teachers who work hard at having an effective working relationship with their students will naturally find that these relationships have far more depth in June than they did during the first week of September. Thus, the degree of your influence on your students can be directly impacted by how much time you have spent with them. You can have a far greater degree of influence at the end of the term than you can at the beginning— if you have laid the necessary groundwork—and being likable is one aspect of this work. I want to illustrate this point with a story about some high school students I taught. Many in the school community considered these students, for the most part, to be extremely challenging. At the time this event occurred, we had been together for ten months, and I was preparing them for high school completion exams—exams they would have to pass to get their high school diplomas.
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