Reflective Practice

CHAPTER 5

SOFT TACTICS FOR LIKABILITY

Many 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.

We had some out-of-town educators who were observing the class, and after observing us in action for some time, one of them asked me—in front of the entire class—why the students were so cooperative with me. Given the nature of the students, he found this quite surprising. I replied, “Once they like me and respect me and know how committed I am to them, they generally want to have a good relationship with me. They don’t want to disappoint me with bad behavior or really poor schoolwork. That’s when I can make them feel guilty if they do.” At that point, a student I had taught for two years immediately interrupted and yelled out to the entire group, “Oh my god, he’s soooo good at it too— making me feel guilty if I disappoint him!”

If this student didn’t like me, if this student didn’t respect me, then she would have cared little to nothing about disappointing me, and I would not have been able to use this to motivate her to be successful at school. This only makes sense. As researchers Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini (2008) remind us, “The more we like people, the more we want to say yes to them” (p. 6). This goes for us as teachers, and it also applies to our students. Ultimately, this student, whom many would consider as at risk, went on to university and obtained a degree in social work.

As you put this chapter’s tactics to work, and as I have noted in previous chapters, it is important for you to reflect on the ethics of influence, which we will explore in detail in chapter 16 (page 193). As teachers, it is clear that the more our students like us, the more influence we have over them. But influence is like any tool—we can use it for good or for evil. We need to be very vigilant about why we want our students to like us and for whose benefit we will use this influence. Ultimately, the influence we have on our students must be directed toward what they need and what is good for them.

This gives rise to the question: If a great relationship (one where our students like us and care what we think about them) is foundational to good teaching—how do teachers establish this kind of relationship? What things can you do to create and sustain this kind of effective teacher-student relationship with your students? To answer these questions, this chapter explores the following tactics. • Use the power of perceived similarity. • Create similarities between you and alpha students. • Use mirroring to establish similarities. • Speak to the elephant, not the rider. • Sell yourself first, then the curriculum. • Use the positive-word strategy with students you dislike.

TACTIC: USE THE POWER OF PERCEIVED SIMILARITY

In chapter 2 (page 17), we looked at the power of in-groups and how human beings generally prefer members of their own group (whomever and however they perceive that to be) to people who are not members of their group (McIntyre & Blanchard, 2012). This is hardwired into our genetic code; it operates within us at the subconscious level. We tend to like people who we believe are like us in some ways, and the more ways they are similar to us, the more we tend to like them. John Ortberg (2017) sums this up nicely in the title of his book, I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me. Who among us hasn’t had that thought on more than one occasion? Brown (2013) puts it this way, “One important pathway to liking is perceived similarity. When people see you as similar to them in some fashion, they immediately—and almost automatically—like you more” (p. 6).

It would be unwise to underestimate the power that perceived similarity has to get people to agree to our requests. In a series of experiments designed to test the power of similarity to obtain cooperation, researchers Jerry M. Burger, Nicole Messian, Shebani Patel, Alicia del Prado, and Carmen Anderson (2004) test the impact that having the same birthday or having the same name has on people’s willingness to cooperate. In the study, participants were asked to read an eight-page essay and