How Students Respond to Teacher Behavior

provide the requester with feedback on the content of the essay. When participants were led to believe that they shared the same birthday as the requester, they agreed to the request 62.2 percent of the time, while those who believed they did not have anything in common with the requester only agreed to the request 34.2 percent of the time (Burger et al., 2004). Almost twice as many people agreed to a request simply because they thought they shared the same birthday as the person asking the favor.

In a follow-up study, participants were asked to donate money to a well-known charity (Burger et al., 2004). People who were led to believe they had the same first name of the requester donated an average of $2.07. For those who shared no similarity with the requester, their average donation was $1.00. Donations more than doubled based simply on the fact that the person asking for a donation had the same first name. Such is the power of perceived similarity to enhance the likelihood of obtaining cooperation from others.

Cialdini (2007) puts it this way:

We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. Consequently, those who wish to be liked in order to increase our compliance can accomplish that purpose by appearing similar to us in a wide variety of ways. (p. 173)

There are myriad ways you can use similarity to establish a connection with your students and thus enhance the likelihood of obtaining their cooperation. Burger and colleagues (2004) look at the power of having the same first name or sharing the same birthday, and these are strategies you can use as a teacher if, in fact, you actually share these similarities with some of the students in your classes. Obviously, you will not share the same name and birthday as most of your students. However, the power of similarity works in many other areas as well. For example, you might share any of the following with your students. • Play or like the same sports • Come from the same hometown or country • Play the same musical instrument • Live in the same neighborhood • Have gone to the same school when you were a child • Like a particular movie or the same TV shows • Have the same hobbies or share similar interests (coins, cars, cooking, music) • Share similar opinions about certain things • Admire the same people

For your target students to know the ways in which they are similar to you, you will have to find out about the likes and interests of these students. As a classroom teacher, one way I accomplished this was to start the year with an assignment that I called the Newspaper of the Self. I would have students write a newspaper in which they were the only topic. In the sports section, they would tell about the sports they played or liked to watch. If they hated sports, they would tell me why. The TV section was about their favorite TV shows, and the same with music and movies. The travel section talked about the best holiday they ever had or the fantasy holiday they would take if they could go anywhere they wanted. You get the idea. This assignment was a gold mine of information that I could then use to establish similarities with each of the students I taught. In my experience, if you maximize what you know about your students, you will almost always find something you share in common.

Note: You will find a complete description of the Newspaper of the Self assignment in the appendix (page 217).

TACTIC: CREATE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN YOU AND ALPHA STUDENTS

There will be times when you have a student or group of students who are natural leaders. They have established themselves as the alpha students among their peers (students whose peers like and respect them; the

leaders and influencers in your classroom), and perhaps they have held this position for several years before they arrived in your classroom. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to change this kind of well-established social hierarchy. Instead, you need to figure out ways to have it work for you. You need to get these alpha students on your side in order to vicariously influence the students who follow them.

This is of particular importance when these alpha students impact your classes in a negative way. You need these student leaders to be supportive of your classroom goals. This is simply a reality of teaching that effective teachers are well aware of. However, this prompts the question: How can you win these kinds of students over? What can you do to get them to like you a little bit so that you have a starting point from which to work on building an effective student-teacher relationship?

Your first step is to use the guidance in the previous section to look for similarities. If you have had conversations with these kinds of students, and you discover there is nothing that you have in common with them at that point, then you need to create similarity. As in the previous section, find out what the target student is interested in outside of school. How do they spend their free time? What movies, TV shows, or Netflix series do they follow? Are they into any kinds of sports—and if so, what kind of sports? What is their favorite team? Who are their favorite athletes?

Once you have this information, begin to familiarize yourself to some degree with a few of the things your target student is interested in. This may involve you watching a movie or an episode or two of a TV series you are unfamiliar with. It may involve you listening to some hitherto unknown music or looking up zorbing online. Once you have some familiarity with something this student is interested in, initiate a conversation on that topic. The fact that you know about this particular sport or music or TV show tells the student you have similarities, and that can be the way in as you seek to build an effective working relationship.

When I taught eighth grade, I was trying to win over a particularly challenging student who was quite influential in my class in a very negative way. Let’s call her Nicole. When I went on my exploration mission to see if we had anything in common, I discovered that Nicole liked a show I had never heard of called Jersey Shore. So, I watched a few episodes. To say this was a painful undertaking would be an understatement. To this day, I can remember a character on the show named Snooki relieving herself in a plant pot on an outdoor deck. However, when the opportunity presented itself, I mentioned something to Nicole about Snooki. It was amazing to see this student instantly open up and start babbling on and on about Snooki and the show. I was careful not to say anything negative about the show. I was in, and things just got better and better after that.

TACTIC: USE MIRRORING TO ESTABLISH SIMILARITIES

Another simple but powerful way to establish similarity and enhance likability is through mirroring. Voss (2016) tells us:

[Mirroring] follows a very basic but profound biological principle: We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. . . . Mirroring, then, when practiced consciously, is the art of insinuating similarity. “Trust me,” a mirror signals to the unconscious, “You and I—we’re alike.” (p. 36)

How can you mirror students you are trying to connect with? One simple verbal mirroring technique is by repeating the last one to three words of what the student has just said. If you use the student’s exact words, they will feel that you are really listening, that they have been heard. It’s a subconscious feeling of, “My teacher gets me—we’re alike.”

In other circumstances, you may want to repeat whole sentences or phrases—again, using the exact same words in the exact same order—that the student has used. In a study done with restaurant servers (Lynn, 2003), one group of waiters was trained to mirror the customers’