What Middle Schoolers Want from Relationship Building with Teachers
Hint: it’s all about them
I had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall at a design thinking facilitation with 8th graders who are tackling the complexities that come with questions like, “What is school?”
It was a fantastic learning and once the young people started to open up, they got on a roll of sharing surprising and mind-blowing reflections.
There were a lot of takeaways. One of them, for me at least, was just how much middle schoolers value relationships with their teachers (even if they wouldn’t use those words). For the most part, their biggest gripes about school boiled down to having teachers and adults who know them and care about them.
Don’t make me do a review just because someone else needs it.
Don’t assume I already know something and skip over the review.
I don’t like to be bored in class but I’ll learn boring stuff if the teachers tell me why it’s important for me to be successful.
It was like they were screaming, “Get to know us!!!”
Which leads me to one young man’s observation that blew my mind:
“Kids understand that Teachers have lives outside of school. But we don’t need to hear all about it. We need them taking that time to understand us. We aren’t adults yet.”
It’s still the first days of school. While meaningful teaching and learning is happening, it’s also expected that valuable class time is being dedicated to getting to know one another, fostering classroom culture and building relationships. These are proven best practices and well worth the time.
Most of us probably share a little about ourselves with students. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m guilty of intentionally offering details I think might hook them. For example, I’ve told middle school Spanish students that knowing Spanish has helped me get jobs in the Real World, and that I got paid to be a casting assistant on a movie and a tour guide in Costa Rica. If they thought that was cool, my reasoning went, then maybe they’d think my class was cool and want to do a good job.
What I heard from this student was that taking that approach is a waste of time. In the parlance of Love Languages, he was conveying that for him and his peers, their language is Quality Time, and giving them our undivided attention.
Building relationships with middle schoolers isn’t about anything we tell them about ourselves; it’s all about showing we care about what they tell us about themselves.
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