I remember being handed a book of policies and procedures to cover each day for the first week of school. Although the expectation at the beginning of the year (or semester) was always to cover the syllabus and get to the curriculum, I have never regretted making the decision to minimize the policies and maximize the time I spent building relationships. Learning names, seeing students as individuals, co-creating community guidelines, establishing jobs, and greeting students daily were foundational to developing relationships and creating the classroom culture.

My husband, a 10th-grade teacher, told me recently that he decided to start the year by having students share their strengths.  I love this idea but was shocked when he told me that half of his students didn’t feel that they had a strength to share. Just think about this for a minute– if students have made it through school and don’t have an idea of what their strengths are, we have failed them!

Committed to getting to know his students and having them identify their own strengths, he asked them to come back the next day ready to share something with the class. He shared how students came back the next day and juggled for the class, showed videos or demonstrated their dancing, skateboarding, speaking different languages and many more.  Although these students had a variety of talents, they hadn’t thought of them as strengths or that they made them special. The relationships and community were instantly different as each student was recognized and celebrated.People are more confident, passionate, and do better work when you focus on what’s right with them instead of what’s wrong with them. Creating a learning community that empowers learners to develop the skills and talents to manage themselves and build on their assets, rather than dwells on their deficits, maximizes the motivation, contribution, and impact of all learners.

Here are 10 strategies that you can use to get to know your students and continue to build relationships throughout the year in any learning environment:

10 Things I Need to Know About You 

A teacher shared with me that he changed his beginning of the year survey from standard questions like How many siblings do you have?,  What are your favorite subjects? and so on to an open-ended list of the “Top 10 things I Need to Know About You.”  Instead of static answers such as 2 brothers and art, he got responses like: It takes me an hour and a half to get to school each day.  My parents just got divorced. It takes me longer to figure things out and so I am quiet but I really do care about school. I love drawing. There are multiple ways to connect and get to know learners to better support them and often it begins with asking the questions and being willing to listen and connect. 

When we know our strengths and others do too we can be more open about how we can work together to accomplish our goals and more transparent about our needs.

Family Meetings

In the spring a group of teachers I was working with decided to check in on students at their homes and bring them some resources. They thought they were connected to students and knew them well but they learned more about their students and deeper empathy for them having connected with families and seeing their homes. Their students appreciated the effort and felt seen and cared about. They shared that it was the best thing for building relationships and better understanding their students and they wished that they had done it sooner. Teachers who do home visits to get to know their new students each year and acknowledge that it is an extra effort, but it makes a huge impact (for middle or high school, this might only be reasonable for your advisory group but still important). Although home visits are not always possible in many contexts, you can schedule a virtual call to check in with families or set up a space at school to meet up, connect and provide resources and materials that students will need with a personal touch that will set you and the students up for success. 

Empathy Interviews

Empathy interviews are a great way to just listen and understand your students and their families. You can do this in person or virtually but spending at least 30 minutes with your students is a powerful way to get to know them. You could also use these questions if you meet with families. Building empathy for your families and students will help you develop stronger relationships so you can better guide and support students in their academic and social-emotional goals.  Here are a few questions to ask:

• Tell me about yourself?
• What do you like about school?
• What do you not like?
• What have you been learning?
• What are you curious about?
• When have you felt the happiest? What do you enjoy doing?
• What can I do to support you this year?
• What ideas do you have to improve school?

One on One or Small Group Check ins

To ensure meaningful learning, we have to know the learners, help them understand and leverage their strengths, identify and work towards goals that matter to them and ensure they persist through challenges and setbacks. You can’t do this without building relationships first and maintaining them throughout the learning process. In lieu of a class period, could you take time to reach out and connect with each student? Both of my kids’ teachers schedule regular check ins and I did this in my graduate school course. It has changed the dynamic of the relationships and it is something I will do moving forward with every class.  Scheduling time with each student to connect, learn more about their circumstances, their goals, and ideas, created a different dynamic that built empathy and allowed for more personalization and meaningful connection. Students also recommend, reaching out via text, calling them or just checking in every so often to make the personal connection. 

Co-create Community Guidelines 

From day 1, it was important students felt that the classroom was ours, not mine.  The process of co-creating the community guidelines was modeled in my teacher education program and so it was only natural to do the same for my students.  I asked them to think about how they wanted to be treated and how they wanted to treat others in our community.  First, students independently reflected, then they shared in small groups, and finally, we put the big ideas into a list of 4-6 community guidelines.  Each class made a poster and they varied across the 5 classes, just like the kids, but ultimately helped establish the culture for each group. We all signed the poster that each class made and hung it up on the wall to remind us of our agreements with one another. 

Teach and Use Emotion Vocabulary

The Mood Meter, is an evidence-based grid of emotions. That helps you identify the “coordinates” to your current emotional state based on pleasantness and energy. The following description represents each of the quadrants. Yellow Zone (high energy, high pleasantness): pleasant, happy, joyful, hopeful, focused, optimistic, proud, cheerful, lively, playful, excited, thrilled, inspired etc. Links to Heart-Mind quality Alert & Engaged. 

• Green Zone (low energy, high pleasantness): at ease, calm, easygoing, secure, grateful, blessed, satisfied, restful, loving, balanced, comfy, cozy, carefree, mellow, thoughtful, serene, etc. Links to Heart-Mind quality Secure & Calm. 
• Red Zone (high energy, low pleasantness): peeved, annoyed, irritated, worried, frightened, jittery, tense, troubled, angry, furious, panicked, stressed, anxious, etc. 
• Blue Zone (low energy, low pleasantness): apathetic, bored, sad, down, uneasy, miserable, depressed, disheartened, exhausted, hopeless, alienated, despondent, despair, etc. 

Many teachers use it to check in with students, have them identify where they are walking in the door, or also to help them regulate their own emotion in the app.  The mood meter is about helping people (students and adults) name and identify emotions to become more aware of emotions, their impact so that individuals can choose to respond appropriately. 

You can use this as a daily check in or you can use it to debrief big events. Amy Fast, author and high school principal, shared how the mood meter helped their community to debrief the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Social Studies teachers facilitate a discussion and allowed students to process and use the mood meter to reflect and share how they were feeling.

Held a virtual discussion room today and invited any student who needed a space to discuss the attack on the capitol. We paid willing social studies teachers and counselors to help facilitate the discussion. It was scheduled for an hour and went for two. This was the mood meter. pic.twitter.com/P7SDSkaZhu

— Amy Fast, Ed.D. (@fastcrayon) January 8, 2021

Having a shared language to or images to talk about feelings can help build community, shared understanding and support to process the emotions appropriately. 

Establish Classroom Jobs 

As a teacher, I loved having classroom jobs. I created a list and students applied for the ones they were interested in.  I tried to match the kids and the jobs and they typically got one of their top 3 choices. This created a sense of ownership for the students and they were empowered to take on responsibilities that helped make the classroom learning community function.  Students had jobs like classroom photographer, greeter (for guests), birthday celebrator, historian, we even had a poetry reader that would kick off class and this ended up being a saving grace. Students would stop to listen to their peers and I never had to quiet the class, especially coming back from lunch. In a remote a or hybrid setting, there are different jobs but still very important like having helpers get class started with a connector activity, take attendance, or manage the chat, or check in on friends. There are so many ways that students can help!

Learning Circles 

One way that I love to connect learners is through learning circles or collaborative groups. It can be a text that they read, a common challenge they are working on, or anything but they meet regularly to check-in and learn together based on your goals and objectives, or theirs. This can be done virtually in small breakout groups that you manage or kids can set up on their own.

The teacher plays a pivotal role in connecting with individual students and their families, while also creating a community where students develop relationships with one another. The first few weeks are crucial as we get to connect with students and as a teacher, and remember that as the role of the educator evolves, human connection and guidance will become increasingly more- not less- important.

Show and Tell

Show and tell doesn’t have to stop after Kindergarten. Creating a place for students to chat and share what they are learning and doing in an asynchronous way can be a great way to connect kids without having a set meeting time. Just like many teachers have places in their classrooms for kids to share ideas, class challenges, or share pictures. A virtual space for this can make kids feel connected to you and the community. A high school teacher shared how she initially built a community by having students bring something to share and she continued to build on this practice once they felt comfortable with one another and speaking to the class. Next they picked a topic that they wanted to discuss from current events and practiced speaking, listening and connecting by sharing things that they cared about. When she wanted them to discuss their literary analysis, they were already connected, had built confidence and were able to share their ideas with an inclusive learning community.

Love Board

In Encinitas Union School District, the 6th grade team at Flora Vista Elementary School has created a learner-centered culture and on one of their walls they have a LOVE board where students can bring in things they love and are passionate about to share with the class. The wall is full of pictures, quotes, and is inclusive of the identities and interests of the diverse students. 

Our relationships and connections are built and sustained over time through opportunities to connect, discuss, and do things that matter. 

Belonging Versus Fitting In

In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown shares what she learned about the difference between fitting in and belonging from middle school students, who might be more consumed with this than any age group on the planet, but if we are honest, a little middle schooler lives in all us.

Here is what they said:

The difference between how one behaves when they belong versus when they are trying to fit in should make us all pause and reflect: Are we creating the conditions where people feel like they belong? When young people (and adults) feel pressured to fit in ways that are not healthy to their overall identities around gender, physical appearance, color of skin, sexuality and other aspects of themselves, they are not at optimal emotional states to learn, grow and contribute meaningfully. Given what we now know about the influence of our environments on learning, it seems clear that creating an equitable and inclusive learning community shouldn’t be an add-on when it is foundational to learning and living our lives to our fullest potential.