It's About The Bond

Relationships.  The state of being connected to another person.  A bond formed between two people.

Being connected is the cornerstone in education.  I believe that the special bond that exists between teacher and student is the most important thing.  Building and maintaining a trusting relationship with your students makes all the difference in their engagement, motivation and successes at school.

Often as primary teachers we teach a student for a year or two, depending on the size of the school.  We see them for six or seven hours, five days a week, for 40 weeks (perhaps times two).  The relationship that is established, or not established, in that time is critical.

A warm and loving relationship between student and teacher (and I make no apology for using the word loving here) ensures that the student is able to take risks with their learning, and has a soft place to fall when they fail.  They are able to become more confident learners because they know that there is someone behind them who has their best interests at heart and who fully believes that they can achieve anything.

I had two beautiful experiences today that really demonstrated the power of a strong relationship with a student.  The first was as I walked into the garden of a funeral I was attending for the grandmother of one of my students.  As soon as she saw me she flung herself into my arms, nearly bowling me over with the sheer exuberance and relief that I was there.  In that moment I saw how important it was to her that I had come to support her, and how that must have made her feel so loved.  The second was later in the day.  A student who had come to our school at the start of last year wanted to finally introduce my colleague and I to his father, who he doesn't see very often.  I could see the pride glowing in him as we spoke to his father about how wonderful his son was, how his eyes glittered as his father shared his own experiences of noticing what a fantastic sportsman and intelligent boy his son was.  It meant the world to him.

A strong bond ensures that we can give constructive criticism and it is received in a (hopefully!) positive light.  We can set high expectations and they will be strived to be met.  When something goes wrong, as it almost certainly will, we can hold the student accountable and they will know that we are doing it because we truly care about them as a person, and want them to be better.  Those things do not happen if the bond is not there.

These relationships that we build during those 1400 hours each year mean so much to our students.  Having a teacher who truly likes them as an individual, who seeks to understand and 'get' them, who believes in them and puts in the time to craft learning experiences for them personally.... it's priceless.