Establishing Rapport with Your Students

Ian Mole, UK

Ian Mole has been an English Teacher for twenty years and has worked in Crete and Poland as well as the U.K. He has taught business and general English classes at Regent London since 2006. E-mail: thesurfingbrides@aol.com

I think you should love your students.

That's right, but only in the context of your classroom and its immediate environs and at the same time I don't think it's a good idea to get too friendly with them. By 'love' I mean you should suffuse them with a tender loving care as if for that one-hour lesson they were your children. They should be able to trust you to establish an environment where they can try to speak freely and without fear of mockery and criticism. They should also be able to expect you to deal with their questions either immediately or as soon as you're able to find the answer. It's not good to be too soft with your students as I think most students expect some discipline in the classroom and respect a teacher who can enforce it.

Something that I think helps to establish a rapport is to tell the class a few details about yourself, your family and your background. Hopefully this will make you seem less of a fearsome figure and create a persona that seems human and even vulnerable to the students. So, I like to talk about various members of my family and some of my friends as well as drawing on my experiences in other countries. I spent a year in Australia many years ago but the exotic nature of that country, heightened by the fact that few of the many students I've taught have ever been there has made it a subject that they're often keen to find out about. With higher level students I've used travel articles that I've had published and I've found that this worked well, partly because again I revealed something of myself. This worked especially well if the article was about a student's home country.

One of my main memories of all the schools I've worked in is the sound of laughter and if you can make your students laugh, then of course they're going to feel more relaxed and look at the classroom as a place of fun rather than a torture chamber. In my experience students often laugh if I engage in mimicry e.g. recently we were talking about what to wear at job interviews and I acted out being a sexy woman in a miniskirt. It raised many a smile and I also enjoy doing things like that as it gives an outlet to the performer in me. I suspect that a lot of English teachers are frustrated actors, or maybe unemployed actors.

Of course you may not appear to be a fearsome figure at all and, if you're in your mid-fifties like me, may indeed come across at first to some younger students as a doddery old git. It's always a mistake to attempt “to get down with the kids” as you'd seem even more pathetic but if they discover that you actually do enjoy a lot of the music that they like and know something about the artists concerned, then they'll see you in another light. If you attend school parties etc, then it's another way to show your more relaxed, sociable side. Dancing, however, should generally be avoided.

I think it's a very good idea to include details about your students in exercises that you prepare for them. If I was a student, my heart would sink if I saw some carelessly photocopied exercise given out to me while if the teacher had taken the time to prepare their own exercise and had included some non-personal detail about me, I'd be pleased. I've found that most students have been very tickled by this. I happen to have a very good memory and I retain a lot of the things that come up in the class so that I can include these in exercises. Speaking of memory, it's important to remember your students' names as soon as possible and I've always felt embarrassed when I've momentarily forgotten someone's name. The more you remember about whatever they've told you, the more they seem to like it.

The main thing of course is to know the English language inside out and know how to teach it well. If you can't do that, all the other good qualities you may possess will be seen in a dim light by your students. I always enjoy testy students who have that look on their faces in the initial classes that suggests I don't know what I'm talking about. It's a challenge to gently try to bring them round to a state of trust. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's a good idea to get too friendly with the students i.e. you should be firm at the same time as being pleasant. If you get into the habit of going to the pub or wherever too much with them, then when the time comes to stop them coming into the class for being late it's going to be more difficult to do. I once worked with a guy who'd earlier worked in Indonesia, where there were lots of attractive young women in the school. A few male teachers had got sexually involved with some of their students and it had caused a lot of jealousy and bad feeling all round. This of course is taking friendliness to the extreme and it goes without saying that you should never do that.

Facebook is a very new phenomenon in terms of my teaching career and probably most of my Facebook 'friends' are former students of mine. The 'Friend Request' usually comes from their side but I occasionally ask one of them to become a friend of mine though I try to keep this till after they've left the class. I also don't usually ask female students to become 'friends' as this can easily be misconstrued.

There have been times during my twenty years of teaching English when I've really liked a student in the class but when I met them socially, I realized that I didn't like them at all. It didn't really bother me as I wasn't there to be just their friend and if their lively personality helped the class roll along, then whatever they were like outside wasn't of much import to me.

One to one classes with business people are of course a different kettle of fish to classes of young adults studying general English and if you don't establish a rapport early on, that clock can really drag its arms round the dial. Luckily this has rarely happened to me but sometimes I have, in the words of a colleague of mine, played the whore as I tried my best to accommodate whatever disagreeable views my student has just espoused. Polite disagreement is of course all good grist to the mill but when your student tells you that e.g. they hate black people, it doesn't exactly do much for your feelings of empathy and to tell the student what you really think of their abhorrent views would probably kiss goodbye to whatever rapport had existed until that point. In such circumstances you just have to bite the bullet and focus on your lesson. I had a one to one with a young Russian guy a few years ago who insisted that the 9.11 attack had occurred on 14th September 2001 so having failed to get an adequate reply as to why the attack had gone down in history as 9.11 and not 9.14, I quickly moved on to a more fertile topic of conversation. When you are getting on well in a one to one class, it's hardly like working most of the time as you enjoy a stimulating discourse with an intelligent, well-motivated companion.

Even after more than twenty years of teaching I still feel a bit nervous every day before I start classes but I also never want to lose that feeling as if I do, I think I'll have lost much of the pleasure in the job. If I ever switched off, I wouldn't put so much into it and feel the challenge that brings out the best in me. Sometimes you feel lousy for one reason or another but if you lose yourself in teaching the class, whatever problems may have been in your head before you started are forgotten about as long as you keep involved in the lesson. After the day's classes are over, harsh reality can sometimes fall heavily but thankfully this is a rarity for me.

The Train the Trainer course can be viewed here
How the Motivate your Students course can be viewed here
The Building Positive Group Dynamics course can be viewed here