Introduction

• Your most important job as a teacher is to create appropriate and pleasant conditions in which learning can take place while maintaining a good, stable relationship with your students. Your relationship with the students largely depends on your personality, attitude, and intentions. No teacher is ever identical to another teacher, just like every student is an individual. Teaching is certainly not an easy job, and it takes effort, time and experience to get better at it. However, there are certain things that you should always avoid doing in order not to spoil your relationship with the students.

1. Being Cold and Distant

• While it’s certainly important that you maintain your authority over the class, you should never allow yourself to become one of those cold and distant teachers that the students are scared of or uncomfortable around. If you act this way you will never be able to establish a good rapport with the students and you will surely hinder their learning because they simply will not feel comfortable enough in the classroom.

2. Unwillingness to Elicit and Accept Honest Feedback

• Sometimes, while teaching, we can unknowingly do certain things that can bother our students. Maybe you’re talking too quickly or using complicated language. Natalie Schwartz, a renowned author of multiple books on teaching, explains how to deal with this in her her article. “Eliciting feedback can entail asking a simple question such as, So how was the homework last night?” All in all, you have to elicit and accept feedback without getting angry or offended when you get it.

3. Being Too Friendly

• You absolutely should have a positive attitude towards your students and you should strive to create a pleasant learning environment in the classroom, but there is a difference between being a good teacher and being their friend. Make sure that they still remember that you are the teacher and that they have to listen to you.

4. Being Hypocritical

• There is always that teacher that strictly forbids students from using their phone in class, but when their phone rings, they pick up the call and chatter away, simply because they are the teacher and that ‘’gives them the right’’ to do something they don’t allow students to do. If teachers establish certain rules in class, then they need to remember that the rules have to apply to them too.

5. Humiliating students

• This one should go without saying, but you should absolutely never humiliate your students in any way. Melissa Kelly, a writer at ThoughtCo. says in her article that, if humiliated: ‘’The students will either feel so cowed that they will never feel confident in your classroom, so hurt that they will not trust you ever again, or so upset that they can turn to disruptive methods of retaliation.’’

6. Flying With the Fastest

• If you only pay attention to the students that speak first, you will definitely get a wrong impression about how easy or difficult the lesson is. Not everyone can learn at the same speed and by only paying attention to the best students, you will lose track of the rest of the class, which will make them feel inadequate and they won’t really understand the lesson. John Marks, an expert in classroom management from says that you should ‘’Try directing questions at individuals and sometimes actively ‘shh’ the loud ones, or simply not hear them.’’

7. Unwillingness to Repeat or Explain

• As Derrick Meador, a writer at ThoughtCo.claims in his article on teaching, ‘’You should never say things like: ’’I’ve already gone over that. You should have been listening.”Make sure that the students know that it’s safe to ask you about anything they find difficult or confusing. It is like R. J. Odora points out in his research study on using explanation as a teaching method “In the context of education, good explanation in teaching is essential for unlocking the students’ understanding of the subject.’’

Conclusion

• To conclude, as teachers grow in experience, their teaching improves, but until then, it is crucial that they learn to maintain a good relationship with the students. Hopefully, this article will help teachers understand what to pay attention to in their behavior and attitude towards the students so that everyone is happy and all the conditions for learning are met.

Kate Khom

• Kate is passionate writer and learner located in Kyiv, Ukraine. She likes to help people and make this world better. Feel free to chat with her on Twitter or check her website .

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