#25 - 10 Tips for Student Relationships & Classroom Management in Language Class

Strong relationships is the first and most essential foundation to a target-language rich world language classroom. Tune in to see my top 10 tips for classroom management and building student relationships specific to world language teachers! 

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) What's up? Que lo que? E salut! World Language Teachers, welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class in a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, Devyn Gunning, the teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of adding to a plate with practical, authentic, and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training. We'll work together towards the magic of a community-based, target-language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go! Hey, welcome back to the World Language Hangout Spot of the Year. This is the Practical Proficiency Podcast. I'm so glad to be with you again for Season 3. My name's Devyn and I am the host today as well as the founder of La Libre Language Learning, or La Libre if you teach French, and we're here today to talk about an important topic that more and more of the teachers that I work with one-on-one are bringing up as a larger challenge than it's been in the past. This has always been on our minds as teachers, and we know that it is foundational to everything that we do, and a lot of the reasons why we even wanted to be a teacher in the first place, which is to build, maintain, and enjoy having a relationship with students that helps lead them to awesome outcomes in the classroom. That's really it, right? Like, the relationship that you have with your students is the foundation of everything that has been possible with their academic success, and it's the exact same thing for world language. However, for us, it's an even stronger emphasis on that relationship because what we're asking them to do is really scary. We're asking them to put themselves out there, and if you're anything like me, who my experience is teaching high school, a little bit of middle school, but mostly high school, you're asking teenagers to show up and show out in front of their peers and do something really scary, which is not something teens are wired to do. So they're only going to do that if you have a very strong relationship with them and that they trust that they're in a safe space in your class. How do we do that in this day and age where we're at? The more that I work one-on-one with the teachers who are part of my PD membership called the Practical Proficiency Network, and some of the messages that I get from you in emails and DMs and things like that often refer to this constant pressure and stress that is getting stronger every year as students are showing up differently in class because of the resulting changes in our environment with what's going on in the world, in the news. I mean, you know, you're loving it, you're breathing it. But because of especially the huge interruptions to school and to their social lives that many of our middle schoolers and high schoolers experienced during COVID, their skills and ability to interact with each other in many ways have been broken. So now you're the one left to pick up the pieces. So it's more important than ever, and it's also harder than ever to talk about building relationships in class. So I gave this workshop with my members to talk about this important topic, and I'm not an expert on building relationships. It's not something that I'm like, yeah, this is something I talk about a lot. But it is actually something I was very good at in my classroom, and I'm proud to say that I did have good relationships with the vast majority of my students. But it wasn't always that way, which is why I want to share with you today 10 ideas for how to build and maintain relationships with your students in specifically the world language context. So to take it back a little bit, when I was in my first year of teaching, I mean, you know what that's like. It was just everything was on fire all the time. And so the only thing that I had at my beck and call was relationships with students, the ability to connect with them. And I did that a lot through half of the time it would be the curriculum that I was using, the materials that I was using, but that took so long. So sometimes it just had to be, OK, like we're just going to spend some time connecting with each other and make sure that this is working out. But there were, you know, as you know, there were many fails and flops with that. And if you're a first year teacher, you're not alone. That's we get it. That's a whole part of the deal is figuring out what are the appropriate ways to show your students that you care about them while also making sure that they're not walking all over you all of the time. It is a very difficult boundary to maintain when you are a first year teacher. And if you're teaching high school when you are so close in age to them. So we get it. We understand. The next thing that happened is that I had to switch schools a year after that because of life circumstances. And that next year was like starting all over again because I was in a completely different community. And there were a lot of behavior referrals. And I thought that it was because I was in a different environment. And then the next year after I got some training and after I tried some different strategies, I realized that this was actually not a reflection of the student environment or the community that I was in, but it was actually a reflection of me. So another title that you could possibly put for this podcast is how I went from 35 referrals per year to less than five, because that was a that was a reality for me. And I want to share some of the things that I employed that year that I was more successful with students and the ways that I got there. So here are 10 ways that you can better connect and maintain good working relationships with students. Let's dive into it. First of all, I would say that the reason I'm talking about number of incident referrals is because I used to think when I was a baby baby teacher that the number of referrals is a reflection on the students. But now that I've been around the block a little bit and worked with hundreds of teachers and have been a teacher myself for five years, I'm now out of the classroom. But after being a teacher for five years, I am inclined to think after teaching in many different environments, a most of them underfunded in a rural school, a huge suburban school and an urban school all under a title one umbrella, whatever. But many people use that as some sort of cover as to why things aren't connecting with their students. So I would just like to put it out there that those are always the circumstances that I have taught in. And I would say that in my own experience, the number of behavior incidences and referrals were more often a reflection of me and how well I was able to manage what was going on in my classroom and what was going on. So I think that we as a teacher community, there are, of course, always exceptions. There are, of course, always specific communities that are dealing with so much more than a single teacher could do anything about. But there are too many teachers who think that they're the exception when actually they're the rule. So I would hope that this episode in particular will give you some tactical tips from a world language perspective because you don't often get management help from a world language perspective that will help you connect with your students. Here's number one. The first thing I would ask you to do for maintaining relationships in world language and even just building is that I would get curious about every behavior that you're experiencing in class. Before you redirect a behavior, ask why. Wonder why. What is the possible source of the behavior? Ask some questions and make some changes because not every student does the same behavior for the same reason. Sleeping in class is a huge example of this. This would be one of the easiest ways that you can get less incidence referrals in your classroom is if you instead of treating every incidence exactly the same way. We'll talk about consistency later. But first, get curious. Address it, but get curious and examine why. Because you will you'll experience that not every student does the same thing for the same reason. It will tell you a lot about them. Under that same umbrella, behaviors or communication. This is just another way that students tell us about what's going on. What's going on in our class? How are they receptive to what's going on in our class? Is it comprehensible to them? Because you'll find that at times when you're not comprehensible, that's when stuff really starts to hit the fan. Also, it tells us a little bit about what's going on in their heads and what's going on in their lives. So think about this in another way is that when I say behaviors or communication, I've been screamed and cursed at and yelled at just as much as the next teacher. It doesn't really make it any easier or more acceptable, but it does make it easier to deal with knowing that it's a message. So if you can separate your immediate reaction to being flipped off in class and think about for a second, okay, what is this person trying to communicate to me? If you label it as communication instead of just straight up immediate blatant disrespect, then we know where to go from here. That being said, whenever the communication is dangerous, it's dangerous to you, dangerous to others, dangerous to themselves, examine it later, get admin. We already know that. Number three is something that teachers, especially newer teachers need to remember, which is that this is a community, but communities don't actually work when they're egalitarian. You are in charge. They want you to be in charge. You're in charge and they have a say. That's actually what they want. They don't want you to stop all over them. They want to have a say and they want you to lead them. Students have zero right to challenge your decisions or argue in most everyday situations. And there's no reason to give that attention or undercutting behavior because that is your job, your role, and everything. When students try to negotiate the amount of work they have to do, that's a no. But if students legitimately have something that is a concern of theirs and they're trying to bring it to you, their community leader, wouldn't you want somebody to listen to you if you had a legitimate concern? Put yourselves in their shoes. If you were bringing something to your administrator or principal that wasn't in it, maybe might be perceived as a negotiation of work, but is really you saying, hey, this isn't working. You're my community leader and I need this, this, and this from you. And they didn't even bother to listen to you and just said, well, I'm in charge. That doesn't work. That never works in a community setting. So what you need to do to establish a good relationship with your students and create a solid working environment is make sure that everybody understands their role. You are the leader of this community, but they absolutely have a say and you deserve to hear feedback from them and respond to it because if you didn't, then it's not actually a community, it's just you with an audience. And there are definitely teachers who would rather have an audience than a community. So I would ask, which one are you? However, if students are attacking you and you should know the difference between somebody who's looking for something because they need it and somebody who's attacking things, such as how long it takes for you to grade things, demand that you do this or that, things like that, that's somewhere where we know that this is an unhealthy community relationship. Students should, of course, have a say in the types of things that they participate in that are part of their learning experience. But you should help guide them in how to do that if they're not doing it in an appropriate way. Number four, I would suggest to you is always explicitly model the outcomes you want more than you think you need to. You can do this in the target language with language bits and idioms because more than ever, students need a lot of social emotional support and they really need some environmentally specific cues for specific situations. For example, like when students are giving presentations, you need to show them exactly how you expect them to participate in that. I would give them specific instructions for how to interact with you, how to interact with each other. Like, don't just get livid because somebody sent you a rude email. Call them to you and say, hey, how would you respond if somebody sent you this message? How would you want to help this person or change their grade, quote unquote, or, you know, do this or that if it was worded like this to you? How do you think you would respond? How often can you flip the script and model for them this is how things should work? This is the type of communication I expect. And you can help them hold each other accountable for those social skills. This is a huge energy and time suck for teachers. And one of the biggest things that will help to make your classroom community thrive. So if there are days where this is where you're spending most of your time, bravo, you freaking did it and you're doing an amazing job. It might also mean that you don't get to a lot of the target language outcomes that you wanted to today. But oh, my God, if you're showing a kid about how to actually give criticism to a partner who doesn't understand the activity and you show them how to do it kindly, do you like can you fathom how much you're setting them up for success in the future in all their other classes? The next time they do a group interview, which is something I had to do to get a job in college, like because I nailed the group interview, I was able to get a really good job in college. So you are setting them up for so much more success than just what's happening in your classroom. So I would say this is the best thing that you can do, even if you don't get to the target language goals that you wanted to. Number five, I would say is actually very hard for some teachers, and that would have to do often with how you were raised and your cultural background and your approach to the educational environment. But number five is trust first, trust always. Here's what I mean by that. Trust is not given to teachers inherently. And there are many people who were raised in an environment where you should give trust to teachers inherently because of the position that was given to you. However, this is not the experience of many students in school. So if you believe that your students should give you trust because simply you are their instructor, I would ask you to challenge this and get curious about it a little bit, just a little bit, because there are many students who have experienced with other teachers that they don't even give their own students respect, that not all teachers actually care about fairness, even if you do, and that many kids have trust issues with authority figures because of something that's completely out of your control. So it's not a reflection on you and on what's going on. But know that not every authority has actually earned this trust model that many teachers feel that they have inherited from their position. So examine that before you walk into a conversation with students thinking that you have trust that is unearned, because that can actually be a huge factor of a contentious relationship between you and your students that you might not be aware of. And if you examine this a little bit and maybe even explore it with specific students that you can tell just like will not give you the time of day, that earning their trust a little bit by simply doing the things that you're already good at, being fair, being consistent, showing up for them, that might be something that they're actually not expecting from you and that they will respond to. Number six is something that is very much so a part of the teacher code, but it's so hard to remember in the moment. So I'm just saying it here as muscle memory so that when you need it, you know it. Calm is your superpower. You are the adult and your job is to model calm. So when you are faced with the irritation, with the insults, with the disrespect, with tension, with the fights, with the undermining, your power comes from the calm. So I would ask you, how can you retrieve your calm when you know that this is something that's waiting for you in your classroom? I had a couple particular classes that I knew those things were waiting for me. So there were some parts of my routine that I would do during my planning period instead of planning lessons, because this is more important, because you can't get anything done if you can't maintain calm in the classroom environment. So things like silence, waiting for a response instead of immediately responding to what you, to what a student has said or done as long as you're in a safe place, and a controlled tone of voice and face is the most powerful response to strong behavior communications. Not actually calling the administrator. So I would say that if you are constantly outsourcing the authority of your classroom to an administrator, now I've taught in environments where this was actually not even available, like you could call and nobody would come, and that's a totally different situation. In this case, like this really is your superpower. But if you're in the type of school environment where administrators are very much so there to come take kids out of class whenever they're being disruptive, be very selective about this choice, because we want students to be in our classroom as much as possible. And the disruption should be pretty high for them to be removed. What can you do to maintain the calm when there is a disruption? And that's going to be different in different situations. And something that you can do to, once it gets to that point of escalation, what are, there's a lot of prevention that you can do, actually. And number seven is all about prevention. And that is to catch students being good. This is part of many systematic behavior response systems that schools have. But just the idea itself is something that you don't have to do systematically, but just every time that you can, every time that you remember. Catch students being good. Empower students individually and specifically with powerful recognitions and reminders of when they're doing the most and when they're being amazing. Empower students to be recognized for how awesome and special they are, because they remember stuff like that forever. There are adults that remember that kind of stuff. So with students with especially strong behavior communications and responses, I would intentionally catch them being good often and praise when you see what they do the best. And don't take for granted your all-stars. Like those kids that you know that you're relying on for some well-needed, some people that are your lifesavers when you're like trying to stay afloat during a classroom activity and you know that like, oh my God, these are the only two that are going to actually answer me. Don't take those kids for granted. Like I would acknowledge them as much as you can. Send them a parent note home. Do whatever you can to recognize and praise them because they need it too. They need it as much as the other students do. Every kid wants your attention. So what kind are you going to give them? Number eight is a personal trademark of mine, and that is that every age likes stickers. So you might teach kindergarten and you know that they love stickers. You might teach middle school and you know that they still actually like stickers, but they also like other prizes. And when I was teaching high school, these kids also liked the equivalent of stickers. So what is the sticker equivalent for your age group? Every age group likes rewards. My husband is in the military and they get badges that are literally attached to their freaking vests with Velcro. I took one look at that. It was like you get special things to put on your vest for doing PT stuff. That's literally a sticker. You're literally like kindergartners getting stickers. How do you not see this? So and he said, yeah, I mean, everybody likes stickers no matter what age group you are. So this is part of the whole deal is that if it's it's every age group likes stickers, no matter who you are or what organization you're a part of for sure. So prioritize rewards for everyone, no matter even if you think you have older kids, they will still like it. Trust me. Number nine is really important, and that is seek to understand before seeking to be understood. This is from a book I read a long time ago, but this one sticks with me the most. This is from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And in the classroom setting, this seeking to understand before seeking to be understood is valuing your students and valuing their what they bring to class and valuing what are they trying to communicate with you? Many a times when there's an issue with a student, something that you can do is just say, OK, we'll talk about this in a minute. You continue what you're doing and then you either go to them to their desk to have like a little chat or you take them to the door so that you can chat a little bit more privately and say, hey, I noticed that something is going on. Can you can you categorize this for me? Can you tell me what what was that that happened back there? And ask them to describe name and categorize their own behavior first. Seek to understand first instead of telling them, you know, oh, this, that and the other so unacceptable like that might need to come later. But first ask them, why do you feel compelled to do that? What's going on here? What do you think is see if you can seek to understand before seeking to be understood? Number 10, we're going to close off with this wonderful mantra that will help you with all of the things that we've talked about here. It's a nice little wrap up on this. And that is address it, address it early, address it often, address it consistently, whatever it is, whatever this thing is that is getting the way of your instruction. For most people, it's cell phones. Everyone is watching, not just the person who is communicating that specific behavior or is off task or needs that redirect. Address it early, often, and consistently. So when you let something slide that might be an important expectation for you, or it hinders the safety of the classroom space, or if it's something that you talked about with one student yesterday and then you missed today, you're going to need to do damage control if you miss it. So I would make sure that this is in your head. Address it early, address it often, and address it consistently. This is what takes the most time, effort, and energy, which is why you need to prioritize energy management in the classroom, which is a whole different topic that I have done a workshop with my members on as well, and maybe we'll be able to do another mini-sode on this topic as well. But this is the most important thing that you can do in your classroom to maintain successful relationships, is when students get from you that you are fair and consistent and serious about your expectations, everything about running a classroom community becomes easier. Model and demonstrate those behaviors that you expect. Instead of saying things like, hey, it's important to start on time, you should start class on time. Instead of always going to the students who haven't started working yet, that's a great time to be like, okay, we've already started, we're going into things, it's much more effective than talking all the time about how important it is to do things. If you address it consistently, address it early, and address it often, things will fall a little bit easier into place for you. It creates a lot of trust. So those are the 10 things that I learned about how to build and maintain relationships in my world language classroom. And the last thing I'd like to leave you on the note is that if at any time your gut is telling you that it would be easier to do in the L1, do it in the L1. Because you can't actually get to the L2 stuff until they trust you, until that trust rapport has been established. And there's many fabulous conversations on here with guests about how you can do that, how you can get further into that. But without trust, it's not going to happen. So that would be my last piece of advice for you. And with these 10, I hope that you have a much better feeling about going into your classroom this week, knowing that you're well equipped to handle whatever comes your way. And I'm wishing you a lot of strength with this because it takes a lot of energy to manage and maintain a community with good relationships. That is the number one task. That's what we're here for first, because nothing else can happen unless this does. Thank you so much for being here with me today, for sharing some time with me on your commute, or in the car, or wherever you're listening or watching this. And I will see you next time. Bye for now.