Will Whitten

This week’s reading in Teaching Each Other focused around teacher student relationships. Goulet and Goulet poin out that these relationships are “foundational to engaging Indeginous children in learning” (p.98). The cree word that really stuck with me this week was weechihitowin– being helpful and supportive. I think by nature many teachers fall into this category as people but for me the key here is being supportive. In the book Calvin Racette shares his story- “It Wasn’t Math, It Was Relationship Building” (p.98-104). Much of Racette’s story echoes my teaching philosophy. If you build relationships with students beyond the classroom and beyond the curriculum you have to spend less time on classroom management. The students will do it for you. Racette talks about students saying things like “Don’t mess with Coach, or you mess with me” (p.101). These moments where the students have your back can go a long way in saving you from having to do a lot of classroom management. These relationships however don’t just come from being the coach or the volunteer or the teacher who helps with musical, you need to develop these relationships overtime. The rest of the chapter goes on to talk about how you construct these authentic relationships.

Goulet and Goulet lay out the relationship building in sections. These are believing in the student and developing close, personal bonds. In order for a student to understand and develop a realtionship with a teacher in the classroom the teacher has to first demonstrate belief in that student. This mean belief in their ability to learn and in their ability to change. Many teachers in the past often approached Indigenous students with a lens that was created through institutionalized racism. This was a defecit lens. The students were coming in at a defecit because this institutionalized racism peremeated Education to lead teachers to believe that Indigeneous students were often behind in learning because of difficult home lives or poverty, these were things that were seen as being beyond a teachers sphere of influence and therefore allowed some teachers to write students off as being unable to learn or in a learning deficit. The problem as we now know well is that we can not generalize a group of students based on race, or community or whatever. All students come to us with a history we can’t control or know but if we choose to build relationships with students we can demonstrate a belief in the student’s abiltiy to change (106). This is similar thinking to Dweck’s Growth Mindset and allows teachers to celebrate not only the student’s ability to learn and retain knowledge but also their ability to adapt and change and become the student and the person we believe they are capable of being. This mindset shift can take teachers out of the defecit model of thinking and help support those students in their space as they grow.

Goulet and Goulet suggest that the way to do this is through genuine caring, showing humanness, recognizing that each student is special, building reciprocal respect and trust, respect and equitable leadership. This list shows us that there is no “quick fix” when it comes to building relationships. Just like Stephen Covey’s emotional bank account analogy teachers need to invest time in students both in and out of the classroom. One strand of this that really holds true for me is the showing humanness. I feel like for so much of my education teachers had to have this aura about them as a keeper of knowledge, a superior, infallable in their knowledge and behaviour. The biggest thing I have found that helps me create bonds with the students not just in my classroom but in the school at large is sharing personal details, sharing jokes and laughter and being fallable. I ofter share with student’s that I am not perfect, I ask for the same grace I give them. I’ll tell them about things that went well but I really lean into things that didn’t- self-depricating humour can go along way with teenagers. I like to have moments where they think I’m cool but I know that no matter what I am still a teacher and therefore I can never really be cool in the eyes of teenagers so I lean into dorkiness and intentionally use slang wrong and any other ways I can get them to cringe for just a minute- so we can laugh together, they can see I am human and we can build that trust, respect and relationship