2 Magic Keys for Building Relationships with Hard-to-Reach Students
All teachers know that positive teacher-student relationships lie at the heart of good teaching.
They make classroom management much easier.
So how do we build them? Especially with hard-to-reach students?
Let me introduce you to someone with a powerful yet very simple method for building relationships fast.
Joe Girard was a car salesman and earned the title of ‘World’s Greatest Salesman’ 12 years in a row.
He attributes this success to the relationships he built with people.
Basically, all he did was this…
Whenever he met someone - in the street, in a shop, at a party, wherever - he would ask their name and address and enter them into his database.
From that moment on, every month, these people would get a handwritten card from Joe.
Inside the card would be a brief but warm message along the lines of… ‘Hey, I was just thinking about you. Best wishes, Joe Girard’ or ‘Hey, I hope everything is going great for you. All the best, Joe Girard’.
At his peak Joe was sending out more than 14,000 handwritten cards every month. About 500 a day. He was employing 3 staff to help him write them.
Why would he do this?
Particularly when there was no mention of selling anything in them.
Think about this...
Most people change their car every few years.
Who do you think was first in the minds of each of those 14,000 people when they next thought about replacing their vehicle?
At the heart of Joe’s formula for building relationships are the two magic keys:
- Communicating frequently with a person and
- Showing that he cared about them.
If you think about all the important relationships in your life – those with your spouse, friends and family – you will see the same two keys in action.
We simply cannot have flourishing relationships unless communication is taking place regularly – through speech or various forms of written communication. And we show we care by showing interest in each other, helping each other and doing and saying kind things.
By concentrating on these two essential factors – frequent communication and showing we care – we have a simple but very powerful formula for building positive relationships with students.
If you’d like to explore novel, fast-acting ways of doing this, be sure to get a copy of Take Control of the Noisy Class.
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Rob Plevin
Author
As a new teacher in a comprehensive school, I really struggled to maintain control in the classroom before finally discovering how certain key strategies would lead to an immediate improvement in the way challenging students responded to me. Using these principles as a foundation I went on to develop a complete system for preventing and dealing with behaviour problems and improving student motivation in the classroom. The ideas are easy to implement and work FAST. I've spent the last 10 years teaching these techniques and concepts to literally THOUSANDS of teachers and lecturers in schools and colleges all over the world and their comments on this site should convince you that this system works.
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