The obsession with measuring what students have learned fails to account for the importance of a teacher’s relationship with them (“Students Learn From People They Love,” The New York Times, Jan. 18). Teachers can know their subject matter, but if they can’t connect with their students on an emotional basis, learning suffers.
Researchers are beginning to understand how students’ brain activity meshes with teachers’ brain activity. That’s a step in the right direction. But if you ask veteran teachers why the same lesson works so well with one group of students but not with another, they’ll likely tell you that their personalities were not in sync. The goal, therefore, is to try to find ways to overcome that mismatch.
When I was teaching English, I tried to engage students in all my classes. Yet as hard as I tried to tweak the lesson to fit what I perceived as the unique personality of a particular class, too often the lesson was a flop. Perhaps that was because I didn’t give proper weight to cultural factors. When Third World immigration resulted in an influx of students from around the globe in my high school, the district gave teachers little support in preparing us.
In the dating scene, two people click when the “chemistry” is right. I maintain that the same thing applies to successful instruction and learning in schools.
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