Connecting and Knowing - What Students Say They Value in their Teachers

A few years ago, I wrote up a study based on a question I put to each of our Year Twelve students indvidually, during a series of nearly eighty interviews I conducted over a couple of weeks. The question was: Who is a standout teacher for you, and why? I used a clustering method ('logico-inductive') to identify key themes and the student's words as evidence for these themes. The article I wrote, published in Australian Educational Leader 36.3 (2014) had the heading 'Connecting and knowing: the qualities of standout HSC teachers ...' In a broad sense, I had clustered the themes under the headings 'attitudes to students and work'; 'attitude to subject' and 'teaching methodologies.' Having repeated a variation on this study for three years (I am currently mid-way through the third year) - I can say with absolute certainty just how important 'connecting' is in the minds of students. This is not some sort of easy mateship or connection to youth culture. Rather, the students speak repeatedly about the effort the teacher makes to get to know them as individuals and how they learn - so that adjustments to teaching and learning can occur naturally and authentically.

Last week, I had my individual student meeting with Amy - an interesting thinker, one of those students who manage to combine being largely quiet with being forthright - when she does speak up, it's to challenge an idea or seek clarification on something important. Otherwise in class, she has a faint smirk on her face. In our meeting, she shared with me a humorous narrative she had written last year which concerned a parent and a child. The parent was religious and worried; the child was a thinker, amused at the world and full of direct questions - but careful not to go too far with her worried mother in their conversations about God. Reading the story helped me to understand the student in my class, to piece together something as I have described here. And this week, and this might be just a matter of my perception, I think she's spoken up a few more times and shared a few more thoughts, to the benefit of all.

So, creating a culture of thinking involves knowing not just our subject and what we know, but what our students know and what makes them tick. In this particular case, my student chose to share something that was comic and yet also cosmic. She needs something of the bigger picture. I think that I have found a way of helping to connect her learning in the classroom.