A teacher reflects on her biggest lesson: building genuine connection with students matters more than any technique. Trust and rapport are foundational to everything else working, yet teacher training programs barely teach it.
Someone asked me the other day, what is the biggest lesson you learned as a teacher? That was actually a really hard question. I started thinking of things I learned in my, you know, studies to become a teacher, things in my master's degree, but really what did I learn from being in the classroom and being around my students every day? And what really kept— I kept coming back to was the power of connection and rapport. And how that just always changed everything. That changes everything as a parent, that changes everything as a teacher with your students, as a teacher with your colleagues. If you can develop a good connection, trust, rapport with a student, everything comes after that. And that's what we don't always learn in our undergraduate degree, in our graduate programs, but that's the most important thing. You agree?
