Develop Meaningful Relationships with Students during Remote Learning

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More than six months ago, the entire world went on lockdown, and, since then, life for many of us hasn't become any easier. The pandemic has affected a lot of spheres of public life, and education is one of them.

Since March, we've been hearing stories of students and their parents who struggle with remote learning. The lockdown has brought unprecedented changes to the global education system, for which students were not prepared.

Educators are also among those heavily affected by the pandemic. Not a long time ago, Time did an interview with a dozen teachers across the U.S, who shared the most common problems they face during remote learning:

1. lack of resources and learning material
2. low budget
3. lack of support
4. bad student engagement

However, the most burning issue that all of the interviewees mentioned was a struggle to connect with students. Some of the interviewed teachers even mentioned that they feared their students would be sitting in silence on the other side of the screen, uninterested, and demotivated.

This brings us to the main point of this article - building a meaningful relationship with your students now is more important than ever. Students need your support and reassurance that they still need the education to build a successful future.

With that in mind, let's take a look at what you can do as an educator to re-establish the connection with students during remote learning.

1. Do a Quick Sync Meeting

Because of the pandemic, we all lack interpersonal communication and close contact. Your students are not an exception. Connecting not just with peers but with teachers as well is very important for students because it creates the feeling of belonging to a community. Your task is to maintain that feeling if you want to build a meaningful relationship with your students while doing remote learning. One way you can do it is by running a quick sync meaning before your lesson every day. You can bring diversity to this meeting using a variety of activities:

1. Surveys: By polling your students, you can get a deeper understanding of what their academic needs are. Apart from that, you will also get a better idea of your students' motivation level.
2. 2/10 method: If you have challenging or at-risk students in your classroom, this method can help you build a more meaningful relationship with them. According to it, you need to spend just two minutes a day with each of them for ten days. You can talk with them about anything - school, relationships with classmates, or family matters. The goal is to establish trust.
3. Greeting each student by name: Try to start your lesson by acknowledging every student in the group and asking each of them about their health and well-being. It won't take much of your time but will build the connection right away.

Virtual classes can be great and engaging, but sometimes they feel a little bit robotic because all the participants feel detached. Running a quick sync meeting before every class will help you get rid of this feeling of detachment and bring you closer to your students.

2. Connect with Students on Social Media

If you want to build a meaningful relationship with your students, you need to get in their shoes to understand their world better. One of the ways you can do it is by increasing your activity on social media.

This doesn't mean that you should stalk your students. For example, you can turn your social media account into another source of educational materials for them. For example, if you are an English teacher, you can post quotes about learning English on your profile every day, as well as record creative Stories on the topics of your lessons.

Another perk to using more social media in education is that it helps you share your knowledge with other teachers around the globe.

For example, Abbie Haley, a teacher from Jonesboro, Arkansas, started uploading videos to Facebook to provide more learning materials for her students. But over time, it grew into something bigger, and her videos have become an inspiration for other teachers to do the same.

Your students are driven by technology, and they expect you to be the same. By becoming more social-media-savvy, you will be able to not only diversify the learning process but also understand your students and their interests better.

3. Go Beyond Your Virtual Classroom

All the above-mentioned methods to build a more meaningful relationship with your students are effective, but they don't work for too long, especially if your students are exhausted from too much studying.

To keep motivation levels high, you need to introduce something different to the learning process and make teacher-student interactions, not just about studying. Extracurricular activities can help you with that.

Even though we are on lockdown, there are still options to get outside of the virtual classroom. For example, you could go on a virtual tour around Louvre without having to pay a lot of money for it.

Many other museums and cultural centers around the world offer free excursions and other activities. This is a great opportunity to spend some quality time with your students and build a connection.

One More Thing

When working on developing a relationship with your students, you should do it with intimacy in mind. In times when we lack meaningful talks, intimacy is more important than ever.

The main point we're trying to make is that remote learning doesn't mean automatic, almost robotic teaching and learning, which can be very exhausting. Instead, it should be based on mutual understanding and support needed to keep your students' motivation up.



Guest Blogger:
Kate Khom is a passionate writer who likes sharing her thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, she works as a digital marketing specialist, you can check her site. She likes everything related to traveling and new countries.