• Create a welcoming environment 

  • Greet students entering the school/classroom every day

  • Provide multiple opportunities for children and families to see themselves reflected in the curriculum

  • Feature family or personalized photos from your students' lives on classroom bulletin boards and walls

  • Prepare for student-teacher conferences by knowing family/guardian names and having family information materials ready.

  • Use quick techniques to build and support your relationships *links to article

• Be positive and professional 

  • Remember, you are constantly modeling behavior and relationships, whether intentionally or not

  • Students notice your non-verbal communication as well as how you say the things you say

  • Be aware of how you handle extremely stressful situations: are you communicating what you want to be communicating 

• Be genuine

  • Build relationships that students can trust and rely on

  • Make the choice to show your students they are valued *link to article

• Be consistent and be patient 

  • All relationships take time and work; relationships with students are no exception

  • There is no “one-way” solution that can work for all students, nor is there a one-way solution for one particular student over time  

• See people in students' lives outside school as experts

  • We can only see what students choose to show us, and often that is an incomplete picture of their lives

• Encourage parents and guardians to share information about their children with school staff. 

  • Invite parents to talk about their family with the class when their child is “Student of the Week”

• Take time to listen to and gather information from families attending parent-teacher conferences

  • Learn preferred methods of communication to increase home engagement

• Build and use parents as resources. 

  • Identify parents’ skills such as language fluency, computer skills, art, cultural awareness, and others

• Sometimes the school building is acting as an unnecessary barrier; Meet families and guardians in neighborhood spaces such as churches, libraries, fast food restaurants, or neighborhood centers

• Share strategies used for learning at school that can be reinforced at home

• Making an IEP work

  • • One of the strengths of a student's IEP is that the work is shared by a team, but too often educators self-isolate into " educational islands"

    • Make the most by collaborating with other staff

• Be genuine and build trust with team members  *links to article

• Make the most of family/guardian engagement

  • • Find out how families prefer to connect (phone, email, text, visits at school) in order to get the most out of your efforts

• Get to the Root Cause *links to 5 Whys image originally from Olivier Serrat

  • State the problem and then use a continued series of "why" questions to find a root cause that you have a degree of control over. Use the framing of new questions to support productive control over the original issue.

  • Drilling down to uncover hidden needs and more meaningful areas to focus energy and attention *links to article

• Offer empathy and awareness to trauma experiences

  • • It is important to know where students are coming from and what external forces may be behind challenging behaviors in order to begin to establish trusting and positive relationships with students 

    • Bring trauma-informed practices into your classroom  *links to article

• Reframe the challenges into "Beautiful Questions"

  • • Sometimes the way a question is asked forces a particular answer. Try using that to design a question that helps you find the support you are looking for. Think of the difference between these two questions: 

"What is wrong with this student?"   VS   "What are factors driving these behaviors?"

• Remember to take a breath

  • "Pause" to build toward controlled responses as opposed to reactionary responses

  • Name your emotions out loud to buy think time for yourself in stressful moments

• Add controls to your input

  • Things that come to us can either nourish or deplete

  • Rarely do we have full control of our inputs during the school day. When you are able to, be sure to increase nourishing inputs

• Be aware of how trauma can affect caregivers *links to article  

• Share to stay connected

  • Share moments, items, or pictures that remind you of your students and the classroom experience. Use these reminders as a way to not only let your students know you care and are thinking about them, but also that you are working to remain connected to them even in times outside the virtual classroom.

• Snail Mail

  • Mail a physical letter or postcard to your students. It doesn't have to be much for it to mean a lot! Not only does it help communicate that you care and are thinking about your students, it also helps your students have a tangible reminder of your commitment to your relationships that they can recognize without needing to look at a screen. 

• Dance like everyone's watching

  • Teach or choreograph a class dance using Meet. Most people have very different dance skills and standing up and dancing in front of others can be harder for some than others. But sometimes adding challenges that make it difficult and new for all participants--like limiting all movement to what can be captured by a computer screen--can lead to great opportunities to have fun and build relationships. Choreographed movements could include moving hands or arms, ducking in and out of the camera view, or turning and nodding your head. To get everything worked out will take time and the positive side effect will be increased practice communicating and working together!

• Connection Detectives

  • Help your students get to know you better by sharing a packet of clues. Use primary sources for "clues" but leave out some details that students will have to "investigate." Students can then work to "solve" by correctly creating a timeline, filling in missing information, or completing a narrative story. 

Example 1: Timeline.  Share photos from a a trip you took with captions that give clues to the order. Have students ask questions and sort the photos to recreate your vacation. While they investigate, you have lots of opportunities to share more about your experience as well as to ask your students questions too!

Example 2: Solved Mystery. Collect meaningful items together and present them to students without giving any information. Give students time to ask questions and guess the significance of each item. Short on time? Use Kahoot to make a quick quiz using the objects you collected. 

• Gotcha

  • Collect one fun fact from each student and yourself. Remind students that they should choose something they are comfortable with the whole class knowing about them.  Read one or two facts a day and have students guess who it was from. 

• Remember SAMR (all four levels have a place)

  • Substitution: Relationship efforts remain the same but through a screen

    • • For example: morning check-in remains the same through Meet; teacher on screen asks how students are

  • Augmentation: Adding enhancements with technology to support relationships

    • • For example: morning check-in uses Pear Deck so students can drag icon to respective feeling

  • Modification: Use technology to build/deepen new relationship supports and skills

    • • For example: students add chat function to morning check-in, in order to deepen and enrich relationships

  • Redefinition: Use of technology allows for something new, previously unattainable

    • • For example: students change their login icon to represent how they are feeling, sharing realtime emotions with all participants