A Quality Teacher Is a Caring Teacher

Show Students You Care About Them

Showing students you care about them helps create a positive, supportive relationship and helps build an environment where learning can flourish. Moreover you're modelling behaviour that you want students to learn and emulate. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. - Leo Buscaglia Ways to Show You Care 1. Listen to your students and help them express who they are and how they want to be treated. 2. Help students show others what they want them to know about themselves. 3. Teach students ways to show they care about another person who serves the community or the countrylike a fireman, policeman, or soldier 4. Work with parents to show interest and concern for their children. 5. Improve your practice by learning something new, including getting feedback from students. Most teachers care about imparting knowledge to students. However, the best teachers also care about the relational aspect of teaching. They take time to establish a trusting and caring connection with their students, who in turn become more receptive to what's being taught. They get to know their students' interests, talents, and needs, which helps them prepare lessons and helps students feel the partnership of the learning experience First and foremost, students perceive teachers as caring when they make attempts to understand and connect with their students as individuals. Teachers who assume responsibility for developing individual relationships with students and who press them to develop relationships tend to be perceived as caring by their students. Caring teachers may employ strategies such as personal disclosure, where they share information about themselves as a way to create space for relationships in the classroom. They cultivate a climate in their classroom where students have an authentic voice (Oldfather & McLaughlin, 1993). In contrast, teachers who distance themselves emotionally or develop differential relationships (Babad, 1993), where they favour some students over others, are less likely to be viewed as caring teachers. Teachers perceived as caring tend to endorse different orientations towards classroom management and establish distinctive types of classroom climates and cultures. Julianne Turner and colleagues (1998) suggest teachers perceived as caring tend to monitor the emotional climate of the classroomparticularly with regard to the experience of unpleasant emotions (i.e. anger, frustration) in themselves and their students. Teachers perceived as uncaring tend to express higher levels of unpleasant emotions and may, in fact, use the expression of unpleasant emotions (i.e. yelling, showing disappointment) as a way to regulate their students' behaviour. In contrast, students tend to characterize caring teachers' classrooms as warm places. Again, it is not that caring teachers avoid expressing unpleasant emotions in their classroom, but they tend to be judicious about their expression of anger, frustration, and disappointment. Teachers perceived as caring tend to endorse more humanistic orientations towards classroom management (Willower, Eidell, & Hoy, 1976). Caring teachers view students as

able to learn responsibility for self-regulating their own behaviour and view themselves as participating in the process of socializing necessary skills and values. The classroom becomes a place in which students learn about the value of rules and rule making and the teacher is a conduit for understanding social order. These classrooms tend to be more supportive of students' autonomy and emphasize the value of social negotiation (DeVries & Zan, 1996; see also Reeve, 2006). In contrast, teachers endorsing more custodial orientations tend to view undisciplined behaviour as an indicator of irresponsibility and respond by increasing control and enforcing punitive sanctions. Sadly, a strong emphasis on law or order, without explicit rationales, may leave students feeling manipulated. Teachers perceived as caring do have some custodial elements in their classroom; not everything is negotiable and there are consequences for poor choices. However, caring teachers are willing to negotiate some elements of classroom life, they express clear expectations for students' self-management of behaviour, and they are willing to endure somewhat more interpersonal conflict in the classroom The perception of caring by students also has a strong instructional component. Teachers perceived as caring delineate intellectual boundaries, including what will be learned and the standards for mastery. Caring teachers are focused on cultivating student interest in the content they are teaching and employ a variety of strategies that connect content to their students' lives. Caring teachers set high expectations for all students in their classes and press their students to understand the material, not merely for the sake of performing on a test but to understand the world around them. Among teachers who push their students to excel, what distinguishes teachers perceived as caring is the quality of their interpersonal interactions with students. Across the literature, caring teachers have been defined as warm demanders, an idea conceived by Judith Kleinfeld (1975). Warm demanders exert influence on their students' learning through their relationship. They are not willing to let a child turn in lesser quality work or fail; instead, with compassion, they express their belief that their students can do better and are willing to work with students to improve their work. To be caring means to be willing to critically evaluate what and for whom one actively cares. Doing so entails being reflective of whether there is a match or mismatch between the things one cares about and the needs of one's students. To be caring means to be thoughtful about the scope of one's caringincluding the extent to which one cares about maintaining or challenging the status quo, representing an authoritative view or allowing student conceptions to be at the forefront, and to create potential for what is personal to mingle with what is academic. To end here, however, would fail to acknowledge a tension in the caring teacher literature in that teachers who care more may be more prone to feeling emotional exhaustion, to becoming burnt out and to leaving the field (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Finally, to be a caring teacher inherently means to identify ways to care for oneself (BenZe'ev, 2006); to create healthy intellectual and interpersonal boundaries and to identify sources of support for when the task of caring for a student, or a group of students, is beyond one's resources.

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