In this article, Mario Sylvander, Co-founder of ISN partner 3Dethos, explains the importance of rapport between teachers and students and shares a useful app that can give teachers a measure of understanding of how their students feel about their rapport
Teacher-student rapport is a funny immeasurable, or is it?
Individual learning needs are as much emotional as academic. Great teachers exercise pedagogical acumen, lesson creativity, and subject knowledge, all the while cultivating rapport with their students, collectively and individually.
Rapport is “a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well”. Thus, it is a two-lane street for teachers: they take the time to understand their students’ interests, strengths, and weaknesses AND, passively or actively (consciously or unconsciously) they share their own interests, strengths, and weaknesses (their humanness!) with students.
Such a humanized approach by teachers increases student motivation, trust, and comfort to move forward — push their comfort zones — with confidence in their learning. Don’t take my word for it, take John Hattie’s, where a thesis of his Visible Learning: the Sequel suggests that a good relationship between teachers and students is a critical requisite for good learning.
If rapport is the concept that captures the relationship, how can one know about it? Is it measurable? As a qualitative thing, probably not. However, there is a magical other thing called aggregation.
Aggregation is the formation of a number of (like) things into a cluster. Think of a ball pit. Just looking at it won’t tell you which colors are in what proportion. If you aggregate by color, though, you can tell if you may want to add more blue balls because there are many more red and yellow (assuming you want a more even proportion).
In a more relevant realm–relationship qualities that relate to rapport–if one collected feedback in the form of adjectives, they could be aggregated from the mix to see which are most prevalent. Bigger clusters represent more visible qualities; smaller ones are less visible.
Such aggregation creates data. And as we know, data–its analysis–points in directions for action. This is why the collection of data is imperative.
Question: where to get inputs for aggregations that create actionable relationship data?
Answer: via feedback from people in the relationship. And feedback aggregation is possible when the feedback has specific possibilities, like qualitative descriptors in the form of adjectives.
Teachers who care about their students’ learning (and schools generally) will want some measures of understanding about how their students see/feel about their relationship (rapport) with them. Good news: there’s an app for that. 3Dethos.com LooP measures qualitative feedback inputs from students to teachers by aggregating adjectives (as a launching point for elaborations).
The result is rapport made visible, and actionable for understanding and evolution/ improvement in teacher-student relationships.
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