Building Rapport with Students Using Social Emotional Learning

Building Rapport with Students: High School

When teaching high school, you know that building rapport with students is essential. They need to know not only that you are there for academic needs, but that you see them as holistic people. Plus, when students feel a stronger connection with their teacher, they seem to perform better (either in their academic skills or classroom behavior or both). As such, we want to try and create a classroom community in order to cultivate student rapport.

What is Classroom Community?

A classroom community is a place where students feel safe and supported. The community works together to learn and engages with both instructor and peers to do so. 

But sometimes, you don’t have anything in common with a student… What do you do then?

Students can find connection in a variety of ways:

• 1:1 time with instructors
• Finding commonalities outside of academic work
• Discussing passions
• Hearing teacher’s stories
• Seeing their instructor outside of class or at one of their events
• Feeling validated in their school work and behavior
• Teachers know them by name and call them by their preferred name
• Having teachers take an interest in something they like, a story, or an event
• Seeing themselves represented in texts or in your classroom 

Fostering the Teacher Student Relationship

In order to foster that connection, we as teachers can include multiple opportunities where students can:

• Create non academic connections with their instructor
• Have authority in what they do or how they do it
• Have their voice heard
• Feel supported

Activities to Build Classroom Community

You may include any of the following types of activities to create these opportunities:

• Ask students what they want to do that day (if there is flexibility)
• Check in with students about their stress levels
• Offer to listen to what they are going through that day or help them navigate a problem
• Ask in what order they would like to do that class’s tasks (if this option is available)
• Offer choice boards for assignments
• Add specific social emotional learning activities as bell work or well-being Wednesdays
• Use conferences for your grading
• Offer opportunities for feedback or reflection 
• Offer a variety of classroom community books for students to identify with
• Coloring (see my coloring pages here for a ready-to-print resource)

 Want more stress management specific activities for teens? Check out my Stress Management Course here!

Why Use Social Emotional Learning to Build Rapport With Students?

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) includes self awareness, self management, decision making, and interpersonal skills (such as relationship skills and social awareness). These specific skills  might take the form of learning empathy, problem solving, emotional regulation, stress management, relationship building, time management, or organization, among others. 

These skills are often brought up in the elementary and middle school levels, but high school students may be left on their own to learn more about how these skills work for them at this stage of life when they are taking on more work and becoming more stressed. As such, we can bring these into our classrooms (even if only for a bell work or at the end of class if there is extra time) to facilitate better understanding of and support for our students. By allowing students to learn coping skills and stress management techniques with you, in a safe space of learning, this also translates to other learning as well. 

Teacher Student Rapport

As you can see, there are lots of ways to build rapport with your students. High schoolers may need a little more support when it comes to the social emotional aspect (as they are going through a lot of emotional turmoil at the time), but we can support them as much as we can. These different strategies are not a one size fits all formula. You have to be able to choose what works best for you, your boundaries, and your students. No matter what, building rapport with students is extremely helpful for your classroom management, your stress management, and your students stress management. Try one of these out today!

Want an easy to use Ebook that you can print and give to students for reference, check out the stress management ebook here. 

Plus, I will be releasing my High School Specific Social Emotional Learning Course in a few weeks! And the whole thing is FREE! This course will help you incorporate those social emotional learning activities to build rapport with your students, while also making it an easy implementation for you. Sign up for my newsletter here to get more information on stress management, social emotional learning, and these free resources!