Communication Break-Down

Teachers are under a lot of pressure these days. Increasing test scores, keeping the class under control, creating interesting lesson plans- teachers juggle these responsibilites daily. But how important is the teacher-student relationship?

Very.

My husband’s high school experience is a great example. He wasn’t too interested in school, so his grades weren’t anything to brag about. Except in one class. He received an A. “Why did you work hard in that one class?” I asked once. “Because I felt the teacher liked me,” he said. It was that simple.

Yet creating relationships with students is anything but simple.

I’ve observed in hundreds of classrooms, worked with hundreds of teachers, and I can speak from personal experience when I say that knowing a student doesn’t like you is incredibly painful and confusing for most teachers.

Add to that the expectation from administrators that teachers should be striving for high-quality student relationships, and most teachers are ready to pull their hair out.

It’s not that teachers are unwilling or unable to do this. There are so many issues out of their control- absentee parents, media influences, video games- that the pressure to be liked can often feel like a millstone around the neck.

Like the teacher I coached recently. He expressed that the office didn’t like it when he sent students out of the classroom, preferring that he take care of the discipline himself. So he did. And then they said he was too “authoritative.” So he tried joking around more. Until one student complained to his parents about a joke, and the parents called the school. He couldn’t win, he said.

Students learn best when the learning environment is safe and respectful. There are times teachers need to be authoritative and come from their position, but there are other times they need to be friendly and come from their person. Oftentimes a teacher only operates from one or the other. If position, they are seen as too authoritative. If person, they are seen as too accommodating. Nonverbal intelligence is knowing when each is appropriate and having the ability to do both.

Nonverbal classroom management assists teachers by allowing them to separate the student from the behavior when coming from their position. In other words, it allows the teacher to manage without making it personal. Through appropriate use of eye contact, visuals and nonverbal cues, teachers can foster trust and safety in the classroom without fearing they are being too strict or too lenient.

Effective use of nonverbal communication leads to clearer classroom messages, which means less misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Teachers feel in control and students feel respected. This is how I define high quality student-teacher relationships. Being liked is secondary.

So my advice to teachers is this: don’t try to be something you’re not in an effort to get students to like you. Be systematic in your use of nonverbal communication, but more importantly, be authentic. People, particularly students, respond to authenticity. The rest is just details.

I’m going to be on TV. KOIN’s Keep It Local, channel 6 here in Portland, next Thursday at 4 p.m.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, specifically about how to camouflage my arms- the camera adds 10 pounds they say- but besides the inevitable television bloat, I’m nervous about the angle.

I’ve made it very clear, through my assistant Val, that I am not a body language expert. This, I think, is disappointing to some people. Like the reporter who interviewed me a few months back and never ran the story. She seemed very interested in the mainstream “body language” stuff- “what am I communicating now?” she asked at one point, leaning forward, freezing her body, as if she were expecting me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. I explained that our work really centers more around becoming systematic with our own nonverbals- and well, the story never ran.

So it will be interesting to see what type of questions I get. My hope is that I’m able to convey how important nonverbal intelligence really is. Although it may be fun to look at body language and guess at the person’s meaning, we are much more successful when we tune into our own nonverbal communication.

Watch KOIN’s Keep It Local next Thursday, November 19th at 4 p.m. to see if I’m successful getting that across. And after watching, feel free to email me your comments, specifically about how thin my arms looked.

This past summer my husband and I took a trip to Finland. My parents are Finnish immigrants, and I am first generation Finnish-American. We had a lovely three weeks, and when we returned I unpacked, stood in the doorway of my home office and contemplated going back to work. At that moment I heard the voice. It could have been mine, the universe, or maybe my dog, but it said,  ”You can’t work here anymore.”

Now perhaps you think I just didn’t want to go back to work, and that’s probably a teensy bit true, but in actuality, I didn’t want to work there. From home. And I never did again.

Luckily I found an office within a week, or Nonverbal Solutions would have ceased to exist.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with working from home, and if I had to choose either/or, I’d go with hate. Yes, it’s convenient, but not so much when you have a husband who is home in the mornings-I can’t tell you how many times I had to sit down and say, “Honey, I work here, so please stop walking into my office to chat”-  and it’s really difficult to walk by a sink of dirty dishes and not drop what you’re doing to wash them. Not to mention the call of the afternoon nap, Days of Our Lives, and don’t even get me started on the constant snacking.

Working from home was beginning to take its toll. I either worked so much that I was writing copy for the website until 11 p.m., or I was so overwhelmed that I sat all day and did nothing. The latter wouldn’t be a problem on occasion, but it was difficult to relax and recharge when my work was always staring me back in the face.

I began to get anxious every morning, dreading going into my office to work. My home began to feel like a prison. It wasn’t until after my three week vacation that clarity hit: I was guilty of contamination.

Contamination is really easy to do. We’re constantly spilling one aspect of our life into another, instead of keeping them separate. My theory is we don’t take contamination seriously, thinking that efficiency is more important than sanity. This is why we bring our work into the bedroom, or our laptops into bed and then we wonder why we can’t turn our brains off and relax.

It’s easy to contaminate because location holds memory. Have you ever sat in your living room -perhaps watching TV- and then got up to grab something from another room, only to forget half-way there what it is you were after? What do you have to do? You have to go back. Walking back to the living room jogs your memory.

To illustrate this idea, let me borrow an example from the classroom. We caution teachers to avoid disciplining from the same spot in which they teach, because it makes it much more difficult for students to go back to learning. They can’t erase the memory of the discipline or the upcoming consequence from their minds. Instead we ask teachers to stop teaching, move to a different location, discipline from there, and then return back to the teaching spot. Students are more able to shake off the discipline because it was done in a different location.

We’ve observed in hundreds of classrooms and found that teachers only have to walk to the “discipline” spot twice before students understand what’s happening. The third time the teacher walks to the predetermined location, students are already shushing each other because they know that they’re about to get into trouble. The teacher has never indicated what the spot means, she or he has just been systematic about moving there every time the class needs discipline. This spot becomes so powerfully associated in the minds of the students, that we have to caution teachers to not do anything else from that spot.

Which just shows that we have to be careful -in all aspects of our lives- to decontaminate. In other words, we need to get systematic about where we do certain tasks, and be careful about what types of visual reminders are present. For teachers, lawyers, and managers, that means moving to a new location for the delivery of negative information. For me it meant moving my office out of my home. For those working from home who neither have the desire nor means to work somewhere else, it may mean containing work to one room and not spilling paperwork onto the kitchen table or working on the laptop in the living room. For those who work outside of the home, it might mean putting the briefcase into the closet when you walk in the door, and agreeing to stop checking email at night and on weekends.

Decontaminating my work environment has had a tremendous effect on my work and home life. I’m able to concentrate when I’m at work, and relax when I’m at home. My productivity has doubled. Look around and see if you’re inadvertently contaminating your home or workspace. Be vigilant about protecting your space and you’ll find it’s easier to concentrate, relax, and find balance.