Student and Teacher Relationships

One of the most important things to remember is that as an online teacher you need to focus on developing a good relationship with your students. It is all about showing an extroverted personality and making yourself and your lessons relatable to your students so you can form a good connection. Another big thing to do in classes is using a lot of gestures and asking a lot of questions to your students so that you are always facilitating learning in your online classes. 

Understand that having online lessons and in person lessons are extremely different when it comes to building a relationship. Your students will see you for at most a few hours a day, so in that time you need to be able to have enjoyable lessons with your students and also build up your relationship with them. Make sure to give a lot of positive reinforcement and praise them often when they succeed with the tasks and phrases that they are given in class. 

Also always make sure to have a clear opening and closing to your lessons as well. Ask your students about their day, their week, their weekends, or anything they have upcoming and always ask other general questions about them and always ask the questions as well as giving the answer first yourself (this can depend on the learner’s level, so you might not need to give an answer quickly). 

For example:

“How was your day today? Mine was very good, I met my friends for lunch today and I had a chicken sandwich and french fries.”

Then when it is time to end your lessons ask if they have any plans for after you end classes or if they ate yet or anything else relevant to the day. It’s important to have some closure when your lesson finishes up so the student can end on a good note regardless of how the class lesson went. Giving closure to lessons is something very important that some teachers pass on, but making sure that your students feel a connection of the opening and closing for their classes can be imperative to the success of your lessons and your relationship with your student.

If you are in group classes, you can encourage a lot of group work as well so that students can feel closeness even when it is just an online class. Making sure that everyone gets along well and that everyone is able to cooperate can help out a lot when you have things such as tests or work that requires groups or volunteers. It’s very important to build connections between everyone so that you have more options when it comes to planning and executing your classes online.

In addition, make sure to always be on model behavior, as your students will see the demeanor and attitude that you come into class with and often mimic it back to you. By making sure to be respectful and following your own rules yourself as well, your students will know what is considered acceptable and what is considered bad behavior during class time. Making sure that you are able to keep control of your students' behavior can be tough, but making sure that you have the right systems in place is important.