Why You Should Care If Your Students Dislike You

Recently, I overheard a teacher confronting two of his third-grade students after they ran through a hallway on their way to recess.

He stopped them, called them over to where he was standing, and said, “Congratulations, you two just lost your recess.”

With an index finger jabbing the air, inches from their sullen faces, he spent the next few minutes lecturing them on the merits of walking in the hallways.

The teacher’s intentions were good.

He sought to make sure the hallways were safe and wanted to hold the two boys accountable for breaking rules. But in doing so, he was making classroom management more difficult for himself.

He made two critical mistakes:

1. He Used Sarcasm

Besides being difficult for children to understand, sarcasm is cruel. It is meant to make the target of the remark feel inadequate and elevate the speaker to a position of superiority.

It also causes students to dislike their teacher.

2. He Showed Anger

Anger is a sign of frustration and manifests itself when a teacher feels he or she has no other recourse or when poor behavior is taken personally.

It, too, can cause students to dislike their teacher.

The Problem With Being Disliked

If you are disliked, the only influence you have with students is negative (i.e., lecturing, scolding, yelling, and sarcasm). And negativity only works to curb bad behavior in the moment. It does nothing to improve behavior over time.

Thus, it is a battle you’ll have to fight every day.

Being disliked also weakens the power of your consequences to curb unwanted behavior. When you enforce a consequence, instead of taking responsibility, your students will most likely blame you.

Do your students get angry at you when you send them to time-out? If so, then your time-out is not going to be very effective.

The Benefits Of Being Liked

Likeability, on the other hand, gives you leverage to influence students to behave as you desire. If your students like you, they’ll want to please you. Your consequences, then, become symbolic of your disappointment.

Likeability gives meaning to consequences and underscores the feeling of separation students feel when held apart from the classroom they love being a part of, by the teacher they admire.

This can be a very powerful consequence.

I’m frequently asked my opinion of whether a certain consequence will work for one grade level or another. In response, I always want to ask, “Well, how well do your students like you, and how much do they enjoy being in your classroom?”

The more your students admire you, the more effective your consequences will be.

Yin And Yang

The most effective teachers are able to balance an influential relationship with students (i.e., being fun, likeable, creating exciting lessons) with an unwavering commitment to their classroom management plan.

You can’t have one without the other.

A positive relationship with students is what makes your classroom management plan work. If you’re grumpy most of the time, if you lecture individual students or use sarcasm, you will always struggle with classroom management. If you’re admired, however, classroom management becomes… dare I say… a breeze.

Likeability is just one of many ways of building leverage and influence with your students. In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about this topic, but in the mean time, please check out my book Dream Class.

Dream Class explains everything you need to know about building the kind of relationships with students that make classroom management more effective and much, much easier.

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