Dan Cottrell

How do you establish these meaningful relationships with students everyone seems to say are the golden ticket in teaching? Erm….. try teaching! seriously, just teach! Passion for your subject radiates - children recognise it and hook into that passion. Providing a safe learning space - you consistently provide an environment for learning, through fair and consistent boundaries, being assertive when you need to be. You teach really good lessons, often - Lessons that spring out, stories that might draw laughter but stay in the memory, activities and resources that are genuinely cool, thinking about the learning experience. The myth is that the relationships are more often than not forged through being overly nice or like another friend. Never saying no. Having banter. Caving into demands. Forfeiting actual teaching preferring to just have chats, trying to turn every moment into a therapy session that a child may not want or need. This is a myth. Teaching is an amazing job and if it’s done well, an ‘over time’ default side effect will be the relationships that outsiders tell you are the key to everything. Good night!