How to Earn (and keep!) Your Students' Respect

There are few things that make can make or break a teaching environment like respect. If a teacher has the respect of his students, even if they aren't particularly interested in the teaching material, they will still be manageable and willing to put forth a degree of effort to learning what they have been given. If on the other hand, the teacher does not have the respect of the students, even good materials and interesting lessons are likely to fall on deaf ears. Students will seem "unteachable" and even if some students genuinely want to learn the material, they will usually be drowned out by those who care less, and eventually fall victim to the environment's negativity and stop listening themselves. While classroom environments may vary from school to school, culture to culture and age group to age group, there are a few things that you can do that will help you earn and keep your students respect regardless of the type of environment you teach in. Here are just a few.

 Know Your Students

 If stepping into a classroom full of new students, your first and #1 priority should be learning all of their names. A great way to do this is through the game, Slap, Clap, Snap, which allows you to not only learn a few of their names, but pushes them to learn each other's as well. In doing so, you show the students that you care about them as people first, and students second, and that goes a long way in getting them to listen to you when you want to tell them something. Beyond learning their names, your first day activities should also feature exercises using WH questions that allows you to learn facts about them as well. Once you learn these facts, you can actually integrate them into your lessons topics, conversation patterns or dialogs, so that they strike closer to home with the students, are more interesting and are more memorable than a generic pattern pulled from a guide book or text.

 Come To Class A Few Minutes Early

 This has a two-fold purpose. 1) It allows you to chat with students, learn things about them that you can integrate into your lessons, and generally getting them opened up and attentive to you before the lesson starts. In an ESL or EFL environment, this also means that you can getting them thinking in English as well. The second purpose for this is that it shows the students that you are prepared and taking the lessons seriously. This is especially important in Japan, where punctuality is a cornerstone of professionalism. In general, if your students see that you take them seriously, they in turn will take you seriously as well. 

Look Your Best - Especially Early On

 This point goes back to the last one. If you show up dressed professionally, clean-shaved, and sharp, your students will see you as a professional who is coming to work, and they will expect good things from you. If on the other hand, you show up unshaven, foul-smelling, unkept, or otherwise badly prepared, you can expect them to not take you seriously, and lose their focus easily at the first available distraction. This occurs because of a psychological phenomenon called the "Halo effect" or the "Horn Effect". Studies have also shown that the more physically attractive you are, the more likely you are to have positive attributes attributed to you. The more unattractive you are, the more likely to have negative effects attributed to you. As such, the better you present yourself, the more likely people are to listen to you, especially early on, when students are still forming an opinion of you as a teacher and as a person. 

Prepared Detailed Lesson Plans

 While this may seem like a royal pain in the rear, having detailed structured lesson plans actually gives you a great degree of freedom. This is because instead of having to figure out what to do as you are doing it (which can both stress you out and occasionally result in epic failures), planning them out ahead of time allows you to do it while you are mentally relaxed and not in a rush. They also allow you to take stock of the materials you have (and those things you know about your students) so that you can most effectively integrate them into your lessons. Furthermore you can go the extra step of writing out a small checklist of what you plan to do in the corner of the board, and then just check things off (or cross them out) as you go. This not only allows you to track the timing of your activities/segments, but also shows your students that you prepared ahead of time with them in mind. Yet again giving them all the more reason to respect your efforts and listen- even when they aren't super interested in the lesson topic.

 Start Off Strict

 The natural inclination for most people when they first step into a classroom is to want to be the nice or friendly kind of teacher. While this may be because we all innately think high school would have been way more fun if our teachers were cooler, there is a reason why those teachers kept the distance that they did or were strict in the way that they were. While in a mature or shy group of students, the nice teacher can do wonders for opening students up and getting them to enjoy the class, the fact of the matter is, in most other environments, the super-nice teacher is the one who is most likely to get ripped apart. This is especially true any time you are working with pre-adult age groups. If you are the kind of teacher who is nice by nature, this does not mean you have to change your personality. What it does mean however is that you have to respond to, and deal with disobedience immediately to show that you don't tolerate it. This can something as small as writing a name on the board, as long as students see you do it, and you always stick to your guns, and make good on your threats. In effect, you just have to let them low that there will be consequences to disobedience and that you are not willing to let things slide. Again, this is of particular importance early on. Once you are eatablished as the person running the show (and not the class clown) it is much easier to relax things a bit (and then tighten the reigns again if they become too wild) than to start off too relaxed and trying to become strict later. It is much easier to go from authoritarian to friend than vice versa.

 While it may not always be easy to earn your students' respect, it doesn't necessarily have to be difficult either. Oftentimes, what it comes down to more than anything is being passionate about what you do, doing it correctly, and doing it to the best of your abilities. If students see that, they will usually respond positively to your efforts and things will become much easier as you become comfortable with them, and they become comfortable with you. Especially early on, the harder you work at doing a good job and earning your respect, ultimately the easier your teaching job will become in the long run.