Everything I do in the classroom has two major goals.

1. Entertain

2. Educate

Because of the age group I work best with and most with, entertaining works well to build rapport which lowers the wall of “I don’t trust you, you’re a big person”.

With new classes, my main goal is to let the little students know I’m just like them. Silly, pure, care free, funny (to me), and fun to be around.

One of the ways I do this is hand them a bag asking them what’s inside. They have no idea what I’m saying so I just use body language to convey the question while asking it.

Inside the bag is this:

Once everyone has a chance to feel the bag and guess what it is, I count 3, 2, 1, and pull out the poo then through it. The kids go wild and we laugh together about the poo. No adult that I know would play with poo but I do and as a result the rapport level goes up.

I’ve found that the higher level of rapport you have with your students, the faster they will repeat language targets and follow your lesson plan.

This is common sense but it takes work and thinking deeply about it.

I’ve worked with other ESL teachers that could care less about this. They show up, wing the lesson with no real plan or strategy then wonder why they don’t earn good money or wonder why no one likes them.

Take the time to learn how to connect with your students on the deepest level humanly possible and I can assure you, your students will love you, listen to you and learn your lessons really fast.