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In his article "Building Relationships with Young Children" from the Exchange book Child Development II, George Scarlett provides advice for teachers on building relationships with the children in their care. At one point he addresses how this is complicated in schools with diverse populations...

"With respect to communicating better, today’s diverse classrooms require teachers to become much more adept at communicating differently depending on the child. Some children take a friendly and reasonable way of communicating as a license to misbehave. Others take any hint at sternness as an indication that an adult is mean. Today’s teachers need, then, to figure out what their ways of communicating mean to each and every child �" and adjust their ways to meet the needs and meanings of each child. When it comes to communicating and relationship building, one size definitely does not fit all.

"This fact hit home to me when listening to my colleague, Cindy Ballenger, talk about her struggles to build relationships and manage the normal behavior problems of the Haitian children in her charge.... Cindy was failing as their teacher and needed to learn the Haitian way of communicating with her Haitian children when they were occasionally disruptive or out-of-control. Typical, North American ways of communicating were useless. Furthermore, she needed to learn not just the words used by Haitian parents and teachers but also the tone and physical posture they used to convey both firmness and care. Specifically, she needed to learn how, in the face of misbehavior, she pcould pose a series of rhetorical questions often used by Haitian teachers �" “Is this the way you act at home?”; “Does your mother let you run around indoors knocking over things?”; “Does your father let you talk mean to other kids?” and so forth. It took time and effort and guidance from Haitian teachers for Cindy to learn; but when she did learn, there were no more problems getting her Haitian children to cooperate.

"This is just one of many examples of the challenges facing today’s teachers when having to communicate and maintain positive relationships with a diverse group of children. Truly, our being such a diverse nation has made the job of teaching incredibly challenging �" even as it has made it more rewarding."

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As we approach the end of the fiscal year, we are offering our book, Child Development II, as well as all other Exchange books at a 10% discount through the end of June. Check out this sale!

In addition, the George Scarlett article quoted above is available for reading in full here: Building Relationships with Young Children

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