What 20 Years in Education Can Teach Us About Relationships
I see education as the purest relationship there is. Most professors and educators love their work and hardly fall into the profession because they need to teach. That passion has always made me look up to my professors with the highest respect while growing up. They knew what I didn’t know and were willing to share.
Today, thousands of people try to share their own knowledge online if you pay them $5 or more. But it’s tough to compare online gurus to people who have amassed hours in a classroom.
Kristen Fuller has been an educator and professor for over 20 years. Still, she remembers the first four as a learning period, where she relearned everything she needed to know about being a teacher. We sat down to get her views on US education, mental health, and social media.
Although we spoke about those subjects specifically, I’d be lying if I said her lessons didn’t apply to my life. Here are some of them:
Customize Learning To The Learner
Reflecting on how you deal with your relationships is the first step to cultivating them. Much like marketers need to understand their audience before creating content, professors should swear by getting to know their students when educating.
For Kristen, a college education wasn’t enough to confront the day-to-day of the profession. So she turned to her students to understand what they needed.
“What I found to be key was that a lot had to do with who I am in relation to them.”
Many kids today spend hours of their days with their professors, and most of the learning happens in class. Besides their parents, these individuals are among the ones who spend the most time shaping how kids think. So making sure that time is valuable is mandatory.
Instead of attempting to insert them in an established learning format, Kristen chose to analyze how each of her students looked at her class, herself, and what stopped them from learning better.
From the issues they face when learning something new to the larger problems they face at home, she envisioned each of those obstacles as something that could be carefully taken care of if approached from the student’s perspective.
If a student is against a celebration, there is often something else bothering him. In that case, listening and offering other solutions can be very enticing. “Think about how you can roll with them, you know? It really throws them off guard.”
Today, she tries to improve everyday learning, sharing, and teaching skills throughout the country to help kids engage better in the classroom. But all of that can start through a single rapport building exercise.
Offer Help First
Throughout her childhood, she had to move around a lot. Enrolled in 16 different schools, Kristen became a master in starting over with people and understand how to cultivate these relationships.
As the person coming from outside to try to improve teaching, she always keeps her position very clear:
“If at any point, me being in your life makes your life any harder, then I need to fire myself. It’s not my purpose to be in your life. I want to be here to share ideas, grow, and learn from you too.”
Her view of a professional relationship is fascinating. In a world surrounded by noisy and repetitive salespeople, she quickly empathizes with the client, so her work becomes helpful from the get-go.
Being a good listener is the key here. Teachers are taught to speak a lot, but you can create a strong bond just by listening.
Her genuine “it’s great to meet you” doesn’t sound pushy when the sole intention is to help. By establishing her role as non-disruptive, she positions herself as a support to the teachers and kids. And by the way, who doesn’t want help when dealing with 20+ children?
Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Scary
In a predominantly traditional system like the US education one, bringing new ideas to the table is always a struggle, one that entrepreneurs recognize too well.
In her opinion, the pushback is based on a valid fear.
What haunts entrepreneurs today is the fear of responsibility. For education, that is no different. Kristen’s goal is to improve how professors think and how students develop, so she accepts full responsibility when she meets those challenges.
Education is a system that hasn’t been entirely disrupted by technology because of how it could affect kids. Although she confirms, even with so many improvements in teaching over the years, there is still room for innovation to take place, no matter where.
“The students themselves are not different. I wasn’t surprised when I met the challenges, learning styles, and the reading issues that I hit in public schools. And then I went into the private schools and hit the same issues just in a different location.”
One of those challenges is skill development, especially for high schoolers heading to college. With most of them prepared to chase a higher degree, one can argue that adjusted paths to the professional world would be more valuable.
Apprenticeships can do a lot for a teenager’s career expectations. Not having experience with real skills until their last college years seems like a missed opportunity. Today, Google’s certificates allow for more modern education without incurring the burden of college debt.
“ I’d love to see kids enter middle school with an approach of interning and apprenticing at a time when their hormones are changing, and they’re growing so much. If you’d asked me as a young teacher in my 20s, I’d have been worried about Google. But fast forward to where we are now, and I’m completely in favor of something like that.”
Today, the cost alone can hold kids out of college, leading them to one of the only other opportunities available: A traditional job in the service industry.
But if that’s not a fit for them, they now have the ability to diversify and look at building themselves up outside of the college path.
College is still something that today’s parents see as the path where the statistics are, but the job market is pretty much evenly divided into thirds:
“A third of the job openings between now and 2021 are projected to require high school diplomas, a third of them are for your college-educated candidates, and a third of them are formal, college educated, requiring graduate or postgraduate level work. So I think that should be good news for some.”
While we wait for technology to disrupt education, students can use it to their advantage, be it for a quick Google search or entire degrees.
Focus on Mental Health
During her time helping schools, she’s been able to see the elephant in the room: Mental health is a real issue.
With students coming from varied backgrounds, there is no real baseline expectation for what kind of support they get. And that’s where teachers should step in.
Humor is still a powerful weapon here. In the depth of traumatic situations at home, there is always something that can make them smile, and if that happens at school, the chances of them getting a better education increase.
This triggers a will to learn, and the earlier it’s done, the longer they retain it.
“If you’re going to learn a skill, the younger you are when you’re exposed to it, the more it becomes muscle memory, the more it becomes immersed in the real situation.”
Facilitating these conversations helps teenagers develop ideas and even dream higher. Since there are no right answers to what one is dreaming about or wishing for, having that conversation requires patience until the kid’s lightbulb goes on. In this scenario, like in many others, the kids are the priority.
Adaptation is another weapon to fight mental health issues.
As it’s known today, social media can play a large role in kids’ behavior and mental health, especially for teens. Although possibly addicting, a different approach to social media is better than complete exclusion from it.
“It’s like a train coming down the tracks. There’s no way to stop it, so we have to learn how to navigate it. This is the world that these kids are born into.”
The TikToks and Instagrams of the world continue to exist and will hardly disappear right away. So instead of looking at it as a malevolent force, learning to live with it peacefully can reap better rewards.
By focusing on the existent mental health issue and learning how to communicate better, these kids can learn more efficiently and better engage with social media.
It’s easy to think that the educator role didn’t affect us early on. But if the way we talk to people, how we communicate online, and how we deal with our own internal issues can make or break a human, imagine a child.
While these are stories in education, they can all be replicated in our everyday lives as adults. And likewise, if teachers can acknowledge they need help, why shouldn’t we students too?
This article and its views are based on episode #1 of The Betterment podcast, where I interviewed Kristen Fuller. You can listen to it in full here.
Kristen Fuller has worked most of her life in the education space in the US, including as a teacher for 12 years. She’s currently a project consultant for scholastic, the same company that published children’s classics like Captain Underpants, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter. The best way to describe her would be as an educator, but she’s also one of the best conversationalists I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak to.
