Successful teachers not only need to care for their students, they need to care for themselves also.
Setting aside relaxation time includes rest and relaxation in your daily schedule. Do not allow other obligations to encroach you. This is your time to take break from all responsibilities and recharge your batteries.
Connect with others. Spend time with positive people who enhance your life. A strong support system will buffer you from the negative effects of stress.
Keep your sense ofhumor. This includes the ability to laugh at yourself. The act of laughing helps your body fight stress in a number of ways.
Caring teachers may employ strategies such as personal disclosure, where they share information about themselves as a way to create space for relationships in the classroom. They cultivate a climate in their classroom where students have an authentic voice. In contrast, teachers who distance themselves emotionally or develop differential relationships, where they favour some students over others, are less likely to be viewed as caring teachers.
Teachers perceived as caring tend to endorse different orientations towards classroom management and establish distinctive types of classroom climates and cultures.
Teachers perceived as caring tend to endorse more humanistic orientations towards classroom management. Caring teachers view students as able to learn responsibility for self-regulating their own behaviour and view themselves as participating in the process of socializing necessary skills and values.
To be caring means to be willing to critically evaluate what and for whom one actively cares. Doing so entails being reflective of whether there is a match or mismatch between the things one cares about and the needs of one’s students.
To be caring teacher inherently means to identify ways to care for oneself; to create healthy intellectual and interpersonal boundaries and to identify sources of support for when the task of caring for a student, or a group of students, is beyond one’s resources.
By: Florenda C. Fabico | Teacher I | Mariveles National High School – Poblacion | Mariveles, Bataan
