Originally published May 2011
By Karen Hume
Perhaps you’ve heard the statement, “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” When students are asked about the qualities of good teachers, they confirm the truth of that statement—caring is always at or near the top of the list.
Demonstrations of caring don’t require that you be available to your students 24/7, or that you know the details of their personal lives and share the details of your own. Those actions, as recent news stories have attested, will get you into hot water for blurring the boundaries of the teacher-student relationship.
Karen Hume is a Canadian teacher, administrator, author, speaker, and workshop leader. She has her MEd in Curriculum and Teacher Development, and has been a member of a university research group funded to investigate the role of talk in the classroom. Karen is also a member of the editorial board of an online action research journal.
