How I’ve Taught People To Treat Me Differently

I’ve heard it said that you can teach people how to treat you, but until recently I never really understood how that worked. One day it hit me. I used to be a teacher. In fact, I have a graduate degree in education. I taught middle school and high school for a few years. If I wanted to teach people to treat me differently, I had all the strategy I needed.

How do you teach people how to treat you differently? The same way you teach anybody, anything.

First, you have to know who you’re teaching.

In my graduate level Education program, we talked about this more than any other subject. We took whole classes to understand stages of development. We talked about different learning styles and intelligences and conducted “pre-assessments” to determine what the students already knew before we began.

The main point was this: you had to know who you were teaching, or the student wouldn’t learn.

*Photo by Don Debold, Creative Commons

When it comes to teaching people how to treat me, I think this is where I most often go wrong. Usually I am trying so hard to be understood myself — to get my “lesson” across, so to speak — I forget that, first, I must seek to understand the other person.

I need to know what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what they’re capable of learning and doing. Without this, I’ll ask them to do things they can’t do, hold them to impossible standards, and make dangerous assumptions about their intentions. The result will be chaos, not teaching.

Give concrete examples.

In the teaching profession, we used a word for this called scaffolding, which is a term borrowed from construction. Scaffolding is a temporary structure used for holding workers and materials during the construction of a building. In teaching, scaffolding is the structure we use to prop students up while they’re learning.

So, for example, if you were teaching Algebra, you would scaffold the learning by doing a few sample problems on the board, before allowing the students to work on their own. Teaching without scaffolding would be like asking the students to teach Algebra to themselves.

It’s ridiculous, and yet this is so often the approach I use when teaching others how to treat me. I pout and withdraw (or get angry and throw verbal punches) when someone does something I don’t like, but expect them to figure out the lesson for themselves, without any specific examples or instruction.

Then, I’m angry when they fail the test.

What if I was just specific and intentional? What if I just said, “When you change the plan at the last minute, it makes me feel like you don’t value my time or schedule. In the future, it would make me me feel more honored if you would make a plan ahead of time and stick with it.”

Stay calm.

Every teacher knows: If you raise your voice, or speak harshly or aggressively to a student — at all — you lose their attention. Even if you’re right, even if their grade depends on your correction.

If you yell, or speak in anger, the student won’t listen.

This is just as true when I’m teaching others to treat me differently. The minute I lose control of my emotions, I prove my efforts are really more about self-protection, self-promotion and self-glory than they are about discovering a more mature, constructive life-giving way to communicate and live.

Focus on one thing at a time.

When teaching, it’s best to focus on one concept at a time, or students get overwhelmed and give up. In fact, there has been quite a bit of research done to pinpoint just how long a student can pay focused attention to a lecture at the front of a class.

As a teacher, this means you choose wisely what you teach today, what you leave for next time, and what you abandon altogether.

The parallel here seems obvious to me, but what kind of teacher would I be if I didn’t point it out clearly? Choose your battles. We want others to treat us differently, but start with the most destructive habits, patterns and language first. Pray for grace to respond well to the others until they can change as well.

Evaluate for progress.

When a student is able to understand and implement the concepts you’ve taught, they get to move on to the next grade level. If they don’t, they’re held back. Nobody likes holding a student back. Nobody. But it’s absolutely necessary to make sure they succeed in the future.

This is not punishment for the student. In fact, just the opposite. It comes from a place of protection and deep care.

Think of the people in your life you would like to treat you differently. Have you confronted a specific behavior multiple times, but it hasn’t changed? You have to ask yourself: why?

Is it because the student refuses to learn?

Is the student not applying himself/herself?

Is there a developmental problem that prevents the student from succeeding?

Have you failed to do your part, as a teacher?

The answers to all these questions help you figure out how to make the difficult, but necessary, decisions you must make next: You must either hold the student back (from certain areas of your heart or life) until the behavior meets the most basic standard, or choose to reevaluate, and re-approach until the lesson is learned.

How I’ve Taught People To Treat Me Differently is a post from: Storyline Blog