 My name is Patrick and I am an English teacher and I have been for about 10 months. So I don't have some of the experience of teaching that some other of the speakers have had. I did my TESL course this time last year. I was just finishing up this time last year and I started teaching in February. So my own background before that was as a psychotherapist I worked at a small practice in Dublin. I am post-grad in psychotherapy studies. So basically what I want to look at today a little bit about is trying to bring some of what I learned about people, how they operate, how emotions affect us, our decision making and our learning. And I came up with this phrase and I was very excited when I came up with this thing called person-centered teaching until the name of my academic coordinator pointed out that somebody had already come up with that phrase a long time ago. So I thought I'd coined a new phrase but I hadn't. So what we're looking at here is sort of drawing on psychology a little bit and a thing called person-centered therapy which has been around for a long time developed by a guy called Carl Rogers who believes that if you apply certain core conditions in the therapeutic sense that amazing things and extraordinary things can happen. So I thought well maybe if we can recreate that in a teaching context extraordinary things can happen in learning too. Empathy, when we talk about empathy we talk about the ability to understand and share the feelings and experiences of another. I'm a native speaker, I'm Irish, I'm from Dublin, I haven't really travelled the world nowadays, I've never really lived abroad. Well I teach a lot of people who are in their maybe early twenties. How often do I stand back and say what's it like for these people to be here? Lots of them are from Latin America, thousands of them are from home, away from family, away from friends. How many people consider the difficulties they have, the problems they have? And should we think about that a little bit more? Or do we just see them as a homogenous group of students sitting in front of us? Do we see them as people at all? The problems, the problems, the challenges. And congruence is the quality or state of agreeing or corresponding. In other words, don't be fake, be real. In human interaction, be real with the person. Because students are very astute and they will sense if you're plumb awesome in any way. You won the risk, I think, then of losing respect. So you need to mean what you say and say what you mean respectfully. And writers also believe in this thing called unconditional positive regard, which is really about respect. You know, that you respect the individuals. You don't have to like them, but you have to respect them as a person. Okay? And acknowledge that whatever their attitude or behaviour they would be doing their best. So maybe the guy in the class was really getting on your nerves as soon as well as he can. You know? Maybe you need to step back a little bit from what you're feeling yourself. Learning as an emotional experience. Learning is not just an academic or a cognitive experience. It's also an emotional experience. And this has been kind of neglected down the years traditionally. And if emotions were paid attention to at all, they were seen as problematic anxiety, for example. Gets in the ways, what can we do to change it? Other emotional factors such as excitement, hope were often ignored. And they could be great motivators for learning, especially library learning. So learning is also an emotional experience. So if it's also an emotional experience, then we need to be paying a bit of attention to the emotional world. Of the people in front of us. Yeah. Algebraing is an emotionally loaded experience. There's a strong relationship between cognition and emotion. We're not robots. We don't just program these people sitting in front of you. We've got to reach them. They're human beings. And research on learning characteristics has suffered from a general emotional deficit. That's what the psychology of the language learner revisited. I'll read that and Steve and I will discuss it. Okay. So emotion and cognition is a strong relationship. Language to learning is an emotionally loaded experience. And any description of what makes a particular learner unique needs to take this into account. Swain argues the relationship between cognition and emotion is minimally interdependent, maximally there and separate. And one general lesson drawn from a review of aptitude research has been that cognition does not function in isolation, but interacts with other mental functions such as motivation and emotion. Therefore more elaborate and educationally meaningful conceptualization of language aptitude would not necessarily be restricted to cognitive aptitude alone. So I'm just reinforcing the whole idea that the emotional world plays its part in our students' learning. Whether we like that or not, that's a reality. Okay. There are many ways to make me address this, but this is the one that I'm going to focus on here. Building rapport with our students is a good way of reaching that part. A number of others have explored the impact of building rapport. There's the references there. And here are some of the benefits of building rapport. Students feel individually valued. I don't know about any of you guys, but whenever I was in a learning environment as a student myself, whether of the kid or later as an adult, that kind of thing meant so much to me. You know, if the tutor or the guy teaching even knew your name or knew something about you or asked you how your football team got on or something. Wow. Well, I feel a bit taller. I feel better for that. I'm not anonymous. I'm not just sitting down there. Students feel comfortable being honest with the teacher. This is very important because they feel able to give you feedback. Yeah? You're talking about getting students involved in it. They're not going to do that if they don't feel in some way that there's a relationship, a relational process happening. And students are more likely to participate and be excited about their learning. So how do you go about building that rapport? How do you do that? How do you make that happen? Gather and share information. Students are people. The way we connect with people is by communicating with them. Students are no different. Talk to them. Ask them questions. What do you like to do? Where are you from? What's the local football team there? Do you support them? Ask them the next week if their team wants. Tell them something about yourself when it limits, of course. You can decide your own limits. Human connections through communication. Let's lose this teacher student. Consciously create the atmosphere. It was one day morning and you were walking in there with a hangover or you had a rail with your partner. And you don't address that and leave it at the door that's going to impact the experience of those students in that room. I believe that. Take five minutes. But the atmosphere in the room is your responsibility as much as the context in that room. Move around the room. Sit next to him. Get him from behind the desk. Abandon the desk. Sit on the floor. It was an empty seat. Sit in there. Decide to move about. This is the difficult stuff for you. For somebody. You've got to know yourself and your own prejudices. We're all human beyond of some prejudices. But you don't need to bring them into the room. Leave them outside the room. You can't do that if you don't know what they are. So like we said, they're hard questions. Take responsibility for being a flaw of human. You might have some prejudices. You're not perfect. And leave them outside the room. Don't take them in there. And this is my favorite. Resist the pedestal. Your students will want to tell you how wonderful you are a little to time. You're the best teacher I've ever had. I've heard of so many times that I want to believe it's true, but I know it can't be true. Just because somebody offered you a pedestal, you don't have to climb up on me. Because if you do, you're no longer meeting their needs. You're meeting your own ego needs and you've lost it. Don't get up on the pedestal. You're not the best teacher in the world. You really aren't. You know, the emperors, the Roman guys, when they come back from the war, after a conference somewhere, they go on the chariot through the streets, the plebs would be cheering. You'd have a slave standing behind them, whispering in his ear, remember your honor, in case he got carried away with himself. So none of you out there are the best teacher ever. And you never will. Yeah, so that's basically, I'll just recap on the main points again. I'm drawing here on psychology, person-centered therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, the tree, core conditions. I'm not saying you go in there and become a therapist, but at least be conscious of these things. Be aware of them. Because there's a human experience in that classroom. Learning is an emotional experience. And I was doing some research with that kind of surprise neighbor. Try and build and foster the rapport, and whatever you do, resist the pest. Okay, thank you very much.