(This posting includes a handout link at the end of this post which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

Early in one term, I was starting a conferencing session with a new student, Anja. As she was sitting down next to me, she said, “David, I heard that you grew up in Chicago. I just had a homestay there!” I noticed that I immediately felt a connection to Anja that stayed with me from that day on.

There is some amazing research that explains how we make connections with others. And best of all, there are ways that we can apply this to building positive relationships with our students.

In their book Click: The Power of Instant Connections the authors, Ori and Rom Brafman, describe some enlightening experiments. In one study, some people volunteered for a made-up study about creativity. The researchers secretly set it up so that as half the volunteers left the researchers’ lab, someone wearing a badge with the same first name as the volunteers approached them asking for a donation to a charity. For example, if Cindy had just left the lab, she would be approached by a charity worker wearing a name tag that showed that her name, also, was Cindy.  Likewise, Susan would meet someone named Susan. The other half of the subjects were approached by someone with no badge. Now this is what I found remarkable. The first group whose same first names were on badges donated twice as much as the second group who saw a badge with a different name.

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