Yesterday I cautioned you against getting too cozy with your students...

But just what is "too cozy" and how do we know when we've crossed that line?

Well, I can sum it up in a few words for you:

"Support your students publicly, but avoid developing private relationships with them."

Here's what I mean...

Several years back when I was running my first school, I was told to never allow yourself to get too close to your students. Socializing with them was a no-no, and befriending them was definitely a bad idea.

And, after a bad experience with dating a student early on in my teaching career, I was more than a little gun-shy about socializing with students.

Now, obviously the dating thing was my mistake and I only had myself to blame. However, between the advice I was getting from school owners I admired, and my own bad memories of that debacle, I was dead set on keeping my distance from my students socially.

Actually, it wasn't a bad policy - it's just that I executed it poorly.

See, I decided that I wouldn't put myself in ANY situation where I would be interacting with my students outside of a school function or activity. What that meant in practice was that I never attended any of my student's weddings, graduations, award ceremonies, or the like.

Now, when you have 150 families in your school, of course that makes it easier on you as an instructor because you don't have to pick and choose which events you can attend and which you can't. Thus, you don't have to worry about playing favorites.

However, this ended up being the cause for some very hurt feelings. Several of my students who had been with me for years were very hurt that I didn't attend their social events. I failed to see it at the time, but what ended up happening was that my failure to attend made me come off as being very callous and insensitive.

And this absolutely was the case. 

In hindsight, I should have been there to support my students publicly. There is nothing that says you have to get buddy-buddy with your students just because you're at their wedding, graduation ceremony, or awards banquet. And unfortunately, I ended up looking like a heel because I ignored invitations to these sorts of events.

So, here's my advice - support your students at public gatherings and events that are important to them. Show up and let them know you care enough to be there. But, when it comes to hanging out afterwards, having a few drinks, or B.S.-ing post event, politely decline and say you have another engagement to attend, or plans with your family, or whatever.

In this way, you'll be walking the fine line between supporting your students and allowing them to get too comfortable with you socially. You'll still have their support, but you'll also avoid sticky interpersonal situations that might end up causing trouble down the road.

I hope this information helps, because it's important that your students know you care. Not just for purposes of increasing your retention, but also because they are taking cues from your behavior and applying them in their own personal lives as well.

Alright, so this wraps up my series on student retention. Now, I know I didn't hit on a lot of the more traditional topics regarding student retention, but if you want to find out more about those areas you can go to my Amazon author page and get the character education book, the drills and games book, the rotating curriculum book, and the profit-boosting book.

Implementing the ideas and concepts in those four books and reports will definitely help you improve your student retention numbers, and at less than $30 bucks for the set (in ebook format) you'd be hard-pressed to find a better use of three Hamiltons this holiday season:

http://www.amazon.com/Mike-Massie/e/B00940L33A/