The Impact of Building Relationships with George Barcenas

Our recent Learn with the Expert session featured George Barcenas, an educator, innovator, and current professional development trainer for Viewsonic.

Picture this: you walk into your favorite restaurant in your hometown. You know you are about to have the best meal because you have a relationship with the food. You have a connection with this place built on past experiences. And you may even know the people behind the food.

Now take this idea and apply it to a classroom setting. This is exactly what George Barcenas lays out for us in his recent webinar Learn with the Expert: The Impact of Building Relationships with George Barcenas.
In this webinar, educators are invited to start thinking through the lens of how to build a relationship with not only their students but also the curriculum and content that they are teaching. He pushes this idea even further as he encourages educators to ask how they can use technology to strengthen those relationships.

From Restaurant to Classroom

Barcenas uses the analogy of a restaurant to showcase how you can successfully build a relationship with your students and your content in order to promote success and foster a love of learning. Through this lens, he explores how educators can connect with their students and the tech they can use to speak their language more seamlessly. He notes that teachers, like people who have experienced wonderful restaurants firsthand and have a relationship with these establishments’ food, see success when they are able to connect with their students. Good restaurants even model themselves like very successful classrooms in order to encourage interactivity. Similarly, teachers must learn their classroom setup and get creative with their technology in order to use it to their advantage to foster connectivity. In his webinar, Barcenas breaks this down into three different steps for educators and equates each step to a role with unique responsibilities.

1. PREPARE

This first step covers how to set up classrooms, build out curriculum, and master classroom management. An educator must ask themselves “What are the things I need to be successful, including all materials needed for lessons?” When considering this, it’s important to keep in mind that not every classroom is the same. Barcenas equates this to the role of a line cook, or a first-year teacher, who is in charge of preparing food and setting up other necessary supplies. The line cook, or teacher, has to learn the most basic teaching skills to be able to build on them and progress to success. To do this, Barcenas suggests educators get to know their technology in and out in order to be able to make their classroom unique and interesting.

2. PLAN AND DIRECTING

The most important aspect of this step is mastering delivery. By seasoning the curriculum or using creativity to make it one’s own, educators are able to deliver interesting, meaningful, and helpful content in a way that connects with the students. Here, Barcenas uses the metaphor of a sous chef as they are in charge of preparation, planning, and directing. They must plan and direct how the food is presented on the plate, keep kitchen staff in order, train new chefs, and create the work schedule. They also make sure that all food that goes to the customers is of the best quality.

3. VARIETY AND QUALITY

What makes a classroom unique? Barcenas shares that he sees this role as head chef, the person responsible for constructing menus with new and existing culinary creations while ensuring the variety and quality of the servings. Notably, they also approve and polish dishes before they reach the customer.

Speak the Students’ Language

But Barcenas didn’t learn these tricks on his own. He shares that he struggled as a student speaking Spanish at home and learning English at school. Because he was always translating the world around him, trying to adapt and learn, he was able to develop skills that were useful when he became a teacher. But this wasn’t without struggle, failure, and most importantly, guidance. Ultimately this challenge made him realize that students desperately needed translators of knowledge.

In this webinar, he notes that as educators, we take the concepts that our curriculum offers and translate them for our students to understand—a skill he developed by mirroring his childhood teacher that helped him see the world around him in snapshots of information. She took paragraphs and broke them down for him which helped him to see correlations and relationships. He learned that “language and knowledge is about relationships” and took the time to help Barcenas see what the word meant and how it affected him—something you can do too.