Pairing is when you spend time upfront building a relationship. The concept: if you’ve spent the time to build that relationship, then when you ask the student to do the hard things, they will do it.
Today one of my last students logged in. My first thought, “they are so behind!”. My second? This cannot be a high demand lesson because they won’t engage again.
Spent the 15 minutes the family gave me talking about movies and that one time my husband jumped out of the dark to scare me. Why? Because the student who was previously refusing to login agreed at the end that I could email dad and set up another lesson.
I do not have magic. I have no secret formula. The only thing I have when people ask me how I “deal with those kids” is that I take the time upfront to build the relationship.