Teachers play a crucial role in encouraging their classes to evolve into productive learning communities: functioning as teachers in the traditional sense on the one hand, while developing rapport and revealing selected aspects of themselves on the other. In this workshop participants have the opportunity to appreciate the necessity of switching between roles and to understand the importance of conceptualising themselves and their classes as ‘we’ and ‘us’ as opposed to ‘me’ and ‘them’. Interactive tasks include examining a range of techniques for developing rapport, sharing with others which rapport-building techniques might work for them in their individual teaching situations, and discussing responses to particular scenarios in terms of their relationship-maintenance potential.