TOOLBOX 4. How you would seek to build effective relationships in the school context?
Building positive relationships is fun and increases my self-efficacy as a beginner teacher. How would I seek to build effective relationships with my students? To help me conceptualise what those relationships would look like this video is aspirational.
“Dialogue refers to the teaching and learning space where teachers and students can engage in an open and in-depth exchange of ideas". The dialogic teaching and learning space is not about transmission or recall information instead authentic questions then "uptake" or the ways in which the teacher uses a student response as the starting place for their next move in the dialogue. Uptake occurs when a teacher asks a question and then incorporates a student's response into the next question. This signals to the students their responses are valued and can "play an important role in facilitating the negotiation of understandings. The quality of dialogue is judged in terms of "the extent to which instruction requires students to think, not just report someone else's thinking." (Hill & Trupp, 2019) My students are comfortable enough with me to exchange, discuss and debate ideas readily but only a few share their lives or concerns without much prompting. My senior students who have known me over the years tend to share more deeply.
I have been trying to build effective relationships that go beyond intellectual exchanges into the realm of “personal sharing” with my students by introducing:
Vocabulary that would help them identify and own their emotions. It helps them in their creative writing but also by recognising the physical effects of emotions such as the clenched jaw, knitted eyebrows and flared nostrils, they learn to identify their own emotional state. I point out different emotive expressions in stories and model emotional self awareness. We, as a learning community, reflect on possible causes for emotions, emotional self care and management.
English expressions to describe the process of learning and the learning strategies so that they are able to ask for more targeted learning support. When students ask for general help, I give them specific options to choose from and get them to indicate what they would like to learn and what tool they would like to use. For example, a student wanted help with the IELTs exam recently. After I asked him a series of clarifying questions, he decided on his own to focus on essay writing for the next four weeks. He was given the freedom to pick his own topic from a list of options
Also as far as I am able, I try to be around and available during break time if they want to talk. I notice if they are absent and let them know I missed them in class. I also try to learn a bit about what they are interested in so that when they share these with me I can understand what is going on. Getting to know my students is the best part of my job and increases my level of self-efficacy greatly. It is a fun work in progress.
Developing effective relationships with my colleagues in my department is easy.
We see each other every day, trust each other and have each other’s back.
We share a common purpose of caring for and supporting international students in our school.
Often we keep each other going. This safe space increases my self-efficacy as a beginning teacher.
However, I realise I need to be more intentional in developing effective relationships outside my department.
I really like some of the ideas in this video and will try them out this term.
1 Take a genuine interest in people.
2. Be easy to get along with.
3. Be generous with encouragement.
Venturing out and building school wide relationships will help me improve my self-efficacy by allowing me to interact with "layers of my school environment" (Hill & Trupp, 2019) that is resources, people, different cultural values, expectations and learning spaces.
References
Hill, Mary. & Trupp, Martin. 2019. The Professional Practice of Teaching in New Zealand. Cengage.
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