Prioritizing Relationships: Practices that Build Relationships and Knownness and the Relational Philosophies and Influential Life Experiences of Relationally Adept Teachers

Teaching Practices;Teachers"Lives;Relationships;Teachers"Beliefs;Social-Emotional;Knownness;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Greene Nolan, HillaryMoss, Pamela Ann ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Teaching Practices;    Teachers";    Lives;    Relationships;    Teachers";    Beliefs;    Social-Emotional;    Knownness;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/149864/hlgreene_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation includes three manuscripts about teachers’ relationships with students. The first explores the relational philosophies of three relationally adept teachers—their guiding beliefs, principles, and attitudes toward relationships in their teaching. This study relies on 12 interviews with teachers plus observations of the teachers discussing their students, the latter of which helped reveal their relational philosophies. This study shows that for many students, teachers moved fluidly between roles of academic coach and emotional confidante, but that for some vulnerable students, they prioritized emotional over academic support. Also, in connecting teachers’ philosophies to their life experiences, this study finds teachers’ commitment to relationships stemmed in part from memories of their own teachers, models of relationally adept mentors or colleagues, personal experiences seeing a loved one buoyed (or not) by a relationship with a teacher, and keen observations of other people’s lives and challenges. The second manuscript builds a detailed description of the relational teaching practices of those three teachers. This part draws on three months of classroom and meeting observations, the same 12 teacher interviews, and 20 student interviews and identifies two sets of relational practices: five that built relationships (e.g., forming a picture of who students are, sharing about oneself) and three that ;;built students up” in some way (e.g., intentionally noticing students, responding to issues with tolerance). The third manuscript draws on 32 videos of lessons from the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project. The videos of sixteen 6th-9th grade teachers were selected as high or low (top/bottom 4%) in terms of their students’ average feelings of ;;knownness,” or how well they thought their teacher understood them per their Student Perception Survey responses. This study finds that high-knownness teachers had personal connections with students (e.g., asked about students’ lives outside of school), put students at ease (e.g., encouraged them on difficult work), and shared in positive emotions (e.g., laughed together) whereas low-knownness teachers spent more time addressing perceived misbehavior and embarrassing or mocking students in front of the class. As a whole, this dissertation portrays the complexity of the relational and emotional work teachers do to build meaningful and significant relationships with students and to make them feel known. This research shows that relationships built by relationally adept teachers occur on many levels, with teachers knowing and connecting with students in service of and during their academic learning but also for the sake of making students feel valued, accepted, and stronger on personal levels—the latter of which appeared deeply tied to teachers’ underlying personal philosophies about relationships and the life experiences that had formed those philosophies. This research is significant in beginning to understand how teachers relational practices are rooted in personally and professionally shaped philosophies and experiences, in giving teachers a voice for articulating the relational work they do, and in naming sets of relational teaching practices, an area long known to be important for students and teachers alike but often assumed to be natural or obvious and so left unnamed.