Professional Learning As Relational Practice

Given the emphasis on transforming professional work through the adoption of enquiry-based and trans-disciplinary approaches to service development, there is an urgent need for those involved in professional education to develop a robust understanding of how changes in practice occur. A more inclusive approach to the analysis of the processes involved across the varied and interrelated contexts in which they occur is thus very timely. In this book, Jenny Reeves sets out to explore the gap between the experience of professional learning as an interactive, dynamic and socially contextualised process, and descriptions that are often individualistic, overly linear and largely context-free. She makes the claim that this disjuncture is the outcome of modes of enquiry that concentrate on limited selections of the available data. Adopting a relational approach to describing practice-based professional development, including graphical means for exploring the spaces produced by the activity, provides a very different picture. It creates a basis for representing the complex movements, relationships and interactions between people and things that occur during professional learning. It also provides a productive approach to describing the exchange and creation of professional knowledge across different contexts over time. By building a picture of the ephemeral spaces and connections that educating activities produce, mapping relational space allows those engaged in professional education to think rather differently about how professional learning and changes in knowledge and practice may be understood, supported and developed.

How is it that some teachers have just “got it”? They walk into a room and the atmosphere changes. They get through to students in a way that no-one else can. The author has sought answers to this question by observing and interviewing teachers from preschool to upper secondary school levels. Having intensively studied the highly influential but underestimated relational dimension of teaching, her contention is that these teachers successfully use relational practices to build educational relationships with their students and educational communities among them. Moreover, she finds that what may come across as a teacher’s personal traits is actually a sensible professional approach. These teachers haven’t “got it” - they “get it”. This book explains how teachers carry out their relational practices, and contains an abundance of everyday examples from all stages of education. The deep theoretical reasoning departs from these examples to create a compelling argument for a teacher’s relational professionality that is possible to learn and teach. New relational perspectives and concepts are introduced for the purpose of facilitating professional conversations about the profound dimension of relationships in education.

In this book, Raider-Roth offers an innovative approach to teacher professional development that builds on the intellectual strength and practical wisdom of practitioners. Focusing on nurturing relationships between and among participants, facilitators, subject matter, texts, and the school environment, this book helps educators create a repertoire of teaching approaches founded on sustained, deep, democratic, local, and active learning. The author demonstrates that, within the context of trustworthy relationships, teachers can better connect with all that they know about teaching, learning, and their own identities. This, in turn, enables them to act on what they know in the best interest of their students and leads to the kinds of lasting change and commitment that can move the teaching profession beyond training for a particular skill set. Book Features: Examples showing how the work of relational learning communities can improve teachers’ practice.A focus on the cultural dimension in professional development for teachers.A view of teaching and learning as deeply relational and transformative. Strategies to help facilitators and participants create processes to best support a fertile learning environment. “An effective and powerful antidote to the usual models of PD, Professional Development in Relational Learning Communities is a thoughtful and engaging text that takes seriously the intellectual work of teachers and the importance of relationships in teacher learning.” —Curt Dudley-Marling, professor emeritus, Boston College

The Different Ways of Being an Educator series highlights the shifts and movements educators make in a flexi school context. Flexi schools offer programs that are responsive to the needs of young people who face complexities in their lives that have created barriers to learning in conventional schools. Not all flexi schools are the same, but they have some common features and practice frameworks. In Relational Practicethe first in a three-book seriesthe author explores an educational model for those who seek to give disenfranchised young people access to safe and dynamic learning communities. Drawing on stories from experienced practitioners working with young people in flexi schools, the author shares insights about re-engaging young people and effective ways of working with colleagues in multidisciplinary teams. The concepts are presented in easy-to-access, clearly themed vignettes from educators. Each element is accompanied by questions that guide staff to engage in critical reflection individually, within teams, and with mentors and supervisors. For educators in any context, the series offers practical strategies and relational ways for educators to support young people to remain connected and engaged in learning at school.

The present book is a result of research conducted in the Indian corporate arena for the presence and effectiveness of Relational practices. Further, It also draws and analyses the relationship between Relational Practices, Organisational Culture and Organisational Commitment. It outlines the significance of Relational Practices through primary and secondary research on the subject.

In this book, Raider-Roth offers an innovative approach to teacher professional development that builds on the intellectual strength and practical wisdom of practitioners. Focusing on nurturing relationships between and among participants, facilitators, subject matter, texts, and the school environment, this book helps educators create a repertoire of teaching approaches founded on sustained, deep, democratic, local, and active learning. The author demonstrates that, within the context of trustworthy relationships, teachers can better connect with all that they know about teaching, learning, and their own identities. This, in turn, enables them to act on what they know in the best interest of their students and leads to the kinds of lasting change and commitment that can move the teaching profession beyond training for a particular skill set. Book Features: Examples showing how the work of relational learning communities can improve teachers’ practice. A focus on the cultural dimension in professional development for teachers. A view of teaching and learning as deeply relational and transformative. Strategies to help facilitators and participants create processes to best support a fertile learning environment.

Measurement-based assessment has dominated our educational systems at the expense of the learning and the well-being of students and teachers. In this book, Gergen and Gill propose a radical alternative to this broken system, which is based instead on an inspirational conception of schools as sites of collective meaning-making and a relational orientation to evaluation. The authors acknowledge that it is within the process of relating that the world comes to be meaningful for us, and equally, learning and well-being are embedded in relational process, which testing and grades undermine. Providing detailed illustrations using cases from pioneering schools around the globe at both the primary and secondary level, this book demonstrates how a relational orientation to evaluation in education can enhance learning processes, foster students' engagement and vitality relationships, and elevate the evaluation of teaching and the school as a whole. Featuring collaborative learning, dialogic pedagogy, and flexible curricula, relational evaluation truly speaks to the demands of a rapidly changing world.

This comprehensive text, written by self-study scholars who are noted in the field for particular methodological and epistemological perspective, delineates a range of research methodologies.