[MUSIC] Welcome back. This is week two of developing relationships and we're looking at positive teacher-student relationships in the classroom. In today's lecture, we're trying to look at how do you go about developing good relations in the classroom. What we need to recognize is that there are a lot of education systems around the world now that are identifying the importance of a range of different student outcomes. As we can see from this slide on the Curriculum for Excellence that comes out of Scotland, it's important for students to be successful learners. However, the Scottish education system has also argued there's a lot of other things that they want out of schools. They want students to be responsible citizens. They want students to be confident individuals. And, they want students to be effective contributors. Now, all these things require different types of teaching skills. Different types of understandings. Different types of relationships between students. So, if we look at these activities again, we're looking at the various outcomes and experiences that learners might need to have. Certainly, they're interested in developing literacy and numeracy, but the whole issue associated with health and wellbeing is very important as well. And, health and wellbeing at the base of it comes from the relationships that we have with other people. If we don't look at developing relationships within the classroom, we need to focus on six different relationships that need to be developed. The first one is the student's relationship with themselves. We need to recognize that how I see myself and how I behave is very important in terms of morality. The second relationship, is the student to learning. And, to aspects of learning that we need to think about. Certainly, if the student sees themselves as being a good strong learner, they can withstand a lot of other problems that might incur along the way. The third one is, the student to the content that we're delivering, and we might argue, because a student is in school, they automatically have a relationship to the content. But, this is not necessarily the case. For instance, have you ever gone into your classroom. And, say, for the first thing we're going to do today, is fractions. And, all the students jumped up an applauded and shouted, and said wow, that's great. They don't have a relationship to the content. They don't do that. We have to build it forward and we have to build it in a positive way. And, if we guys build these positive relationships to self, to learning and to content. The relationship between us as teachers and our students becomes very critical. But, there are broader relationships that we need to focus on as well. And, that's to the students, and the rest of the students in the grade, and students in the rest of the school. But, we also need to think of the student as being part of a wider community. And, we need to look at, how do we develop relationships between our students and the community, as well? This particular graphic looks at a more complex and interactive relationship with students. We can see from the model that's being proposed by Otero and Sparks that at the bottom of it we have isolated learners. And, these are people who simply learn things in order to learn things. They're learning them because they have an examination. They're learning though, because they have to. And, what happens at this level is that people will recognize something for a short period of time. They become aware of things and then they forget them again. And usually, they're aware of them for as long as they have an examination. And as soon as the examination is done, we forget the facts again. Individual pieces of knowledge, I've mentioned this before, individual pieces of knowledge are things that we learn and then forget. Let me give you an example. How many of you are able to identify for me what the formula for acceleration is? For instance, almost every teacher in the world would have learned the formula for acceleration, either in mathematics or in science. And yet, I would predict that those of you that were able to tell me what the formula for acceleration was are either mathematics or science teachers now. For everybody else, we learned it, we passed the test. And then, it was of no use to us anymore. So, we forgot it again. This is at the level of factual knowledge, where we learn something for a short period of time. But, it's isolated from everything else that we do. If we want to move to the next level, we want to engage our young people in what they're doing. We're looking at promoting the development of understanding. We're looking at making them more adaptable, looking at analyzing the concepts that they have. What we need to remember is that for every single word in our language. We have a concept. So, if I mention a few words. Music. We have a concept with music. Family. We all have our own concept of family. Understanding. We all have a concept of what understanding means. But, it's only when we start to talk about these concepts. That we help young people to understand what they learn. We may help them adapt their concepts. We may help them add to their concepts. But, we can only do that by discussing bigger things, not simply facts. We also need to recognize that concepts are not necessarily acceptable in the same way to everybody. So, a concept that I have and a concept that you have for the same thing might be completely different. And in fact, we might find at certain times that these concepts are actually in conflict with each other. And, one example of that at the moment would be, we have people who follow the Islamic religion. And, there are some people who have concepts that anybody who does that is a terrorist. And, we have other people who simply have the concept that these are people just like us who follow a different religion. Now, these two concepts are a complete contradiction to each other. But, if we have students, who do have these different views of a similar concept, it's through our interaction, it is through our discussion of these. It is through our ethical perceptions that we actually start to identify what the values are underneath a particular concept. So, if we want to move from engaged learners to interactive learners, we need now to be active in our discussions of things, is we need to look at them in different ways. From different points of view, and then do it in a very positive and supportive environment. But, as we can see at the top, if we want our students to be global self regulated learners. We have to do things in a different way. We have to recognize that this is a different activity. What we're doing is we're helping young people to relate themselves to various things. We're getting them to understand that there is an interdependence between what we do and what they do. And, what we're looking at is to enable them to find options for positive action. It could be argued that if we want people to be global self regulated learners, we no longer need teachers. We need people who do different things. Let me give you a way of looking at this. If you are not learning, how can I call myself a teacher? I can only call myself a teacher if the people around me are learning. So, if we're having people that are learning almost by themselves and they're regulating their own learning what I need to do is to be a facilitator of other people's learning. I don't need to be driving everything from the content knowledge that I have. I need to be establishing the processes and the situations within the classroom that will enable a range of people with a range of different learning styles. All of them to lean what they're looking at. S,o this relational learning model proposed by Otero and Sparks actually leads us to a different understanding of what teaching and learning is all about. Instead of talking about teaching and learning, we now need to talk about learning and teaching because it is the learning that takes priority. So, here is another graphic that you may find interesting. It talks about survival values in learning. And, it talks about how we remember certain types of things. And, at the bottom, if we had what's called nonsense syllables, if we just remember a jumble of things or if it makes nonsense to us we have no interest in it and no desire to know it. At best over a 12 month period, we'll only remember about 10% of what we hear. Even factual material, material that we would like to learn, that we want to learn, we can only remember about a third of that. But, as we go further up this graphic, what you can see is as we become more active in our learning, rather than sitting and listening, or sitting and watching. We're doing things or we're processing things in our own mind, we start to remember more and more for a long period of time. And, the idea of it would be that we remember 100% of our attitudes and feelings about the things that we're doing. To give you an example, for instance, in 12 months time, people might say to you, did you do the improving relationships program, for the foundations for teaching and learning? Did you remember what tiny had talked about during that program? You may not remember much of what I said. You will remember, however, a lot what you felt about what I said. Did you agree with me? Did you disagree with me? Are there things that I said that you would like to have changed? Are there things I said that you really feel strongly about your attitudes and you feelings about things? So, let's take this graphic and turn it upside down. What if we started by talking about young people's attitudes and feelings about things. How do you feel about mathematics? How do you feel about geography? And then, if we started with their attitudes and the feelings about certain subjects and certain studies. The factory material later on can be put into place where it is associated with our attitudes and feelings. We may have a much better chance of getting people to remember facts if we start to have conversations about how they feel about things, what they think about things and what they're actually doing at the time. So, what is the basic premise if we want to improve student-teacher relationships? If we want to improve knowledge and we want to improve understanding, we have to assume that the students are indifferent. Why do we assume that they're interested in what we're teaching? If we assume that they're not interested. We' ve recognized the need that we have to do some work in order to make them interested in the first place. And, this is the whole basis of motivation. Motivation is helping me to develop an interest in something. So, as a teacher, we need to work hard of making students interested in what we're talking about. So, how can we do that? Well, hey, there's a model of what we might use. We need to find at who are the kids are. Who are the students that we're working with? And now, who are they as students but who are they as people. We need to ask some questions and in the activity sheets that, that come after this particular lecture. I've given you some questions that you might ask of the students in the morning. Questions that are not about them as students, but are about them as people. Questions like, how do you get to school? Questions like, what do you like to eat? Questions like, what are your favorite hobbies? We're finding out about them as people. Having found out about them, we then need to work out for ourselves, what's worth learning and therefore, with teaching. Because if it's not worth learning. If I don't believe it's all that important, why am I teaching it? And, if I believe that I'm teaching something that is not really important, I'm not going to do it well. So, we have to work out as teachers, what's worth learning about this particular piece of knowledge. What is important about it? How can I convince the importance to the students? Because I should only be teaching the things that I'm interested in, the things that I believe are worthwhile. And then, of course, we need to ask ourselves the question, well, how do I deliver? We recognize, and in a little bit, in a later week, we're going to talk about diversity. There are many different people in our classroom. Many different energies, many different viewpoints. How do I deliver something in a way that is going to make it interesting to people? Well, what I want to do now is to give you a couple of exercises that you could use if you want because you're able to download this PowerPoint. You could use this in your own classroom and just some examples of how you might get people engaged in their learning. These come from a book that George Otero and myself wrote which is called The Global Classroom. This particular graphic shows different symbols that are used by four different cultures around the world. One of the cultures is Egyptian, ancient Egyptian. One of the cultures is Mexican. One of the cultures is Native American Indian and one of the cultures is the Celtic culture. Now, if we had something like this what we would ask you to do is to identify for me which of the symbols come from which of the cultures. I wouldn't ask you to do it by yourself, I want to ask you to work with other people, to share your knowledge, because the important thing is to find out what the answer is, it is not so important to find out by yourself. So, spend a minute, look at these things. Can you recognize anything from the different cultures? [MUSIC] When you go to the running shift for this particular week, I will provide you with the answers to which of these symbols come from which of the cultures. The second one that I have. This is one that I find very interesting. I call it the golden rule. Anything you look down the list of statements there, we find that there are very similar in all different religions about how we should treat each other. It sort of says, do unto others as you would like to have done to you. In other words, treat other people in the same way that you'd like to be treated. Now, if we think of this, if all of the religions in world have a similar sort of starting point in terms of how to treat people,. We have to ask ourselves the question. Why have we been fighting each other for so many years? What could we do if we showed this to our students? And, we've got them to discuss what each of these statements mean. And, what does it mean in terms of how we can interact with each other. Again, diversity. This last one shows you the different sorts of systems that you can ask your students to be involved in. Ask them how many different systems can you see here? What is a system? Well, a system is two or more things that operate in tandem, that work together. So, you've got two things happening. And, they work in some way that they're interacting. Now, I'm not going to give you the results to this. I will just let you do it yourself. But, we've done this with students at Grade 4 level and they can identify many different systems that are at work in that. There are transport systems, there are food systems, there are so on. In that person that's riding a bicycle. How many systems are within that person? Circulatory system, reproductive system, lymphatic system and so on. How many systems can you find? What I've talked about here are ways in which we might engage young people in their learning. By asking them questions, by getting them to see each other as partners in this, and by getting them to see each other as partners with you as a teacher. So, in our next lecture, we're going to look at some of the ethical things that we need to remember when we're teachers. We need to behave in a particular way. We need to maintain a particular standard of behavior when we're teaching our students and in the next lecture, we're going to look at some of these. Thank you. [MUSIC]
