Photograph contributed by Fernando Carranza and taken in Honduras, CA
Relationship-Based Management For virtual or F2F learning settings By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Saturday, October 29, 2016 Post 304
Teachers, professors, faculty members, and any kind of instructor face lots of classroom management challenges every time they walk into a classroom. So is it that difficult to manage a group of learners? Do you really consider classroom management a difficult task to achieve? No doubt that answers will vary from educator to educator, and most will answer both questions with the cliché expression, “it all depends.” But, what does it depend on? In education we are certain that variables affecting this particular kind of management are many, and after asking a good number to teaching professionals for the answers, many
commonalities can be easily spotted. However, in blended learning education, we instructors follow three principles that can help us all have a better control of the class and that can be easily moved into face-to-face teaching sessions: teacher social presence, instructor’s teaching presence, and student cognitive presence.
Teacher Social Presence Learning to Interact with one Another All of us educators are human beings dealing with other humans, and because relationships are necessary, it is important to exercise the teacher social presence to empathize with learners. Based on Mary Scholl (2016), who had a talk on relationship-based management as part of the PD Talks organized by the Mark Twain Library at CCCN (Costa Rica), the very first thing to establish with learners is
interaction. For Scholl, it is imperative that learners can get to know who the instructor is, and in return, the teacher can also get to know who is in class. In synchronous or asynchronous blended and online learning education, a “virtual” relationship is then created with course participants by means of the posting of the facilitator’s bio (usually composed with very specific standards), the personal teacher/student correspondence through the platform being used, and with any other kind of announcements connected to the course and its learning tasks. And there is no reason why this model used in bLearning cannot be applied in F2F teaching scenarios where the teacher social presence also needs to be established. If the establishment of the instructor’s social presence is absent, as Mary Scholl (2016) posited in her PD Talk, “classroom management fails when teachers do not relate to students.” The moment in which interaction cannot be established, teacher social presence is out of the classroom management equation. The Way Teacher Social Presence is Exercised
How is instructor social presence exercised? Though a couple of ideas where shallowly stated above, let us explore how this presence can be used in vitual instruction and in F2F teaching. Virtual Social Presence Let students know who you are by
F2F Virtual Presence To start relating to learners,
providing them with a bio with a tint
introduce yourself with a kind of
of personal information about
activity in which a bit of personal
hobbies, pastimes, and the like.
information can be shared such as
Create a forum, such as a Class Café, to allow learners to introduce
things you like. Establish an open channel of
themselves to peers and to you, and
communication with students by
ask further questions after welcoming
asking them further questions and
them to the course.
sharing a bit of who you are as a regular human.
Whether these ideas are actually used in virtual or F2F learning environments, they allow your pupils to know you and their peers. In a virtual environment, relating to students is a way to have them understand they are not interacting with a robot, but with a human being interested in having them construct their knowledge and develop skills. Not relating to learners leads to classroom management failures [ CITATION Sch16 \l 1033 ]; the setting of a class culture or community of learning is part of exercising our teacher social presence.
Instructor’s Teaching Presence Having them Believe Based on the four components of Nonviolent Communication stated by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg (2005), observation, feeling, needs, and request, we teachers
need to have our learners really believe in our believing in them. As educators, no matter what learning environment we are part of, we will walk into it “without introducing any judgement or evaluation” [ CITATION Ros051 \l 1033 ] of what we are observing; since our outmost interest in learners is to have them learn what needs to be studied, we will teach based on our relationship-based classroom management. The new scenario will no doubt produce feelings in ourselves that will flourish while we see what happens around us. We need to ask ourselves, “are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated, etc.?” [ CITATION Ros051 \l 1033 ] to exercise our teaching presence and produce deep learning among our pupils.
Mary Scholl during her PD Talk at CCCN, San José, Costa Rica
As soon as we teachers have indentified what is felt based on what is being observed while teaching, we must “say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified” [ CITATION Ros051 \l 1033 ] and what needs we are perceiving from our students. Our teaching presence can soothe learners’ dispair, fears, and needs for pain relief while our power as educators is exercised in the
classroom. All this is leading us to the fourth component that addresses “what we are wanting from the other person that would enrich [their] lives or make [their learning] life more wonderful” [ CITATION Ros051 \l 1033 ] for them. The ultimate learner request
in an educational environment is fully established when “we
connect with [learners] by first sensing what they are observing, feeling, and needing, and then discover what would enrich their lives” [ CITATION Ros051 \l 1033 ] by receiving the product of our teaching presence, bearning in mind the importance of our social presence or the relationships that need to be created to foster learning and the development of new skills. Student Resistance towards Learning While listening to Mary Scholl during her PD Talk at the Mark Twain Library at CCCN (San José, Costa Rica), my mind began toying with the idea of how students resist my teaching (presence). Not really understanding what they feel and what needs they have can lead to a dead-on street in terms of relationship-based management. Though I was not exactly aware of how much resistance learners can bear, I have always counterattacked it with a bit of common sense, by helping them complete course work in any of the two teaching environments I work in, and by aiming at having them sense that I want to assist them in their learning process as a guide, tutor, facilitator, and friendly hand. At this point of my teaching career, I have come to realize the importance of empathizing with learners and become a helping hand for them, and one that they can hold on when their learning is at risk. As Scholl (2016) suggests, students need to be brought to life in our teaching. By showing learners our social side, by having them feel that we are there to assist them in their learning, and by correctly applying our teaching presence (with suitable teaching approaches and with the application of a variety of learning strategies). If all this is done, along with
Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication model, we can help learners not to resist learning but to embrace all we can provide them to make them feel academically fulfilled.
Student Cognitive Presence Their Resistance to Learning (Once Again) Classroom management is directly linked to breaking student resistance to learning, which becomes a failure in the correct application of their cognitive presence. Since this is a symbiosis of elements to build up a relationship-based management, student cognitive presence needs to be connected to the way in which we entice them with what needs to be learned in the course we are teaching. It is imperative to keep learners alert and focused on learning and making them feel fully backed up by us, the faculty members, educators, instructors or teachers. The objective of their education and their sole reason to be in a classroom is to build their knowledge and skills. A way to break student resistance to learning is correlated with the exercise of our power (control) over the students that must be done with nonviolent leadership. As it has been probably witnessed by many of us, the wrong exercise of power can backfire on us and in our teaching; as a consequence, the whole cognitive experience we want to provide learners is sent down the drainage. The cognitive presence can be fostered and boosted if we simply empathize with students instead of imposing what we think is the best (for us, usually), and if the four components of Nonviolent Communication are forgotten in the darkest corner of the (physical or virtual) classroom, no cognitive presence is endorsed by our teaching. This is why we need to beware of how power is exercised and how it is perceived by our students. The more threatening their learning scenario becomes, the more they will resist our teaching.
What Classroom Management is for us So far what we have been doing is seeing how classroom management based on relationships can be enhanced with the inclusion of the triad of presences commonly used in blended and online learning, but we have not really defined what classroom management is. Based on the Glossary of Education Reform, it can be defined as a “wide variety of skills and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class” [ CITATION Cla14 \l 1033 ]. All these “skills and techniques” are much connected to what Mary Scholl had us PD Talk participants include in what we think classroom management (CM) implies. In her session many of us came up with the following list: Part of CM rules teacher position interactions agreements dispositions
Presence Teaching Presence Feeling Teaching Presence Feeling Social Presence Needs Teaching Presence Needs Teaching Presence Feeling
Part of CM relationships consequences expectations attitudes negotiations
Presence Social Presence Needs Teaching Presence Feeling Cognitive Presence Needs Teaching Presence Feeling Teaching Presence Needs
As it can be seen after analyzing Scholl’s exercise during her PD Talk and intending to make sense of what these words can tell us, most of our classroom management is based on our teaching presence and how our learners feel/react toward our teaching. The CM we are practicing is incredibly teacher-centered, with a little, little bit of social interaction, and with lots of needs that are not exactly dealt with properly by the instructors and that produce many feelings on both sides that are not coped with in the best way neither by the learners nor by the teachers. This
shows some evidence that the need for more relationship-based classroom management needs to be cultivated. When Scholl (2016) asked her audience what our goals in classroom management are three ideas came into my mind, but now and after analyzing the implications of classroom managements, other ideas have popped up. Initially I started considering the importance of breaking student resistance towards their learning. Furthermore, I started to think again on how essential it is to build a community of learning for students to feel at ease while being instructed, and how CM is transcendental for us educators to help pupils construct their knowledge and skills. Now that I can see what we normally do in our classrooms in terms of presences and Nonviolent Communication, we are very far away from the ideal teaching scenario where we are really interested in our students and their learning, or we are sidetracked by our personal interests that we forget that students are there waiting for us to give them a hand in their education. Relationships in CM If we want to strengthen our relationships in education, it is necessary to identify the kind of interactions we educators experience in our teaching settings. Based on Scholl (2016), we teachers along with learners undergo several types of binary relationships that are not productive for the teaching process: studentstudent, teacher-student, student-self, and teacher-self. As it can be seen on the chart for what CM is for us, there is a need for the strengthening of teacher social presence, which is the origin of the relationships with learners. Binary relationships are not always good. The four different components for Nonviolent Communication cannot be met this way. Student-student relationships can only add to the amount of frustration one or the two learners are bearing and
no relief is going to come since most of our classroom management is connected to us, the instructors. Teacher-student interactions can also be counterproductive if no observation, feeling, needs, and request are comprehended when coming from the learner, and it is surely not understood either by the student who may be getting input s/he is not able to process. Student-self and teacher-self are the least two explored binary relationships that can produce the rupture of any attempt to having some good classroom management. Who helps any of the two but the self? Is this right? Concluding Remarks This is just a simple reaction towards what Mary School proposed during her PD Talk session at CCCN (San José, Costa Rica). Some more research is needed to uncover some more of the truth linked to the way classroom managements based on relationships can be improved with the three types of presences used in blended and online education nowadays. If, along with the presences, we can include Rosenberg’s in a more in-depth study of a more efficient relationship-based classroom management, the equation can be more complete and more meaningful data can be obtained. But in the absence of this study, a shift in the way we hold our relationships with our students and the way we handle our teaching needs to be re-oriented to satisfy more students’ needs for learning. References
Classroom Management. (2014, August 20). Retrieved from The Glossary of Education Reform: http://edglossary.org/classroom-management/ Rosenberg, M. (2005). Nonviolent Communcation A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press. Scholl, M. (2016, October 7). Relationship-Based Management. PD Talks. CCCN. San Jose.