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
|
F2F Virtual
Presence
|
·
Let students know who you are by
providing them with a bio with a tint of personal information about hobbies,
pastimes, and the like.
·
Create a forum, such as a Class Café,
to allow learners to introduce themselves to peers and to you, and ask
further questions after welcoming them to the course.
|
·
To start relating to learners, introduce
yourself with a kind of activity in which a bit of personal information can
be shared such as things you like.
·
Establish an open channel of
communication with students by asking them further questions and 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 (Scholl, 2016) ; 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” (Rosenberg, 2005) 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.?” (Rosenberg, 2005) 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” (Rosenberg, 2005) 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” (Rosenberg, 2005) 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” (Rosenberg, 2005) 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” (Classroom Management, 2014) . 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:
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: student-student, 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.
Saturday, October 29, 2016
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