Supports teachers in building and maintaining positive teacher-student relationships.
What creates a strong connection with a student, or prevents one altogether?
What about hard-to-reach young people?
How can I become the teacher I aspire to be for every student?
What is it?
In this program, we focus on teachers in secondary education.
Through a training and small-group booster sessions, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with your colleagues and explore how to navigate challenging relationships with students.
You will learn about the impact of stress, mental health challenges, and trauma in young people. You will also explore how mentalizing can support you as a teacher in responding to these challenges.
Why?
We developed this programme because the number of young people with significant behavioural and emotional problems in schools is increasing. These young people are often in a socially vulnerable position.
As a result, alongside your core teaching responsibilities, you are increasingly faced with additional demands and challenges.
When emotions run high in a classroom or young people display challenging or difficult behaviour, you become affected as a teacher and as a person. In these moments, standard approaches to “managing difficult behaviour” are often not enough. What is needed instead is a moment to reflect – together – on new ways of understanding and responding, so that you can continue to be the teacher you want to be.
Background
A teacher’s ability to maintain a mentalizing stance appears to be a key condition for developing positive teacher–student relationships. This involves being able to look beyond a student’s behaviour and continue to consider the thoughts and feelings underlying students’ behaviour – even when that behaviour is highly challenging.
Research shows that positive teacher-student relationships are crucial not only for students’ academic achievement, but also for the social and emotional well-being of both students and teachers.