Why relationships are crucial
Malcolm is a Year 9 English teacher with 26 years of experience. Despite all the pressures of working in a highly demanding inner city school he says it was the closeness of the relationships with his colleagues that made him feel that this environment, and his department in particular, was the ‘best place’ that he had every worked:
‘Personally I love working down here. It’s the best place I’ve ever worked for – team spirit, keenness and motivation that I have and the rest of the department has. … Over here (department) I’m happy. I’m enjoying things. I’m working with people that I rate and value and I feel value me’.
At a time when the contemporary landscape of teaching is populated with successive and persisting government policy reforms that have increased teachers’ external accountabilities, work complexity and emotional workload, understanding why and how many teachers are able to sustain their capacity to be resilient and continue to work for improvement is an important quality retention issue.
Resilience is not a given capacity. Rather, it is nurtured and can fluctuate. In this article I focus more closely on teachers’ relational resilience, demonstrating how establishing connections with colleagues and students can produce collective intellectual and emotional capital which stimulates teachers’ professional learning and development and sustains their commitment and capacity to teach well over time.
The reasons for focussing on relationships are threefold. First, teachers’ professional worlds are relational in nature. Supportive relationships in the workplace play an important role in sustaining their sense of wellbeing and commitment in the profession. Second, relationship is essentially about establishing mutual connections. Teachers’ collective sense of collegiality, efficacy and effectiveness is an outcome of their joint, collaborative effort. Such effort connects them intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – which, in turn, enables the seeds of trust to grow deeper and flourish. Third, relationship is an important organisational entity. It shapes organisational cultures and conditions in powerful ways that it can nourish (as well as constrain) teachers’ collaborative effort for learning. School leaders, and principals especially, are the architect of relational cultures. Recent research evidence on teacher retention has been consistently reporting that teacher leavers are not necessarily ‘escaping’ from pupils’ poor behaviour. Rather, they are escaping from poor leadership and dysfunctional school cultures.
Thus, exploring how the webs of relationships in schools influence, positively or negatively, teachers’ capacity to be committed and resilient enables us to probe deep into the individual and organisational worlds of teachers and understand that teachers’ resilience (i.e. capacity to teach to their best in their everyday worlds) is socially defined.