THEME: 'The relational aspect’ and its importance for learning.

Anne Bang-Larsen has written a PhD thesis on supervision on writing in Danish High Schools/gymanasier and has published a number of texts on supervision and academic writing. She is a consultant at SDU and has  practised as a lecturer and a high school teacher of Danish and History of Religion at Svendborg Gymnasium. 

For Anne Bang-Larsen, who is both a long-term external supervisor at the Lecturer Training Programme at SDU and an experienced teacher at secondary education, it is striking how big a difference there is in the attention to 'the relational aspect' in a high school context and at the university. As she sees it, relationships are a prerequisite for you, as a teacher, to be able to move someone figuratively and for the students to learn.

When Anne Bang-Larsen supervises, she occasionally encounters teaching that takes place without much interaction. In this connection, she points to the fact that the pure lecture format, without relationships between teacher and student, can be inherited through generations. In these situations, observation and supervision are a powerful tool for changing practice, as the observations and the subsequent conversations with the supervisee can draw attention to when the students are actively involved and when they ‘fade away’. In this way, the supervisee becomes aware of differences in teaching approaches and the learning opportunities that result from the approaches. When the students engage in the teaching material, learning takes place, and therefore it is important that the teacher has plans with exactly the group of students who are in the classroom, otherwise the teaching might as well be an online lecture. In this context, e-learning tools can be a good dialogic tool to get hold of what the students are preoccupied with during a lecture, for example. Gaining such an insight, via a poll or something similar, is one way of having a relationship with the students; the teacher can relate to what exactly these students are dealing with, are interested in, find difficult, etc.

A simple approach to creating relationships with your students can be to set out to present what it is that you must be together about in the given teaching situation and make the students responsible in relation to this: "The goals are XX and we must work together so that you can learn them". If the teacher can also relate the material to previous and future themes, the students' previous experiences and their expectations, a relationship is also created between the student and the material being worked on. Finally, Anne Bang-Larsen highlights the relationships between the students. Collaboration and feedback between students can be the relationships that support and promote learning opportunities.