Empowerment and power of a teacher through contributing to positive relationships and using positive discipline in the school environment: teachers’ experiences in two Baltic countries

• In Event: Issues in Education and Digitality

Abstract

There is growing evidence of the role of relationships in teaching, learning and disciplining. The aim was to compare LV and LT teachers’ experiences regarding their empowerment through contributing to positive relationships and power through using positive discipline in school. Findings. LT teachers express their expectations for relationship improvement, while LV teachers speak about actions for implementing empowering relationships in the school; LT teachers emphasize their power through creating the dyadic trustful, group-related relationships with students as a basic for teaching and learning, while LV teachers specifically use the potential of the school community. To answer the question about teacher empowerment with the focus on teachers’ contribution to relationships with colleagues and students, 3 similar categories from LT and LV teachers’ responses were developed: ‘practicing positivity’, ‘strengthening mutuality’, ‘improving communication’. To answer the 2nd research question about teacher power by emphasizing the teachers’ use of positive discipline while working with students in a classroom, only some categories appeared with the same names, but their contents according to the answers of LT and LV teachers, differ.
For LT and LV teachers empowerment through their contribution to positive relationships means connectedness and specific qualities of communication and interactions (motivating feedback, friendliness, openness, support, cooperativeness and collaboration in the school environment in order to promote effective and meaningful education). Teachers’ practicing of positivity in relation to their empowerment through relationships is focused on students, fellow teachers; means the idea of how the teacher educates and influences the members of school community.

Short Bio

Vilma Zydziunaite, PhD, Professor, Vytautas Magnus University
Baiba Martinsone, PhD, Professor, University of Latvia

Author

• Vilma Žydžiūnaitė, Vytautas Magnus University