Relationships First is the RP model used by one of my mentors and dear friend from Newfound Land, dr. dorothy vaandering. I love the simplicity of this overarching intention. It is a wonderful compass to guide all that we do in schools - from our relationship with learning, the relationship between our school improvement plans and the people they seek to serve, the connection between colleagues, amongst students, and amidst our school communities- Relationships First! What might this look like in practice? Connection Before Curriculum in Our Classrooms! It could be as simple as connection before curriculum, especially important at the start of the school year when we may be trying to hotwire connection and create some safety and belonging with new students. I’m so very proud of our RP Student Mentor - Be Here, Be You, Belong programme that many of our schools began this academic school year with - seeing images on social media of the connection and relational space the senior students built for incoming first years brings me so much joy.. Dorothy also stretched my thinking around Relationships First further when she suggested that we not only connect before but connect through curriculum - I loved this reframe. Facilitating students to identify their personal scripts through stories they encounter in English class, or perhaps allowing students to see themselves in mathematical equations using relatable data, or using academic prompts such as ‘What was your favourite part / the part you struggled with the most in today’s lesson?’ are as important as using relational one-word-whizz check-ins at the beginning of class. (you’ll see our one-word-whizz series if you follow Connect RP on social media). Bringing restorative language and relational thinking into the classroom by inviting students to use the restorative questions to unpack the subtext of a character or to guide an introspective diary entry of a character in English class to explore the past-present-future grammatical tenses in a language classroom, are just a few ways to foster connection through our curriculum. I love learning from teachers about the many other ways they may seek to do this in their classrooms. Looking at the relationship between what we learn and how we learn - focussing on our relational pedagogy is key! One of my favourite parts of the face to face workshops we deliver is modelling relational pedagogy while learning about RP - but of course we can apply such methodologies while learning about volcanoes or photosynthesis too. It is paramount when nurturing a restorative classroom or indeed school, we look at developing methodologies and whole school preferred relational practices that acknowledge the importance and impact of process - the relationship between how we learn on what we learn. If you would like to know more and engage in an actual experience of this you can check out a list of the workshops, dates and venues on offer this year on our website workshops page here