Chapter 2 provides details of the teacher participants and how the stories of their lived experiences were shared and how they evolved. It includes details of the reflective practice framework that was used. This is followed by a discussion of the methodology that includes details about the context, the seven participant teachers, and how their story was obtained and analyzed.

At its most basic, the application of reflective practice in teaching involves scrutiny of the practical theories and values that shape teachers’ daily activities. This is a complex process in which teachers undertake various forms of reflection. The purpose of this is to increase teachers’ comprehension of the teaching–learning process, increase their personal and professional efficacy, and formally investigate various classroom problems. The complexity of reflective practice requires that teachers engage in the formation of routines, practices, and structures that facilitate individual or collective reflection on their experiences when teaching, support for which can be provided by a range of tools. To discuss these issues in greater detail, this chapter is organised as follows. First, it explains what reflective practice means and what it involves. This includes elucidation of concepts such as reflection, critical reflection, and reflexivity. This is followed by a summary and endorsement of the theoretical framework for reflective practice developed by Farrell. Then, several tools that teachers are advised to adopt to reflexively examine and enhance their teaching are outlined. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the concept of teachers as researchers and exemplifies teacher-led research in terms of action research and classroom ethnography.

Finally, Chapter 17 refers to an important aspect of the role of any EC professional – ongoing professional learning. This chapter discusses reflective practice and critical reflection as a means of ensuring that EC professionals review and monitor their own practice and understand how this practice affects children’s learning outcomes. Tools such as reflective journals and professional portfolios are discussed. The theoretical aspects of EC professionals’ pedagogical content knowledge, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are explored.

Concerns regarding equity and diversity are ongoing. Effective school and district leaders need to become ever-evolving researched practioners to meet the needs of the students, staff, and communities they serve. The achieve gap is explored and reflective practice is emphasized as a crucial tool as leaders delve into the additional concerns associated around the opportunity, confidence, and honesty gaps. Leaders are given a “mirror” to examine their place along the continuum regarding the concepts of being an ally, advocate, and/or activists.

This chapter provides an introduction to psychodynamic theory as applied to settings outwith the specialist psychotherapy clinic, paving the way for the chapters that follow in Part 4. An individual’s internal world affects how they relate to others. Others may be unconsciously invited into playing old roles that are familiar to the individual (such as rejecting, not listening, criticising), even though these roles bring difficulty and distress to both sides. This chapter explores how these powerful but sometimes ‘invisible’ interpersonal dynamics may play out between service users and staff in settings where the human relationship is at the fore (such as schools, social service agencies, and hospitals). We also discuss splitting within a clinical team and other system dynamics. In circumstances where services and professionals can sustain a good-enough therapeutic environment in the face of unconscious invitations to repeat a problematic relationship, trust may develop between service user and service and many people are able to discover new ways of forming relationships. This depends partly on the capacities and current state of the person using a service, but also, crucially, on the capacity of the professionals and services to observe and be reflective about both sides of the relationship.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the relational dynamics underlying ‘multiple exclusion homelessness’ and an approach to working in this area. Adults experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness have often, during their developmental years, experienced multiple homes, disrupted attachments, un-forecasted endings, multiple and short-lived figures of support – all experiences that can lead a person to develop an understandable anxiety about trusting anyone to remain stable in their life. These dynamics may inadvertently be recreated in the person’s adult life through the impermanency of different organisations they are involved with. Multiple exclusion homelessness can be understood as a late emerging symptom of underlying difficulties in someone’s relationships with care. A psychologically informed approach for staff working in the homeless sector is outlined. The staff-service user relationship, while often viewed as important within mainstream services, is commonly seen as a vehicle through which treatments can be completed rather than as the treatment itself. By contrast, a psychologically informed service for people experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness understands that the reverse is often more accurate: that the tasks and activities are really just the vehicle through which a relationship can develop that carries the possibility of developing a sense of safety, trust, and continuity.

This chapter starts by considering anger and the various routes to this feeling. We discuss how anger can be a desperate call to be attended to and a powerful invitation to neglect. We then discuss aggression and violence, including the potential role of shame and humiliation. At times, violence may accompany a process of an individual projecting unwanted, intolerable, or overwhelming feelings into another person. At other times, violence may be understood more in the context of fighting a perceived danger. We take inclusive approach to contemporary theory, noting that more than one approach may be useful when trying to understand a person’s actions. We touch on wider societal responses to violence, acknowledging that this is a potentially divisive area associated with strong feelings. The dynamics of anger, aggression, and violence are not necessarily straightforward to make sense of, and it is easy for any of us to inadvertently become drawn into responses that may make a situation worse. Conversely, with an awareness of key dynamics and time to reflect on these, professionals and teams can find an understanding of angry, aggressive, or violent encounters, which is a prerequisite for safe practice, working matters through, and resisting harms.

A psychologically informed service is one where the design, practice, and principles of the service are informed by the best understandings of the psychological and emotional needs of people who the service is intended for, with particular consideration to those who struggle to use the service in an uncomplicated way. The need for the concept of a ‘psychologically informed’ service arises because a proportion of people have psychological and emotional needs that may not be appropriately catered for within standard health and social care designs. Care-seeking is one of the most primitive and early relational dynamics we engage in. Experiences described as developmental trauma, neglect, and other mistreatment occur in relationships, often within relationships that are expected to provide safety, security, and comfort. One of the longest legacies of early relational adversity may be a loss of trust in others, which can subsequently give rise to complicated relationships with caring figures. Making a service psychologically informed can be understood as a necessary provision for those who have the highest levels of psychological need. We look at several themes to do with developing psychologically informed services: reflective practice, language used by staff, beginnings and endings of contact, time, ambivalence, and treatment.

Staff in the caring professions often have to contain troubling and unpredictable communications (projections) from those they work with. It is usual and expected for staff to have feelings in response to these communications – this is part of the process of emotional containment. If reflected on, the professional’s feelings and inner responses (countertransference) can be a vital source of information about the relational dynamics the service user carries with them and how the staff member is responding to these. However, if staff members do not reflect on and process their countertransference, there is the potential for increased stress for the staff member, and to inadvertently re-enact the patient’s relational difficulties rather than provide containment for them. A reflective practice (RP) group brings a whole clinical team together with the primary task being to reflect on and process staff-patient, teamm and organisational dynamics, to sustain caring relationships with patients and reduce the stresses of the work for staff. This chapter offers an introduction to psychodynamic RP groups, aimed at both participants and group facilitators. We discuss the theory of RP groups and their intended purpose, outline a process of starting a group, and consider what is expected for both participants and facilitators.

This chapter offers a detailed description of important similarities and shared features among the eight teacher participants in the case study, discussing these commonalities as both a ‘quintain’ (Stake, 2006) and a ‘prototype’ (Sternberg & Horvath, 1995) of Indian secondary teacher expertise, offering extensive extracts from lessons and interviews to do so. It covers the participant teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpersonal practices, their languaging practices, how they managed their curriculum, prepared resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed description of aspects of their classroom practice, including lesson structuring, negotiation and improvisation, whole class teaching, learner-independent activities, teacher active monitoring of learners, assessment and feedback practices. Evidence is also provided on commonalities concerning their knowledge base, reflective practices and professionalism. The chapter closes by offering a number of brief examples that serve to relate the practices and cognition of these teachers to the contextual constraints, challenges and affordances typically experienced by teachers working in the global South.

In this chapter, we extend the learnings from Chapter 4 to expand your knowledge and skills on reflective practice for building effective and dynamic relationships for partnerships. You will understand how further elements of the TWINE Model of Partnership inform your reflective practice in partnership work. You will also come to learn about tools of reflective practice and how these tools can be useful in helping you to build meaningful relationships that contribute to partnerships with families and communities. This chapter will invite you to challenge yourself by asking key questions that will help you to become a reflective practitioner who builds dynamic relationships with children, families and communities.

In this chapter, we begin by examining the importance of trust in partnership work. We will then discuss the final premise of the TWINE Model of Partnership - to adapt. Through this premise, we will explore concepts such as participatory action, mapping out timelines, funding and resourcing a partnership. We will also examine some of the common challenges that might be faced in partnership work and discuss the ways these challenges might be overcome in practice.