Unit 1: Building positive relationships

Knowing how to build positive working relationship is a valuable skill. As a leader, positive relationships ensure success; you cannot achieve goals if colleagues are not willing to reach them with you.

Building positive working relationships is important in any industry, even more so within an education setting – one where your relationships are witnessed by not only peers but by pupils. How you conduct your relationships and your own behaviour ultimately impacts, positively and negatively, on the pupils within your classrooms.

Maintaining effective relationships with your peers and your management team ensures that lines of communication are open, feedback can be given and received effectively and change can take place where needed without conflict becoming a major obstacle.

Refining your communication skills, understanding how to build rapport, how to understand viewpoints and mediate conflict are all important components in maintaining healthy relationships – all of which are covered in this course.

There is also a real importance in understanding your relationship with yourself, how you define self-care, self-awareness, self-esteem and what these elements mean to you. It is extremely difficult to maintain a relationship with anyone if you do not have a good relationship with yourself.

• Understand how to build good rapport.
• Evaluate and adapt positive non-verbal communication.
• Consider the importance of clear boundaries and assertiveness.