The importance of relationships in the classroom

There have been calls that Swedish classrooms should be silent and that pupils should comply more with their teachers. The response has been to claim that it is possible to achieve discipline in the classroom in a variety of ways, and that a more holistic view of teaching and learning is needed. We have revisited a number of classroom observations in order to find the patterns in the way teachers handle discipline in their everyday teaching. The aim of this essay is to answer the question of what teaching strategies are available, and which appear to be successful. Our study takes a hermeneutical and lifeworld phenomenological approach. The result shows three different teaching strategies: one where the teacher most of the time addresses individual pupils; one where the teacher is directed towards the whole class; and one where the teacher often and in relation to contextual aspects oscillates between the individual pupil and the class. When it comes to order and discipline, the third strategy appears to be the most successful. The didactical consequences are that order and discipline are embedded in everyday teaching. In the past, teachers had to be flexible about content and methods, but today they also need to be flexible towards their pupils.