Relationships
Building Relationships for Learning
Create the conditions for safety, trust and connection in your classroom and beyond.
Teaching is a relational practice
Every interaction in the classroom carries meaning — a signal of trust, safety, or disconnection. Yet relationships are often treated as something peripheral to the “real work” of teaching. This course starts from a different place. It recognises relationships as central to learning — and invites you to approach them with the same care, reflection and intentionality you bring to curriculum planning.
This course brings together thinking from the fields of neuroscience, wellbeing and relational pedagogy to help you build a classroom culture that centres connection. Whether you’re working with children who struggle to feel safe, navigating conflict, or simply seeking to deepen trust and collaboration in your space, this course will support you to lead relationally — with clarity, care and presence.
Why this course matters
Relationships don’t just make learning possible — they shape what learning is. When children feel safe, seen, and connected, they’re more willing to take risks, more able to regulate their emotions and more open to challenge. But these conditions don’t happen by accident. They require intention, design and daily attention.
This course explores how to build and maintain those conditions. You’ll reflect on your own relational presence, explore practical strategies for co-regulation, and consider what it means to hold strong boundaries with warmth. Across the modules, we’ll examine how relational practice weaves through every layer of the classroom — from planning to feedback to behaviour support. You’ll be invited to slow down, notice, and reconnect with the human core of your teaching.
Who this course is for
This course is ideal if you are:
- Teachers seeking to deepen their relational skills in the classroom
- Behaviour or pastoral leads rethinking how safety and trust are built
- School leaders and whole school teams exploring how to embed a more relational culture across teams
Meet your guides
Mark Finnis
Mark’s work on restorative practice and relational leadership has influenced thousands of educators across the UK and beyond. His contribution to this course grounds our work in real, practical action that supports culture change — in the classroom and across whole schools.
Becky Carlzon
Becky brings a compassionate and reflective lens to the work of relational teaching. With a background in classroom practice, play and the Learning Power Approach, she helps educators build classroom cultures grounded in mutual respect and agency. In this course, Becky guides you through moments of reflection, insight and practical experimentation, always inviting you to notice what's alive in your practice.
What you’ll explore
Across thirteen modules, you’ll explore the foundations and practice of relational learning. You’ll reflect on your current relationships — with students, colleagues and yourself — and build strategies to nurture and repair them over time.
Over 18 units you’ll explore:
The science of safety, trust and connection
Co-regulation and emotional literacy in practice
Routines and rituals that build relational culture
How to hold boundaries without disconnecting
Reframing behaviour through a relational lens
Sustaining relational presence in the midst of challenge
What makes this course different
Relational practice can’t be reduced to scripts or strategies — and this course doesn’t try to. Instead, it offers a layered, human approach to working with others. It supports you to notice your own presence, listen more deeply, and respond with intention.
Throughout, we invite you to hold complexity without losing clarity — to offer warmth without collapsing boundaries, and to stay grounded in your purpose even when things feel messy. The course creates space to reflect on your own experience of school and teaching, helping you to notice patterns, shift habits, and align more fully with your values.
This is professional development that includes personal growth — because how we show up in the classroom starts with how we show up to ourselves.
What’s included
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18 self-paced video modules featuring Becky and expert contributors
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Reflective prompts, planning tools and downloadable resources
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Book study and video provocations, designed to incrementally build on one another
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A bonus recorded interview with Mark Finnis and Professor Robert Loe
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Ongoing access to updates and new materials via the Learning Pioneers platform
Course Outline
- Why restorative practice?
- Developing a restorative mindset
- 1% gains - A little goes a long way
- Culture by design
- Championing children
- 5 key foundations of relationships
- The power of "with"
- Language and belief in students
- Restorative Conversations
- Restorative Circles
- Restorative Meetings and Conferences.
- Moving forward
- Reflection and summary
What you’ll walk away with
By the end of this course, you’ll:
Feel more confident in designing a classroom culture rooted in trust and safety
Understand how to use relational presence as a pedagogical tool
Have practical strategies for co-regulation, emotional awareness and repair
Be able to hold boundaries in ways that maintain connection and agency
Begin embedding relational practice into your routines, planning and team culture
"...quite simply the best professional learning I have received in my 30 years of experience."
Fiona Chapman
Head of Teaching and Learning, Leadership Mastermind member
Pricing & Enrollment
Learning Pionners
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