Loughborough University
Browse
Unravelling the Safe Concept FINAL2014 paper.pdf (126.17 kB)

Unravelling the ‘Safe’ concept in teaching: what can we learn from teachers’ understanding?

Download (126.17 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-07, 12:11 authored by Sarah Turner, Maggie Braine
The word ‘safe’ is widely used in everyday education speak in phrases such as ‘safe learning environment’, but how do trainee and experienced teachers interpret, understand and use this word in their everyday teaching? Teachers are acting as observers of pupils’ well-being, and one of their roles in the classroom is to offer support to build relationships and enable pupils to achieve their best. This case study reports the use of the ‘safe’ concept by trainee and experienced teachers in England and uses ‘safe spaces’ groupings to allow categorising of the qualitative results obtained. The majority of trainee teacher responses related to ‘safe’ meaning a classroom where no child is embarrassed about sharing their opinions/answers, where pupils are comfortable about taking risks in their learning and one which is rooted in mutual respect. Experienced teachers reported that a ‘safe’ classroom was where pupils could express their thoughts, feel comfortable and be safe from harm. This concept has been used by all participants in this study but differently. The findings could help develop teachers’ understandings to ensure the use of the word ‘safe’ is not limited and maximum impact within school is obtained. It could help all teachers to be fully aware of the broadness of the concept, especially that surrounding the ability to achieve due to the importance of feeling safe in lessons.

Funding

This work was supported by Loughborough Design School.

History

School

  • Design

Published in

Pastoral Care in Education

Volume

33

Issue

1

Pages

47 - 62

Citation

TURNER, S. and BRAINE, M., 2015. Unravelling the ‘Safe’ concept in teaching: what can we learn from teachers’ understanding? Pastoral Care in Education, 33 (1), pp. 47 - 62.

Publisher

Taylor and Francis / © NAPCE

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Pastoral Care in Education on 11 Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2015.1005657.

ISSN

0264-3944

eISSN

1468-0122

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC