What the Family Studies?
What the Family Studies?
Dynamics of Human Relationships:Connection Matters!
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Ever watch students struggle to make eye contact or endure a moment of silence without reaching for their phones? You're not alone. In this revealing conversation with Lisa, a Family Studies department head in Hamilton, we explore the fascinating world of teaching "Dynamics of Human Relationships" - a course she believes should be mandatory in every school.
Lisa's journey from social worker to educator provides her with a unique lens through which she approaches teaching relationships to today's digitally immersed teenagers. "I feel like so many kids don't know how to have a conversation with someone else," she shares, attributing this skill gap to smartphones being "put into kids' hands far too young." Her classroom becomes a rare space where students practice face-to-face interaction, emotional regulation, and mindfulness.
What makes this course exceptional is its accessibility to students across all academic levels and abilities. Lisa recounts how even students from special education classes find meaningful connections, creating natural opportunities for empathy development among diverse peer groups. Her culminating assignment - where students plan wellbeing activities for classmates - showcases this inclusive approach. She tells the moving story of a chronically absent, disengaged student who transformed when given the chance to share his passion for parkour with peers.
Working with a social worker, Lisa incorporates elements of dialectical behavioral therapy through "Skills for Everyday Stressors" workshops, teaching practical coping mechanisms for life's challenges. Her teaching philosophy embraces authenticity over perfection: "I always take the approach that we're in this together and I'm very authentic with them. I'll say I've never taught this before... so we're going to figure it out together." This vulnerability creates a collaborative classroom where students become invested partners in their learning journey.
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Introduction to Lisa and Family Studies
Speaker 1Hello everyone and welcome back to what the Family Studies podcast. My name is Laura Hadier and I'm your host for this episode of what the Family Studies.
Speaker 2And my name is Katherine Murphy. Today we'll be interviewing Lisa, a department head in Hamilton.
Speaker 1Like all of us, lisa has a passion for family studies, even extending beyond the classroom on occasion to Western pre-service classes at Altout. Lisa loves to teach HHD Dynamics of Human Relationships and this course is not commonly offered, so in this episode we are hoping to gain more insight from Lisa about what it is and why it is so great to teach.
Speaker 2And our learning goals for this episode are to get to know Lisa and more about her career as a family studies teacher and department head. Learn more about the grade 11 course, hhd 3.0 Dynamics of Human Relationships. Explore the different ways of engaging students and learning more about healthy human relationships. Consider ways of assessing student learning in this course and share resources that are great additions to this course.
Speaker 1So thank you so much, lisa, for joining us today. We would love to hear first about just like your pathway to becoming a family studies teacher. Maybe a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3Okay, thank you so much for having me. My family studies pathway is not very clear cut. There were a lot of jagged edges along the way. So I actually didn't become a teacher until I was about 30.
Speaker 3Prior to that I was on the pathway to becoming a social worker and I worked in a number of social worky type jobs. But then just one weekend, coming home from a night shift at a woman's shelter, I just thought I can't do this, it's too heavy for me, it's too much. So I kind of got off that pathway and was a little bit lost for about a year, not sure what to do. And then, honestly, my neighbors were teachers and I saw them coming home one June to tell me they had their summer off and thought, well, that's pretty cool.
Lisa's Journey to Teaching
Speaker 3So then I began looking into it and, just by luck, I happened to take a bunch of family and social relation courses along with my degree in sociology and that qualified me for family studies at Western. So I applied, I got in and here I am and it couldn't be a better career choice for me, because it kind of combines a lot of that social worky stuff, especially in family studies. And I have a big sticker on my head that says tell me everything. So my students tell me everything. But I feel like my social work training really kind of prepared me well for this job.
Speaker 1Yeah, teachers are more than just teachers. Right, they wear a lot of different hats, so it's really great that you have that background experience and I don't think any well, there's some teachers that maybe knew they wanted to be teachers and went right into it, but there's a lot of teachers that didn't start out in this career, so you're not alone in that, and I'm sure you found lots of things you love about the job. Aside from the summer's off, even though that is definitely a perk, and I'm so excited for summer this year we would love to hear a bit about your school that you're at and your current schedule and what you're really enjoying.
Speaker 3Okay, well, we have a pretty diverse range of students at the school. We have a very small school and unfortunately our enrollment appears to be declining quite a bit, so I think at the moment we have about 650 to 700 students. It's gotten a lot smaller since I started semester. I have Challenge and Change in Society, grade 12. And then I have a grade 11-12, fashion Split, and then my last period I have Exploring Family Studies, the grade 9 class. Yeah, I'm kind of all over the board.
Speaker 3My fashion class is probably one of the most surprising, amazing things that's happened to me. I don't have a background in anything of the sort and it kind of just fell into my lap. Last year where I had to teach fashion, it was either I teach it or it goes. So, out of respect for the person that was leaving, I decided to take it on and it's been absolutely incredible and I would encourage anybody who's maybe a little bit creative, but maybe, if you don't sew, just do it. Just take it on, if you can, because it's absolutely amazing and YouTube has helped me immensely.
Current Teaching Schedule and Experiences
Speaker 1Yeah, I feel like a lot of people that ended up in fashion didn't originally have the background in fashion and have fallen in love with it. I'm still hesitant, still scared, but maybe that day will come. Like everyone else, I've heard teaching fashion, but very nice. That's a good variety of courses that you have. Unfortunate that it's a small school, but I guess there's perks to that too. One of your favorite courses, I've heard, is teaching dynamics of human relationships. It's not taught in a lot of schools, but it's a really good course. So can you explain to those of us who are new to this course what it's about and why you enjoy teaching it, including like a little bit of the course description, maybe some of the content, maybe the unit, how you broke it down and maybe even like who typically takes this course at your school?
Speaker 3No, it is not taught at a lot of schools. Personally, I think it should be mandatory at every school. I know we all think that about our family studies courses because they're so important. This one is very special to me because the way I teach it is very laid back. So we start with the students kind of learning about themselves and learning about personal well-being and self-care, and I feel like that's a really important part of this course because a lot of kids don't know about this and they don't know that that's actually a thing and that they should be doing that to take care of their mental health. We start with that and then we just get into different kinds of relationships and basically just relating to each other.
Speaker 3And what I find is so important about this is I feel like so many kids don't know how to have a conversation with someone else, and I'm going to blame everything on smartphones, even though I'm using a smartphone right now. I feel like these things have been put into kids' hands far too young and because of that, they're lacking in a lot of basic skills with human interaction. So they're not comfortable with eye contact. They don't know how to have a conversation with someone. They're uncomfortable with like quiet time or quiet space, without having to have this in their hands and be constantly stimulated by something on their screen. So the way I teach it is I really focus on you know, let's put that away. Let's learn how to talk to each other again, and I've had mixed reactions from the students. Some kids buy in and they're ready for it and they want to change and they love it. Some kids are a little more reluctant and I don't always find success with every student, but we try.
Speaker 1That's all you can do.
Dynamics of Human Relationships Course
Speaker 3Part of that question was who typically takes this course? Yes, so usually at my school. I know some schools they kind of handpick kids, but we at my school we just kind of wait for kids to take it Like. So we wait to see when the options go out and usually I get around 20 to 25 students taking it and honestly, again, just like our school, I get all kinds of kids. I get the kids who are university bound, I get the kids who are, you know, typically take just open level courses.
Speaker 3And recently and I don't know if this is just happening in our school, but from what I've heard from talking to other people we're also getting a lot of kids from the special education classes joining us too. And at first that kind of scared me a little bit because I didn't know how I would sort of handle that. But it's actually been incredible because it's a great opportunity for kids who might not normally hang out with or work with kids in the spec ed classes to actually interact with them and learn about them and learn that you know they're not scary and they do crave interaction just like they do. So I think it's actually been, I want to say, for some kids maybe building some empathy for sure.
Speaker 1yeah, that is lacking right now and I feel like it kind of just works well with the course itself and what you're teaching. But that's a really interesting course and it sounds like it's really up your alley with, like, your background and everything. Can you explain maybe the way that you break down the units and what kind of content is part of that class and then also what your biggest challenge is with teaching as a department head in general and in that course?
Speaker 3Okay, so the units I know that we start off with just learning about our personal well-beings and how to take care of ourselves. And then I actually do something a little bit different in this course that isn't really available to other boards, but we work with a social worker from the school board and we do a program that's called Skills for Everyday Stressors. So what this is is it's a workshop. I guess it's like twice a week, I think for about eight weeks, and we have five or six modules and it's based on the therapy of dialectical behavioral therapy. So it's not therapy the way we're delivering it, but we sort of take from that. And so the modules are on mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal skills, distress, tolerance, and then just dialectics. That's roughly what it is. I think I'm missing one, but basically just really incredible skills for kind of coping with stress that we all face every day.
Speaker 1I'm teaching grade seven this year. Normally I would be teaching family studies and I've noticed everything that you've mentioned about the phones and like their attention span and the inability to have a conversation with each other.
Speaker 3I've noticed in my classroom and there's a few students like all of them would benefit from this class, but there's a few that I are coming into my head as you're speaking and it's just like I really wish that this was offered at every school oh, I know, I'm hoping it kind of catches on because it's so, so, so important, because these kids are just lacking in all of these things, even emotion regulation, like you know, kind of understanding how to cope with life's stressors that are going to happen no matter what.
Speaker 1Right and it's out of their control. At this point, like, realistically, like I know that, yes, in theory, they could put their phone down, they could make a choice, but really, the life that they're living, this is how they grew up, this is what's all around them, right?
Speaker 3So it is really hard.
Course Structure and Well-being Activities
Speaker 3Yeah, we have that special program kind of added to the way we teach HHD and that covers a lot of the curriculum expectations. So there's a lot of information on relationships, communication, and then we have a whole unit also on human rights, which is really cool too. So I usually end with human rights, because we've kind of gone through all the stuff where we're learning about ourselves, our own well-being, getting along with others, and then we kind of take it to human rights, which is more of a broader kind of global kind of perspective on relationships with people. So kind of a nice way to end my culminating task for the course. I do a couple of different things. One of them is for the students to plan a well-being activity for their classmates, and this one's nice because it's not a lot of writing, it's more of like a hands-on activity. So they take something that they like to do for their well-being and then they kind of share that with the class and the students plan everything. They plan the whole thing. And it's nice because, I'm telling you, we've had so many different activities. So once we went to the movies, sometimes we just will play family feud, and the students put all that together. Sometimes we'll go outside and we'll play soccer or we'll play basketball.
Speaker 3But once I had a kid in my class who was kind of a non-attender. He didn't show up very often and he was clearly not happy to be at school at all. If he wasn't going to show up to school he wasn't going to graduate. So he had to start coming and he was very negative. But he came in and you know, he would just kind of observe and he would watch. And we do circle time and he would never participate in circle time, he would just kind of, you know, watch.
Speaker 3So then when it came time for him to do his activity, he didn't know what to do. He thought, well, there's, there's nothing. And I said, well, what do you like to do in your spare time? And we kind of broke it down and turns out, he turns out he was really into parkour. So we went outside and here he was, this like super unengaged kid, you know, angry at everybody, and here he is laughing and having a great time and showing us parkour moves. And it was amazing. And this is one of the main reasons I love this course, because we can cater it to everybody, so because everybody has something right. So I don't think I've ever had a kid who's been like I don't want to do this and there's absolutely nothing that I want to share. So he's always my example, because he was. He was the kid who I thought I was never going to get through to Anything you can think of. We've done it.
Speaker 1I love that.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's just, it's the best activity and it's it's driven by the students, right? It's not, it's not me telling them what to do for their wellbeing. It's them sharing the things that they love to do with their peers. So it's super cool.
Speaker 1Yeah, I imagine they look forward to that class too as like kind of like a break in their day and like I imagine they get really close with each other by the end of the course too or like make new friends and stuff. Just based on the stuff that you're doing in the class, it seems very like you're actually engaging with each other in a meaningful way. That's like relevant to your life and not just being told do this and do that.
Speaker 3Here's a checklist I think so that that's my goal and I I think most of them feel that way. I know there's probably some that that maybe are happy to get out of it because they don't want to share, and they're kind of right, you know. But but for the most part I do think that they really enjoy it. I know a lot of kids come back and they tell me, you know that, but for the most part I do think that they really enjoy it. I know a lot of kids come back and they tell me, you know, that was my favorite class. So, and you're right, it is, it's extremely easygoing and it's very chill and I think sometimes that's nice for them when they're so busy with everything else.
Speaker 2I love how you talk about. You know all the different students that you're getting into your course and those varied students, the varied learning needs of those students. It's amazing. I've personally never taught this course, but it sounds fantastic and I think I agree with you that it's very important. But what are some of your favorite must-have resources for the course?
Speaker 3I would say lots of team building activities. So we have thumb balls, we play lots of games.
Speaker 2Can you tell me what are thumb balls? I've never heard of a thumb ball.
Speaker 3Oh, a thumb ball is. It's just like a squishy ball. It's like about the size of a volleyball and there's little circles or squares all over it, and on each circle or square there's like a little question that says tell me about the best part of your day. Okay, Okay.
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 3So just wherever your thumb lands when you catch the ball, you answer that question. Okay, yeah, so it's pretty fun. So we just stand in a big circle and we kind of throw that around and then we do rotating circles. It's nice to have some of these props for doing team building activities, so that's a resource that's important. Other than that, I don't use a textbook. A few websites that I use are the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and then I use Amnesty International websites for that unit, but other than that, I don't need a lot.
Speaker 2That's excellent. You've got these great strategies. Do you find that your admin is supportive of the things that you're doing in the classroom with this group of students?
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely. I've never had any problems or questions. And if I need extra money, if we're going to go on a trip or something, they're always very supportive, joining our podcast tonight.
Speaker 2Any last words that you want to share with our listening audience. I know you know for me a course like this might be a little bit. There might be a little bit of trepidation my first time running through it.
Speaker 3Any advice that you can give to us, I'd say one of the biggest piece of advice that I would give is don't feel like you have to know everything about a course if you've never taught it before. I always take the approach that we're in this together and I always am very authentic with them, and I'll say I've never taught this before. This is the first time we're doing this, so we're going to figure it out together and I ask them for feedback. I ask them what do you guys want to learn about? I find that once I started doing that and I do that with fashion as well is it takes away so much pressure from me to be, you know, this perfect teacher who's supposed to know everything, and I feel like if you kind of approach it that way, the kids love that and they appreciate your honesty and I feel like it also makes them step up to the plate because they want to help you.
Speaker 2For sure.
Teaching Resources and Final Insights
Speaker 3Yeah, so that'd probably be my biggest piece of advice, especially for newer teachers who might not know that yet.
Speaker 2I think great advice for any course we teach really.
Speaker 1Thank you so much for joining us, lisa, and explaining this course and all your activities and resources and just the way that this course has impacted the students at your school. Hopefully there's somebody in power listening that can introduce this into all the schools, because I think it's so important. We are just going to finish with our fun rapid fire questions, so hopefully you're ready to answer these. No stress, it's kind of like the thumb ball, except there's no ball involved. I'm just asking you random questions, but here we go.
Speaker 1First one is what is your favorite drink to wake up with in the morning?
Speaker 3Coffee.
Speaker 1Yeah, I kind of predicted that. Yeah, all right Number two what's your go-to karaoke song If you were to do karaoke?
Speaker 3Crazy by Patsy Cline.
Speaker 1Okay, well, we don't even know who that is. No, I just skipped right over that because I was like I don't know what you're talking about. If you could instantly master any skill, what would it be? Playing the guitar, oh, okay, Me too. Actually I don't play any instruments and I'm at an art school this year and it's made me realize how cool it is to play an instrument and. I really wish I could. Okay, what's one food you could eat every single day and never get sick of?
Speaker 3Burritos.
Speaker 1Okay, and are you more of an early bird or a night owl?
Speaker 3Early bird.
Speaker 1Me too.
Speaker 3Yeah, all right, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you very much for having me and thank you for asking me to join your podcast. This is really cool.
Speaker 1Of course.
Podcast Wrap-up and Season Closing
Speaker 4Okay, so this is Micheline. I'm the producer of this podcast and tonight I just wanted to take a moment to express our deepest gratitude to two incredible individuals who have been the backbone of this podcast for the last three years Cassandra and Laura. Cassandra, your expertise in technology and editing has made every episode sound seamless and professional, and Laura, your voice and presence as a co-host have brought warmth, insight and energy into our conversations. You both have given so much of your time and talent, all while stepping into the busy and rewarding world of teaching. We know that both of you are brand new teachers and so grateful for everything that you've done, and while we are going to miss you, we know that your students are very lucky to have you. So thank you so much for being such a vital part of this journey. Your hard work and dedication will not be forgotten. So, on that note, if any of our listeners are interested in joining our podcast team, please reach out. You can definitely find our contacts in the show notes. We're looking for a couple new people to join our team and anybody's interested. This is a really great professional learning opportunity, but it's also just a really great kind of networking experience to be part of Get to meet lots of neat people, learn lots of new stuff and I think, at the same time you know it's once a month we get to join each other and we get to know each other and have some fun. So if anybody's interested, just reach out and I can give you some more information.
Speaker 4And as we wrap up this incredible third season of what the Family Studies, we want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you, our listeners, our guests and our amazing team for making this journey so meaningful.
Speaker 4Over the past episodes we've explored ideas, we tackled important discussions and hopefully we've sparked some new conversations beyond the podcast discussions, and hopefully we've sparked some new conversations beyond the podcast. Your support, engagement, enthusiasm remind us why these conversations matter so much and why family studies is such an important part of the curriculum. It is so important for what our students are learning and what they need every day. You know all of us are huge advocates of this and we're really excited to have you join us. So, to those who've been with us from the start and those who've joined, thank you for being part of this growing community. We can't wait to bring you more content next season, if you have any ideas of guests we should interview, or if you'd like to be part of our podcast, reach out. Until then, take care, keep learning and keep asking what the Family Studies. Have a wonderful summer and we will see you in September.
Speaker 5What the Family Studies is brought to you by the Ontario Family Studies Home Economics Educators Association. Special thanks to our producer, micheline Gallant, tech support and podcast editor Cassandra McEachern, and our co Gallant tech support and podcast editor Cassandra McEachern, and our co-hosts Catherine Murphy and Laura Hadier.
