All change!

There are three main ways to support changes in behaviour

The move from Competent to Motivated (see here for the taxonomy that describes these terms) involves a standing back or holding back of a teacher’s own influences that might limit or constrain her students.  These include moods, fixed beliefs and defensive responses to being triggered by some behaviour or feature of a student.

When these are not held back then the teacher is not modelling what it means to be a healthy adult as well as behaving in ways that will limit students’ developing autonomy.

No one can do this work but the teacher herself and working on ourselves is always difficult to do – in the busyness of a school environment it will be neglected unless prioritised.

Prioritising this effort can come from three sources.  The individual herself, and about 40% of teachers have the intrinsic motivation to have moved down this path already themselves.

A school culture can prioritise this effort and encourage those who have already moved down this path to take a lead in bringing the others on, in effect, this is an example of building collective teacher efficacy.

JanisDeMan and DeefFeed - Street Art - Bookshelf

The final way is for education systems to prioritise this effort because developing autonomy is seen as being a good just as important as developing knowledge and skills.  Prioritising at a system level allows all facets of the system to re-align from Teacher Standards, to teacher education, to appraisal systems, and so on.

No matter where this starts every level can contribute – individual to the system.

We just need to do it.

See my new book Why we Teach for more detail about why moving from Competent to Motivated is so important now.  You can download a pdf version of the book here.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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